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Yesterday it looked as if he might get his wish, after a referendum in the state looked likely to keep segregation-era wording, requiring separate schools for "white and coloured children" in its constitution as well as references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

A narrow margin of 1,850 votes out of 1.38 million, or 0.13%, in a referendum on November 2, meant the state was obliged to hold a recount, which took place yesterday. But with no accusations of electoral fraud or any other irregularities, nobody last night expected the result to change.

The ballot initiative sought to remove the most objectionable elements of the state's constitution which remain, even though they have been overridden by more recent civil rights legislation. They include passages such as:

"Separate schools shall be provided for white and coloured children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race."

And: "To avoid confusion and disorder and to promote effective and economical planning for education, the legislature may authorise the parents or guardians of minors, who desire that such minors shall attend schools provided for their own race ... "

Almost 50 years since Rosa Parks was ejected from a bus in the shadow of the governor's mansion because she would not move to the back, most people thought the amendment to remove the segregation clause would pass fairly easily.

"It was more ceremonial than legalistic," said Bryan Fair, a law professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. "The language in the constitution was already unconstitutional and this would have brought Alabama up to date. So it was surprising that something so clear and symbolic would be even close."

Even the Montgomery Advertiser, not given to radical outbursts, backed it. "Amendment 2 is a valuable cleansing of a grievous stain on the state's image," it argued in an editorial shortly before the vote. "It should be ratified."

But powerful groups and personalities on the right campaigned heavily against it, claiming that the amendment opened the door to lawyers to sue the state and raise taxes.

They were most incensed by efforts to remove the section that denied that Alabamians had "any right to education or training at public expense". Opponents claim education is a gift from the state of Alabama, not an entitlement.

"You open up that door, that is a trial lawyer's dream, to represent clients that have unbridled opportunity for mischief in raising taxes, tampering with private and parochial schools. It's unlimited," said John Giles, president of Alabama Christian Coalition. "Activists on the bench know no bounds. It's a trial lawyer's dream."

Mr Giles's campaign was assisted by the former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, who has become a local hero since he defied a federal court order to remove a two-ton slab of granite engraved with the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama supreme court.

Mr Giles said he would have been happy to see the racist language go so long as the issue of education rights remained. But many in Alabama believe the taxation argument was simply a ruse for white southerners to flex their muscles, even on a symbolic issue.

After the US supreme court ordered the end of segregation 50 years ago, many white southerners simply moved their children from state schools to private academies, often referred to as "seg academies" because they effectively kept segregation intact.

Since then Alabama has provided the backdrop for some of the ugliest scenes during the civil rights era, from the bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four little girls at Sunday school to the beating of marchers on St Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

"There are people here who are still fighting the civil war," Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel Baptist church and a retired school administrator, told the Washington Post. "They're holding on to things that are long since past. It's almost like a religion."

A statute banning interracial marriage in the state was struck down only four years ago by 59% to 41%, with a majority of whites voting against the change.

This year Mr Moore's former aide, Tom Parker, was elected to the Alabama supreme court even after it became clear that he had been handing out Confederate flags while campaigning and had attended a function honouring the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

"It seems perfectly clear that a number of the people who voted against the amendment did so for purely racist reasons," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an anti-racist monitoring group based in Montgomery.

But in one of the most lightly taxed states in the nation the argument that the measure could raise the fiscal burden went a long way, some say.

"In Alabama, if an opponent can label a policy as a tax, then 99 times out of 100 the policy fails," said Prof Fair, who is an African American. "Some folks in Alabama are assiduously holding on to what they call southern traditions which are traditions of white people being superior. But racism by itself is far too simple an explanation."
Troubled past
Since Alabama was declared a sovereign and independent state on January 11 1861, it has been a hotbed of racial tensions in the US

· December 1955 Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger. Her action prompted the Montgomery Bus Boycott and earned her the title "mother of the modern day civil rights movement".

· December 1956 The US supreme court banned segregated seating on Montgomery's public vehicles. The Rev Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks were the first to ride a fully integrated bus.

