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Opinion | Caroleene Dobson’s true Alabama story

Caroleene Dobson talks a lot about her family’s roots. She leaves out the part about slavery.

Caroleene Dobson
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Editor’s note: An early version of this column incorrectly stated that Caroleene Dobson was related to the founder of the KKK in Alabama. While various records reviewed by APR and reported in other publications, such theGrio and author Michael Harriot, have cited Dobson’s ties to individuals in the early KKK in Alabama, there is no link between her and the KKK’s founder. Additionally, APR has added reference links to a number of the statements in the column linking Dobson’s family to slavery. 

The campaign ads paint a portrait of Caroleene Dobson, running for Congress in Alabama’s 2nd congressional district, as a down-home, pickup-driving, folksy mom who grew up on a fifth-generation cattle farm, where she learned about hard work from the sweat and tears of her ancestors. 

She’s got the boots. She’s got the hat. She’s got a nice story. 

It’s an Alabama story, if ever there was one. Because it’s absolute bunk. 

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Dobson is a Harvard-educated attorney who represented some of the wealthiest corporations in America and is herself worth about a billion dollars – facts that her PR team has spent tremendous amounts of time and effort to hide – and instead, let’s focus on the true Alabama story at the heart of this. 

Slavery. 

Because Dobson’s family tree bears a lot of it. 

On both sides of her family tree, Dobson’s family owned dozens of slaves, according to reporting by theGrio’s Michael Harriot. Slaves that worked and toiled unpaid in the fields and who likely helped establish that fifth-generation cattle farm. (I say “likely” only because land records dating back to the 1800s in rural Alabama can get a bit murky on which property is which, but there’s no disputing that Dobson’s great-great-great grandfather owned slaves up until the 1860s on a farm in Monroe County, where the aforementioned fifth-generation cattle farm resides.)

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That is in addition to the more than 100 slaves that were owned by Dobson’s ancestors in Georgia and the slaves owned by her husband’s ancestors in Texas. 

Dobson’s ancestors were also involved with the early KKK in Alabama, and there are a number of documented cases of lynchings and other killings, beatings, fire-bombings and various mayhem committed by the klan in the areas where Dobson’s family resided. Essentially, they were making sure that in the late-1800s, a time of Black people finally receiving freedom and being afforded opportunities to make a living in America, no Blacks were doing so on their watch in Alabama. 

(I should also point out that it appears, according to reporting by Harriot, that Dobson’s family gained control of a major portion of their Alabama lands by way of the U.S. government stealing those lands from the Muscogee tribe following the Creek War and the forced death march that was the Trail of Tears.)

These are not disputed facts. These are documented realities. If anything, in the interest of brevity here, I’m probably being too vague, and not nearly graphic enough, in these portrayals. 

To be certain, though, no one is claiming that Caroleene Dobson, living now in 2024, is in any way responsible for her ancestors’ mistreatment of Black people or that she should be shamed by her family’s enrichment from that free labor. She’s no more responsible for their actions than any of us are for the crazy stuff our family members do, especially the drunk ones. 

But here’s the rub: While she’s certainly not responsible for their actions, she also doesn’t get to pretend that they didn’t happen, or that the fifth-generation cattle farm she keeps bringing up was somehow built on anything other than the forced servitude of the Black slaves her family owned. 

But then, that’s what makes this a true Alabama story. 

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Because these are the fables that we’ve been told and taught in our schools for years – these grand tales of white people persevering through trials and tough odds, fighting off the Native Americans who had the gall to be upset that their lands were being stolen and having the genius business sense to realize that plantations could be most profitable if you didn’t pay for labor. Some of Alabama’s most famed families, and the over-indulgent success stories of mama, daddy, grandpappy and so on, are built on just such utter fiction … and upon the backs of enslaved Black men. 

Like Dobson, few acknowledge it. Instead, they pretend it didn’t happen. Pretend that it was just gosh darn hard work that catapulted those white families into generational wealth. Pretend that Black Americans were thrust into poverty and strife due to some yet-to-be-discovered condition associated with black skin. 

Nothing at all to do with slavery producing generational-sustaining wealth for white people, Jim Crow ensuring that wealth was never threatened and sixty years of Republicans moving the goalposts and creating new ways to lock up Black men. 

Like Dobson, they’ve done a fine job creating their own story and selling it to the masses. And like Dobson, they’re trying like hell now to stop anyone from telling the truth. 

Dobson is on record repeatedly denouncing the teaching of “CRT,” or critical race theory, and bemoaning discussing issues of race, because it would be focusing too heavily on “an issue that divides us.” 

She also advocated for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education – one of the only reasons that Alabama’s minority children get anything close to a decent education in this state. But maybe she didn’t know that, given that she attended a segregation academy that has never admitted a single Black student, according to reporting by journalist Michael Harriot. 

All of this is made even slimier by the fact that Dobson is running for a seat that’s only up for grabs because the most conservative U.S. Supreme Court possibly ever determined that Alabama had racially gerrymandered it and denied Black voters a chance to be properly represented. 

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And now, here she is, trying to sell those same voters a whitewashed, fictional story of hard workin’ white people with Jesus morals and a cattle ranch built on love and determination. And definitely not a rich lady who’s already dumped nearly $2 million dollars of her own money into this effort to buy a congressional seat, who has the means to do so because she had the good fortune to live a life built by the generational wealth obtained through forced servitude and grotesque land grabs. 

But hey, hey, hey – don’t tell anyone that part. That’s the Alabama story we don’t talk about.

Josh Moon is an investigative reporter and featured columnist at the Alabama Political Reporter with years of political reporting experience in Alabama. You can email him at jmoon@alreporter.com or follow him on Twitter.

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