This is an opinion column.

Gov. Kay Ivey promised to do better.

First, she lied about having worn blackface in college.

Then she got caught.

She said she was sorry and that she would work with Black lawmakers until she “exhausted every effort” to heal the state.

And they forgave her.

Finally, she reverted back to her old ways — defending Confederate iconography, telling lies about CRT, celebrating Alabama’s treasonous past, and now hijacking pre-K education for the sake of anti-“woke” hysteria.

Ivey promised to do better — and we should have known better.

Today is Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, one of three state holidays that memorialize the Confederacy, and Kay Ivey has become a living Confederate monument.

Not only has Ivey not followed through on her promise — she’s dragging Alabama backward.

It’s not just noisey campaign stuff. Ivey is term-limited, anyway. It’s how she’s running this state now that she has firm control, and it’s how she’s spending your money, too.

Look no further than Alabama’s General Fund budget, where the governor has again earmarked $50,000 for a private “museum” run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The John W. Inzer Museum in downtown Ashville, just northeast of Birmingham, is a museum in the sense that it houses a lot of old stuff. Mostly, it’s a clubhouse for Confederate apologists.

READ: Alabama’s Confederate mansions get state funding, distort our history

In 2021, I was given a tour and met the folks who run it. They were nice enough and polite, but the abundance of rebel flags showed that the private nonprofit cares more for rehabbing the Confederacy than it does memorializing history — starting with the rebel flag flying on the pole out front.

That banner we call the Confederate Battle Flag didn’t fly over Alabama in any official capacity until the 1960s, and it was never an official flag of the Confederacy. It was rejected by the Confederacy’s flag committee, although variations of it were used on the battlefield only after the official flag got confused with the Stars and Stripes.

But the distinct battle flag we all know became popular only after the war as a symbol of Southern defiance of federal authorities — especially when those authorities insisted the Southern states treat Black people as equals.

When Dixiecrats revolted against the national Democratic Party in the 1950s, that banner flew at their convention in Birmingham.

When white counter-protestors jeered Martin Luther King Jr., and civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery, that’s the flag the racists waved at them.

When U.S. Attorney Gen. Robert Kennedy came to Montgomery to give Gov. George Wallace a talking-to about civil rights in Alabama, that’s the flag Wallace hoisted above the capitol ahead of his visit.

And there it stayed until Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. removed it when courting Mercedes to open a plant in Alabama.

That’s a lot of background for a racist flag, but I want to make it clear that flag in no way represents history unless we’re talking about the history of white supremacy.

When I asked the folks at the Inzer Museum about it, I got the same deflection I’ve heard many times.

“If somebody is offended by something, whose problem is that?” then-state Sen. Jim McClendon, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans camp, said.

But Alabama taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Which brings us back to Ivey.

For years, McClendon had earmarked state funding for the Inzer Museum through the legislative appropriations lawmakers tack on after the governor submits her budget.

But beginning in 2022, Ivey began including funding for the Inzer Museum.

In last year’s budget, Ivey committed $25,000 to the museum. I wrote her spokeswoman, Gina Maiola, to ask whether the governor understood what she was using state money to pay for. I explained that the museum was run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and that it had a Confederate Battle Flag out front, and I asked whether the governor thought that was an appropriate use of state funds.

“This year, since the budgets were healthy and in solid shape, our office let requested earmarks be included in the governor’s budget proposals,” she wrote back.

And that’s as close as I got to an answer.

Until now.

Alabama’s budget is big. Wires get crossed. Things slip through the cracks.

But after your funding of a Confederate apologist museum makes headlines, you don’t get another pass.

So did Ivey give the Inzer Museum another $25,000 this year?

Nope.

This time she gave them $50,000. She doubled its state funding — our tax dollars.

This wasn’t an accident or an oversight. Her administration did this on purpose knowing full well what they were doing with your money.

Kay Ivey doesn’t seem to care who she offends anymore than McClendon and the SCV does.

Funny. It wasn’t that long ago that she promised to do better.

When Ivey’s political future was up in the air after her lies about wearing blackface in college were exposed, she asked for forgiveness and gave assurances to Black lawmakers that she had changed.

“While we have come a long way, we still have a long way to go, specifically in the area of racial tolerance and mutual respect,” Ivey said in a video published online. “I assure each of you that I will continue exhausting every effort to meet the unmet needs of this state.”

Since then, however, Ivey hasn’t done anything of the sort.

She joined the fearmongering over CRT and said liberals hate America —  not the Confederates who once fought to destroy it.

She has supported the state’s new law to prohibit majority-Black cities from removing Confederate monuments from places of honor.

She ignores the pleas of Black lawmakers to fund things that might help their constituents, like Medicaid expansion.

And she makes lists of regressions like this one difficult  — because when you start one, she makes it longer before you can finish it.

On Friday, Ivey ousted Barbara Cooper, the head of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education, because Cooper’s department used teacher training materials that included “woke concepts.”

Alabama’s pre-K program has been touted as the state’s escape route out of the basement of national education rankings, and Cooper, who’s Black, had been generally regarded by her peers.

The materials in question were a training manual from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The book in question has been widely used for 40 years. The latest edition of the book encourages teachers to be mindful of their own biases and to make a welcoming environment for students from diverse backgrounds.

But somebody cherry-picked a few passages from an 800-page training manual and now Ivey is more than willing to junk the state’s one educational success story to appease the anti-woke crusaders.

Just a few years ago, Kay Ivey promised “racial tolerance and mutual respect,” but today in her administration, that sort of talk will get you fired.

When Ivey pleaded with Black lawmakers for forgiveness after her blackface scandal, most of them gave it to her.

“I’m glad she accepted that responsibility,” state Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, said then. “Yes, it was shocking to find that out but from this point forward I think we need to use that as a catalyst if we can to look race relations head on in the face. This could be a catalyst used for a very positive purpose.”

When she promised to do better, they agreed to work with her.

And what did they get in return?

Not more of the same — but more of worse.

Alabama still observes three Confederate holidays, and Ivey has done nothing to bring the state into the 21st century. A bill to sever MLK Day from Robert E. Lee Day — which are commemorated on the same day in Alabama — died last week after an Alabama Senate committee voted along racial lines to kill it.

Ivey and her ilk are fine keeping the Confederacy on a pedestal.

So today Alabama celebrates its Confederate dead.

But with Ivey in charge, it sure seems the Confederacy is alive and well in Montgomery.

More columns by Kyle Whitmire

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