A bill is once again moving forward to give political leaders control of appointments to the board of the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
House Bill 169 by Representative Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, is practically the same as a bill that passed both chambers of the Legislature last session but failed to reach the desk of Governor Kay Ivey due to an unusual hurdle in the legislative process.
The bill would essentially give the governor control of the board, allowing the governor to make eight appointments of the 17-member board in which he or she would also have a vote. The governor would appoint one member from each of the seven Congressional districts plus one at-large member. The other eight appointments would be split between the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore, all at-large.
Steve Murray, director of the department, and Marty Olliff, vice president of the Friends of the Alabama Archives, asked the committee to instead consider an alternative bill that would see the board governed akin to the state’s other flagship history museums, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and the U.S.S Alabama.
Representative Marcus Paramore, R-Troy, offered an amendment to the bill to require the appointed members to be vetted by the Senate Confirmations Committee as the committee deems necessary.
Wanda Battle, a board member on the Friends of the Alabama Archives, addressed a portion of the bill that makes the bill retroactive to January 2025.
“The effect of this language is to revoke the membership of two colored board members who were reappointed to the board under existing law … beginning in January 2025,” Battle said. “Both highly-qualified African-American women who were previously confirmed by the Senate in 2019 and 2021. We do not know why the author of this bill in the Senate seeks to remove these members from the Archives board, but I can tell you how it will be received by the African-American community in Alabama.
“The Archives was founded in 1901. For many decades it served the citizens of our state in a discriminatory way, choosing not to preserve and share the history of Black Alabamians who consequently felt unwelcome in this important institution. That changed beginning in the 1980s, but it has been a long, long process to build trust in a community that had good reason to distrust the agency.”
The bill originates from Senator Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, who began seeking to change the board’s composition in 2023 after it refused to cancel an event highlighting the discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in archival spaces.
The bill now moves to the full House for consideration.
