In a wide-ranging interview with NC Newsline, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the the Equal Justice Initiative, says college football in Alabama – championship teams stocked with Black athletes – is an effect of desegregation that whites still don’t acknowledge.

“In Alabama, it’s like a religion. You don’t have professional teams, but Alabama and Auburn are the most powerful cultural forces in the state. It defines the state. It’s the one source of legitimate pride that we can point to, when Alabama is winning all these games,” Stevenson said in the interview shared by Alabama Reflector.

“It would not have happened without integration. And yet people don’t want to talk about that. They were so resistant to it. George Wallace stands in the schoolhouse door, and yet now it is the source of the single most significant achievement and accomplishment for the state.

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“We don’t talk about how, ‘O thank God we allowed racial integration in our schools.’ We don’t say that. In fact, we just kind of ignore that, because we want to win.

“In that regard, we have held back the evolution and development of the South for over a century by these irrational restrictions that we placed. Yes, it’s good that we now have athletes on our college football teams, many predominantly Black, that allow us to win.

“But think about all the other things that we could have had — when it came to agriculture, when it came to business, when it came to education, when it came to development — had we been forced to have the same kind of integration. We haven’t done that, and there is still resentment that Black people want that, and I think that is the great burden of this history.”