· May 1961 The Freedom Ride, an integrated bus trip from Washington DC, through the Deep South, was formed to test the 1960 supreme court decision prohibiting segregation on buses and trains. It was greeted with violence in Anniston and Birmingham. The Freedom Ride eventually resulted in the interstate commerce commission ruling against segregation in interstate travel.

· 1963 Birmingham bombings of civil rights-related targets, including the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the home of A D King (brother of Martin Luther King Jr), and the 16th Street Baptist Church (in which four children were killed). Governor Wallace makes a speech at the University of Alabama protesting against federally forced racial integration; Vivian Malone and James Hood register for classes as first African American students.

· March 1965 Six hundred demonstrators make the first of three attempts to march from Selma to Montgomery demanding the lifting of voting restrictions on black Americans. They were stopped by police at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, the pictures of the clashes with police were broadcast across the nation and caused a surge of support for the protesters.

· March 1965 The Rev Martin Luther King led 3,200 marchers from Selma toward Montgomery in support of civil rights for blacks. Four days later, outside the Alabama state capitol, King told 25,000 demonstrators: "We are on the move now ... and no wave of racism can stop us." On August 6 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

· Sept 2000 Selma elects its first black mayor, James Perkins, with 60% of the vote

· May 2002 Bobby Frank Cherry is convicted of murder for his part in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 1963, in which four black girls were killed.
Topics

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Yesterday it looked as if he might get his wish, after a referendum in the state looked likely to keep segregation-era wording, requiring separate schools for "white and coloured children" in its constitution as well as references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

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A feature in National Geographic 's October 125th anniversary issue looks at the changing face of America in an article by Lise Funderburg, with portraits of multiracial families by Martin Schoeller, that celebrates the beauty of multiracial diversity and shows the limitations around our current categories when talking about race.

In many ways race is about difference and how those differences are codified through language, categories, boxes, segmentation, and even the implicit sorting that goes on in our heads in terms of the way we label others and even ourselves.

Appearance and identity are most certainly linked when it comes to racial categories, but there is another important ingredient in that stew: Experience. There is no room for that on those official census forms, but when a person picks up a writing instrument to choose which box they check, experience most certainly helps guide their hand.

David Kung, a math professor in St. Mary's City, Maryland, wrestled for years with what box to check when confronted with official forms. His mother is white. His father is Chinese. His last name speaks of his heritage but it is hard to easily slot him into a single category based on his outward appearance. When he had to fill out those forms, sometimes he would check multiple boxes and let someone else figure out how to handle the confusion. Sometimes he would flip a coin. In that moment he thought of family traditions, songs, food, memories. Marking just one box was agonizing. It meant denying part of his ancestry. When the census forms changed, allowing individuals to choose more than one category, David Kung tore into the envelope, checked multiple boxes, and then sat down and cried.

Official statistics can paint a useful picture. Appearance is an important aspect of the story. But to understand race-and more specifically racial ambiguity-it helps to understand those whose lives are defined by it.

For three years now I have been collecting stories about race and cultural identity on the Race Card Project, and it has provided a window into society like no other I've ever experienced in more than three decades of working as a journalist. The stories I am talking about are short. Very short. Six words long. And it is amazing how much power people can pack into such a small package.

More amazing is how the exercise, over time, has opened a window for people to share much more than just their six words about who they are and what they are feeling. The submissions that arrive via snail mail, the Internet, and Twitter are often accompanied by comments, essays, pictures, and artwork. And of the more than 30,000 submissions I have archived, a large percentage, in some way, touch upon multiracial experiences-most specifically marriage, parenting, and the questions of identity for the resulting offspring.

I guess it's not surprising given the trends in interracial marriage. A 2010 Pew Research Study found that interracial marriages in the U.S. reached a record of 4.8 million and have been steadily climbing since those figures were compiled. To put that in context, one of out of every seven new marriages is among people of different racial backgrounds.

For a long time the mere mention of the phrase "race relations" invoked questions about the largely binary, and frequently complicated, dance between black and white Americans (think Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or, more recently, Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn in the blockbuster ABC television hit Scandal). But today the blurring of the color line is much more stratified and much more diverse.

