This is an opinion column.

Want to know what it was like in the South after Brown vs. Board of Education, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state-sanctioned segregation of public schools?

You could study it in those schools (or state-funded private ones), I guess. You used to could, as we say around here. Not so sure anymore.

But it was ugly.

Virginia formed a commission to defy it. A hundred members of Congress backed a Southern Manifesto to try to overturn it. Mississippi politicians railed against the High Court as a “political body.”

In ways it all led to the impotent pandering of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, who – in the unholy name of “segregation forever” – stood in a University of Alabama schoolhouse door to deny entry to Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood.

But you don’t need to study it. Not anymore. All you have to do is look around. History revolves as we fight to evolve.

It seemed like an evolution when the now-conservative U.S. Supreme Court told Alabama in June to redraw racially gerrymandered Congressional districts to give some reasonable hope that a Black candidate could win in two districts. But Alabama’s state Legislature responded like, well, like it always does.

Like a racist, petulant child. It redrew districts but changed nothing. It was a finger to the courts. And of course to Black people.

We’re moving forward fast. Right back to the past.

Want to know what it was like in the South after slavery and Reconstruction, when it seemed Black people had actually made strides to obtaining a modicum of political power?

I guess you could study it. If you try hard enough. It was an orchestrated, regional effort.

A Mississippi constitutional convention began in 1890 with a stated purpose: “To exclude the Negro.” Alabama’s 1901 a constitutional convention began for the same purpose.

“If we would have white supremacy,” convention president John B. Knox began, “…”we must establish it by law.”

The secret about Southern racism is that it was never a secret at all.

Across the South, voting restrictions, Jim Crow laws and dirty tricks wiped Black people from the polls. Two years after the passage of that Alabama Constitution in 1901 the number of Black men eligible to vote fell 98 percent.

But you don’t even have to look back anymore. The tricks are just as dirty now.

Look at Tennessee, where a Republican majority in 2022 was just about as brazen, rewriting districts to, among other things, split Nashville into bits to steal political power from its otherwise dominant urban center.

Of course that’s the same state legislature that expelled two Black men for protesting after a mass shooting, but not the white woman who did the same.

Because life is a history lesson.

Want to know what it was like to grow up in the South after slavery and Reconstruction, amid Jim Crow and lynchings and beatings and burnings, as white people sought to rationalize and rewrite the misdeeds of the past?

You can look at the old “Know Alabama” textbook that taught the state’s fourth-graders a version of history that credited the KKK for setting things right:

“The Negroes who had been fooled by the false promises of the ‘carpetbaggers’ decided to get themselves jobs and settle down to make an honest living,” it said.

Or you could just look down to the Sunstroke State, where Florida Man Ron DeSantis still won’t back down from state board of education standards based on the warped notion that slavery had an upside.

“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to Florida’s new social studies standards.

The South – the whole country, really – doesn’t need to study real history anymore.

It’s too busy living it.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.