Reflections on the Untold Stories
Ed. note: This was first published as the afterward to Untold Stories of Montevallo, Vol. 4. Read more here.
Joe Demartin is a third-year student at American University Washington College of Law. While working on a paper about the fall of the Voting Rights Act, he discovered MLP’s Untold Stories of Black Montevallo through a website search. He reached out, explaining that he was analyzing the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder through a counter-storytelling framework. He was examining whose stories are elevated and whose stories are forgotten. In his view the stories preserved in the Untold Stories had the potential to create a higher justice than that produced by stories legitimated by the Roberts Supreme Court. Oh yes, we replied. Write something for us!
You may wonder why some random, white law student from over 750 miles away has any interest in Montevallo, Alabama and its history. But make no mistake, endeavors like the Montevallo Legacy Project are of the utmost importance to understanding and thinking about the law because you do the radical work of telling untold stories.
Critical Race Theory argues that the law cannot be properly understood as an objective set of black-and-white choices. Rather, legal reality is constructed subjectively through stories and narrative. The power of storytelling, according to Professor Richard Delgado, is the power to shape reality: “We participate in creating what we see in the very act of describing it.” This power is wielded by both the dominant group and the out-group. The dominant group tells stories that “provide [] a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural.” In the legal context, these stories manifest as “the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place.” For Delgado, the mind-set of the dominant group helps it “justify the world as it is—that is, with whites on top and browns and blacks at the bottom.” (All quotes are from Richard Delgado, Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative [1989]).
When thinking about dominant groups in the law, there’s no group more powerful than the United States Supreme Court. In the era of the Roberts Court, the dominant group might be more accurately construed as the Court’s conservative majority. Their decisions, in a very literal sense, create a legal reality that strengthens the structures maintaining racism in America. However, Professor Thomas Ross warns against taking a surface-level approach that treats judicial opinions merely as narratives: “In doing so, one can miss or obscure . . . the violence of the word.” We should understand the Roberts Court’s opinions as a dominant group’s violent construction of a social reality where particular white conservative interests are chosen and prioritized.
To hide the connection between judicial action and violence, judges use a powerful narrative tool that Professor Ross dubs “law talk.” According to Ross, “law talk is rational and calm even dispassionate.” When engaging in law talk, judges “take on the sense of detachment and cool rationality that is part of [their] ascribed cultural role.” (Quotes from Thomas Ross, The Richmond Narratives, 68 Tex. L. Rev (1989).
For the Roberts Court, and for John Roberts in particular, law talk is a powerful storytelling tool for disguising their ideological ambitions, dismissing judicial violence, and maintaining the perception of moderation and institutionalism. Take Roberts’s infamous assertion from his confirmation hearing, deflecting from probes into his steadfastly partisan record, that his job was simply to “call balls and strikes.” Roberts’s pablum screams dispassionate detachment and rationality. But note that Roberts’s statement does not actually contemplate substantive judicial action. Instead, it uses imagery and narrative to redirect our focus away from ideological ambition to an aesthetic of neutrality. As he ascended to the position of Chief Justice, Roberts created a reality-altering narrative of ideological disinterest to hide the violent imposition of his conservative ideology on America.
So where does Montevallo and the Montevallo Legacy Project fit into all of this? One strain of the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence that illustrates how the Court weaponizes narrative and Law Talk is its steady dismantling of the right to vote. Montevallo is part of Shelby County, Alabama, the site of the infamous case Shelby County v. Holder that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts presents a story in Shelby Countyv. Holder. It is a story that glorifies a nation pressing on and a South redeemed, and it erases the burdens on and violence against Black voters and voters of color. Montevallo is a counterstory, a small town that living in the shadow and trauma of racial violence and racial segregation. Montevallo demonstrates that history does not recede just because the law declares it so. Memory lingers. History lingers. Wanting to be heard.
The VRA faces yet another impending blow this term in the case Louisiana v. Callais. John Roberts’s singular struggle against the Voting Rights Act is particularly dependent on narrative because the struggle for voting rights and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act are intricately intertwined with Black history and Black stories. In other words, to destroy the Voting Rights Act, Roberts must necessarily cast aside those stories and create a new reality by telling his own version of history. Projects like the Montevallo Legacy Project will be instrumental in creating the fuller legal reality that follows the Court’s capture.
The ongoing struggle for voting rights in America is molded and shaped by stories. America sits at a crossroads, a choice between two stories. Will we believe the story that John Roberts wants to tell? A story of a country that has pressed on beyond the days of racism, where we take for granted the fragile achievement of racial progress and instead declare it settled history? Certainly, that path is easier, more comfortable, and reassuring. Or does America have the courage to face its ugly history head-on, to learn the lessons it shouts at us? Will we look up to the ropes still hanging from the trees above our heads? Or is the shade too comfortable? Will we remember the lingering trauma of racial segregation? Or will we instead choose to disinfect our memories? Do we have the courage to tell the untold story, to shatter and upend the prevailing narratives that create racial hierarchy? Because the stories we choose to tell will decide whether we bury the past or transform the future.