The Pew study found that among newlyweds in 2010, 36 percent of Asian women married outside their race, compared with 17 percent of Asian men. Pew also found that 26 percent of Hispanics married outside their race, compared with 9 percent of whites and 17 percent of blacks.

But remember, statistics only tell part of that story.

The six-word tales that have poured into the Race Card Project create a portal that allows us to dive beyond the surface into the deeply nuanced issues of racial ambiguity and cultural identity. They are by no means comprehensive. It is not possible to explain every facet of multiracial life. But the six-word stories present a broad mosaic that informs us in these times and will serve as an amazing archive in the future as we try to understand the years when America was steaming toward a majority-minority status.

For many, there are no easy answers-or no fixed answer. Identity is not always a concrete concept but rather something that is situational, or shifting, based on time, place, growth, or circumstance. There are those who are proud of their ability to confidently "code switch" or move easily between cultures, sometimes borrowing the moniker Edgewalkers from Dr. Nina Boyd Krebs, whose book of the same title explores how people form diffuse cultural boundaries in the new Global Frontier.

Edgewalkers are like happy ambassadors who "move between cultural traditions and cultural communities with some level of ease, comfort and enjoyment." Edgewalkers welcome questions, even when the query is boneheaded or uncomfortable ( "Ooooh, is that your father?"). They are calm when people stare or ask about their suntans or light eyes. They enjoy confounding people. Humor is always in their toolbox. Patience too. They see these encounters as a chance to chip away at a tortured history.

There are also those who don various identities based on convenience, advantage, or comfort. Erica Shindler Fuller Briggs of North Charleston, South Carolina, is asked the question "What are you?" so often she has started charging people for the answer. "It's my retirement plan," she says. "What I charge is determined by timing: At what point in the conversation did they ask the question? If it's within the first few minutes of the conversation, I charge no less than $1 per minute, the fee for insult and time wasted catering to shallow character."

Shindler Fuller Briggs says people are either appalled or entertained. In either case she has made her point, prompting those who seek information about her identity to ask themselves a question: Why is it important? At age 42, she's developed a hard edge around the constant questioning of her identity over time, and for understandable reasons. At one point, a shoe store manager assumed she was Hispanic and fussed at her for not knowing her own language. When she told him she was not Latina, he seemed offended. A corner store clerk refused to believe she was black. "No, you're too pretty to be black," he said.

So how does she answer that oft-asked question, "What are you?" Her answer is found in her six-word submission to the Race Card Project: "What would make you more comfortable?"

For some, even that word, what, makes them bristle. As in " What are you?" instead of " Who are you?" or even " How are you?"

Though race is one of those seismic issues-the stuff of movements and monuments and multiday conferences at top universities-the moments revealed in the six-word submissions are smaller in nature and much more intimate:

Brown-skinned mothers who are mistaken as the nannies of their lighter skinned children.

Blue-eyed teenagers who grow outsize afros to win easy (or at least easier) acceptance on the basketball court.

Asians with Irish last names who delight at seeing the faces of potential employers when they show up for job interviews.

And blonde women who understand why their children choose to identify as "Black-tino" out of cultural convenience but quietly die inside because they feel rejected or left out. This is all part of the crazy quilt of America. Our diversity is the marvel of the world and represents one of our greatest strengths as a nation. It heralds progress but not without pain for those who live on the knife-edge of multiple cultures. That will become evident if you spend any time scrolling through the stories that my project, the Race Card, has received.

I've been in journalism long enough to know that people who are exceedingly happy with their lot in life are less likely to share their stories if given the chance. Those who have something to get off their chest are more likely to sidle up to the keyboard. But for a subject as historically and emotionally fraught as this, I am honored that anyone chooses to share their story and that the Race Card Project has become a forum where people can emote but also absorb a bit of life as lived by someone else.

Consider the pain that seeps through the six words submitted by Chad Oiastad of Madison, Wisconsin: "My grandfather would hate my children." I visibly seized up the first time I read that. A little shudder went through me just writing it now. But I have seen enough other stories come through the site to know that grandchildren have also had a way of melting away generational bias, or even fear of the unknown, and replacing it with love and pride and fierce protectiveness.

