It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Vincent, Alabama, and the town’s many church parking lots are packed — but the doors to the police department are locked, and there hasn’t been a single Vincent officer working here since August.
That’s when the city council voted to disband the entire department — one of the oldest in the state of Alabama — after a racist text message sent by a Vincent officer became public. Residents were up in arms at an emergency council meeting held at the local high school, and Vincent made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. The text, written by a white officer, had been about a pregnant slave, smack in the middle of land that for years had been tended by Black men, women and children robbed of their freedom.
