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the new Brazil saw a former shoeshine boy and factory worker – Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – win the presidency in 2002. Now his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, herself a former political prisoner, is president. Their dual policy of generating rapid economic growth and providing generous social programs helped lift 30 million people into the middle class.

The symbolism of a black American president will encourage people here like nothing else,

Thanks to H.B. 56 (the “Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act”), passed a year ago by the state’s first Republican Legislature since Reconstruction, I am ashamed of being from Alabama.

Since Alabama has no foreign border and a Latino population of less than 4 percent, the main purpose of H.B. 56 seems to be the id-gratification of tribal dominance and its easy political dividends. A bill co-sponsor, State Senator Scott Beason, was frank about his motive: “when their children grow up and get the chance to vote, they vote for Democrats.”

The city had nearly finessed that dialectic during the memorial in October for a local civil rights legend, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth. Flying into the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, the protagonists of the movement — Andrew Young, John Lewis, Joseph Lowery — were greeted at the funeral by Gov. Robert Bentley with words of regret about his segregated youth. So cordial was the network of mutuality that it was at least an hour into the six-hour service before speakers pointed out that Governor Bentley had signed the immigration law that reinvented the sin from which Mr. Shuttlesworth had supposedly delivered us.

When the Justice Department investigated the state for demanding checks on schoolchildren, the defiant reaction of Alabama’s attorney general prompted comparisons to George C. Wallace’s 1963 “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” at the University of Alabama.

Leading with a reference to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” some 150 ministers formally condemned H.B. 56 for preventing them from fulfilling the doctrine of the good Samaritan by making it illegal to give assistance to illegal immigrants, the basis of a suit against the state by three Christian denominations.

A statement co-author, Matt Lacey, received dozens of e-mails from the law’s defenders beginning, “I’m a Christian but.” They saw no distinction between the bureaucratic category of “undocumented” and the moral one of “criminal”

“Are you objecting to harassing the people who have no business being here?”

The South’s culture of kindness is real and must account for the most poignant theme of the Human Rights Watch report: how many of those repudiated “aliens” professed an attachment to Alabama. “I love here,” said a 19-year-old, in the state since he was 9. Now the cycle of bigotry is renewed, poisoning a new generation of Americans on both sides.

A University of Alabama economist placed the law’s damage to the state in the billions of dollars.

The annual re-enactment of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights was refashioned as an anti-H.B. 56 protest. My heart began to mend at a perverse prospect: in half a century, would Alabama be honoring the remarkable community uprising that overcame H.B. 56?

In May the Legislature passed an “improved” bill

It forced the police to obtain papers from passengers as well as drivers, and it ordered the state to maintain a database of known “illegals,” recalling antebellum ads spotlighting runaway slaves.

The law still exempts domestics, observing the plantation hierarchy of “house Negroes” and “field hands.”

We know how the fight will turn out, just as it was long obvious the Constitution could not condone segregation forever. But the fight will be ceaselessly reprised, shattering lives before the inevitable is allowed to happen.

At least in Alabama, the civil rights movement, like the football team, knows what it takes to win.