I think of the six words submitted by Phyllis Kedl, of Minneapolis, who could not be more proud of her multiethnic brood that includes fourteen grandkids, only five of whom are ethnically related to Phyllis and her husband. Her six words: "Family matters; race not at all."

I applaud Kedl's outlook and her optimism. I can't go all the way there with her though. If anything, the Race Card Project has taught me that race often does matter. To insist otherwise is to dismiss the observations, views, and experiences of the thousands of people who have shared their stories with me. Discussions about race have taken on a particular aspirational nuance in that there seems to be this often expressed wish that we could get to some kind of finish line where matters of race would be over ... done with ... a thing of the past.

If you don't know what I am talking about, think about the phrase "post-racial," with its suggestion that we could take some kind of express elevator up to the top floor where the view was great, the air was clear, and no one would make you feel icky or uncomfortable. In matters of romance, I have also repeatedly heard the phrase that "the heart perhaps is the last frontier," with the idea that a rainbow generation would lead us to a promised land where race was at least less prickly than it's been in the past. Perhaps that day is coming but it surely is not here.

Lessons abound if you take the time to dig. Ali Berlinski offers a dose of simple wisdom. Her six words are a descriptive anthem: "American Polish Filipina living in Spain."

What a delicious stew. Or perhaps I should say estofado ... or ilaga ... or gulasz.

In any case, Ali Berlinski says she uses prickly humor to talk about her eclectic upbringing. "Being a biracial kid can be hard, especially when you have a white name and a face that screams 'I give pedicures.'"

Berlinski embraces her racial ambiguity as a "beautiful mess."

"My family could very well be the United Nations. Navigating through so many cultures can get messy but it is always oh so rewarding."

Navigating cultures is something that National Geographic and the Race Card Project have in common, and we want to include you in our journey to better understand the changing face of America. We want to see and hear how you identify yourself in terms of culture, race, or even region. Are you raising mixed race children? Are your parents of different races? Do you have siblings who identify themselves in different ways, even though your biracial background is the same? Are you unsure how to describe a friend, colleague, neighbor, or teammate?

Whatever your story, we want to hear from you. Share your six words and illustrate it with a photo on Twitter or Instagram tagged with #NatGeoRaceCardProject.
Michele Norris is a host and special correspondent for NPR and the curator of the Race Card Project.

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A feature in National Geographic's October 125th anniversary issue looks at the changing face of America in an article by Lise Funderburg, with portraits of multiracial families by Martin Schoeller, that celebrates the beauty of multiracial diversity and shows the limitations around our current categories when talking about race.

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"They would follow us, barking and sneering and spitting on the sidewalk. They would step in front of us and then to block our way... [My grandfather would] give his regards to their parents or ask after someone he used to work with at the mills" (Norris 58).

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"They would follow us, barking and sneering and spitting on the sidewalk. They would step in front of us and then to block our way... [My grandfather would] give his regards to their parents or ask after someone he used to work with at the mills" (Norris 58).

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"Everybody was in the same boat, rowing in the same direction determined to get somewhere better fast" (Norris 56).

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"Everybody was in the same boat, rowing in the same direction determined to get somewhere better fast" (Norris 56).

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During her annual vacations to Birmingham, Alabama as a child,  Michele was exposed to a more blatant form of racism .

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During her annual vacations to Birmingham, Alabama as a child,  Michele was exposed to a more blatant form of racism .

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"He [my father] was willing to humiliate me, he was willing to do that so our friends would see he had power inside his house" (Norris 47).

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"He [my father] was willing to humiliate me, he was willing to do that so our friends would see he had power inside his house" (Norris 47).

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"We didn't just emulate the all-American white families in the Coca-Cola commercials- we tried to top them" (Norris 41).

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"We didn't just emulate the all-American white families in the Coca-Cola commercials- we tried to top them" (Norris 41).

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In stark contrast to their neighbors' beliefs, the Norris' were the epitome of a perfect "all american" family.  

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In stark contrast to their neighbors' beliefs, the Norris' were the epitome of a perfect "all american" family.  