Alabama in the Twentieth Century (Modern South)

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ALABAMA in the TWENTIETH CENTURY

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ALABAMA in the TWENTIETH CENTURY

WAYNE FLYNT

The University of Alabama Press • Tuscaloosa


Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn Typeface: Granjon ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Flynt, Wayne, 1940– Alabama in the twentieth century / Wayne Flynt. p. cm. — (The modern South) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8173-1430-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Alabama—History—20th century. 2. Alabama—Civilization— 20th century. I. Title. II. Series. F326.F754 2004 976.1′063—dc22 2004002841 The author acknowledges permission to reprint quotations from the following sources: From Booker T. Washington, “Useful Living”; and from Grover Hall to Major Howell, November 29, 1936, Grover Hall papers, courtesy the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Alabama. From E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981), courtesy of John Sledge. From Gary Smith, “Crime and Punishment,” Sports Illustrated, June 24, 1996, courtesy of Gary Smith. From Nanci Kincaid, Balls: A Novel (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books), courtesy of Nanci Kincaid.


To Dorothy, As always, the light of my life.



Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Introduction xv PART ONE Alabamas Political Economy 1 In the Beginning: The 1901 Constitution 3 2 Every Man for Himself: Politics, Alabama Style 29 3 Selling Alabama: The Economy 107 PART TWO Alabamas Society 4 5 6 7 8 9

Life from the Bottom Up: Society 175 Teaching the People: Education 220 On and Off the Pedestal: Women 251 Counting behind White Folks: African Americans 317 Fighting Mad: Alabamians at War 373 Beyond the Game: The Social Signi¤cance of Sports 407 PART THREE Alabamas Culture

10 What Would Jesus Do? Religion 443 11 Plain and Fancy: Folk and Elite Culture 485 Notes 533 Bibliography 545 Index 579



Illustrations

Following page 292 Map of Alabama Counties, County Seats, and Geopolitical Regions South Alabama planters, 1920s Delegates to the 1901 Constitutional Convention Justice Hugo Black Virginia Durr and Rosa Parks Wallace campaign smear sheet for the 1970 gubernatorial runoff Train track in the Wiregrass region used by the timber industry Gov. George C. Wallace, Dr. Wernher von Braun, and Mr. James E. Webb Italian coal miners’ village The streets of Mobile during the 1920s Students of the Pinson rock school in the mid-1920s African American students, 1938 Mrs. W. A. Kirkland of Henry County on a John Deere tractor Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Carrie Tuggle Booker T. Washington The 167th Infantry Regiment victory parade, Montgomery Railroad car from Mobile, with U.S. Army recruits in 1917 Airmen and a ®ight instructor, Tuskegee Tom Daniels, Auburn’s placekicker, 1893 Cartoon by Scott Stantis depicting Bobby Lowder’s control over Auburn University


x ILLUSTRATIONS

Congregation of Calvinistic Primitive Baptists on Sand Mountain Worshipers at the Fairmont Baptist Church, tent revival, ca. 1925 Harper Lee Hank Williams and the Driftin Cowboys, 1938


Preface I

suppose anyone who spends half a century pondering a single subject will become obsessed with it and want to write a book. One day as the words poured out of my fountain pen, I realized that I had lived in Alabama during 6 of the 10 decades I was describing. During 5 of them, I was an activist with pronounced opinions about these subjects. I was often deeply ashamed to be an Alabamian and once in graduate school at Florida State University even vowed never to live there again. More than one fellow citizen has expressed regrets that I did not keep my vow. Trouble was, Alabama is like a disease. Once it infects a person, it is hard to cure the ailment. Every time I thought I had obtained a cure, I experienced a relapse. I still remember the ¤rst of many. Klan terrorists had just murdered four little girls at 16th Street Baptist Church. I read the attorney Charles Morgans account of the event, detailing his decision to leave Birmingham and its mindless violence for good. He made perfect sense to me. Then I read Harper Lees novel To Kill a Mockingbird and changed my mind. Across the years, I alternated between despair and hope. For every George Wallace, Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and Art Hanes, there seemed to be a George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr. Every time I gave up on Alabama, I encountered a soldier, sailor, or airman, an athlete or teacher, an environmentalist or minister who prevailed against incredible odds and made me proud to be from the same place. Every time I returned home, people who shared few of my opinions welcomed me back into a nurturing circle of kinship and community. And every research trip north or west or to Europe or Asia reminded me that Alabama had no monopoly on racism and injustice. Nor did many other climes match the states beauty, kindness, neighborliness, or potential.


xii PREFACE

Cleansed of its racism and fear of change, I often mused, this could be as ¤ne a place to live, even with all its ®aws, as any imperfect place on earth. And so I stayed, studied, observed, and wrote. Not everyone who reads this book will be pleased with it. One persons honest appraisal often strikes another as unnecessary criticism. Some will say I spend too much time on the negative and not enough on the positive, that my historical glass seems perpetually half-empty rather than half-full. To me, the fullness or emptiness is of less interest than the halfness. Why does a state with so much human and natural potential settle so often for mediocrity? Why are Alabamians expectations so low when excellence is so often within their grasp? The incidence of world-class performance in so many spheres of life makes more poignant the persistent waste and inef¤ciency and backwardness of so much of Alabamas collective life. Alabamians who persist through the ¤rst painful chapters describing the states political economy will grow increasingly proud of what they encounter. They will discover enough nobility of spirit, courage under ¤re (literally and ¤guratively), creativity, and accomplishment to make even the most cynical citizen proud. They will also encounter enough corruption, opportunism, cowardice, betrayal of power, and lack of vision to make even the most chest-thumping booster ashamed. That is the way of history. In some respects, Alabama had a worse record in the 20th century than other states. It was de¤nitely no century to relive for blacks and poor whites. In other ways, it was 100 years of uncommon accomplishment. Whether ones preference is for Bear Bryant or Hugo Black, George Wallace or Hank Williams, Joe Louis or Harper Lee, Booker T. Washington or E. O. Wilson, Helen Keller or Nat King Cole, Jesse Owens or Frank M. Johnson, the human saga occurred on a grand scale. Non-Alabama readers will encounter a list of characters they didnt even know had Alabama roots. And if I do my job well enough, stereotypes will give way to increasing complexity, irony, and ambiguity. Even the states harshest critics will have to concede ground in the face of so much positive exertion against such heavy odds. Irony abounds. White evangelical Christianity played a major role not only in Alabamas legendary sense of community but also in its racism, sexism, and traditionalism. Black evangelical Christianity played a major role


PREFACE xiii

in racial justice, modernization, and social change despite its fundamentalism. As in religion, much of what is best and worst in Alabama traces its origins to common sources: racial differentness, folk culture, Jacksonian individualism, and populistic assumptions about the rights of ordinary people. I have divided the book into 11 topical chapters, each spanning the entire century. The weakness of such an organizing principle is a certain level of redundancy. Was prohibition, for instance, primarily a political or religious movement? The subject ¤ts in either chapter, or even in discussions of women or society. Does college football belong in chapters on sport, education, or religion? One could make a case for any or all of these locations. Did the black migration between 1915 and 1930 re®ect more about societal transitions or about racial identity? On all these calls and many more, I chose to locate the primary discussion in one chapter with secondary references in another. Nor will all agree with my 11 topics. In fact, nearly everyone would probably select at least one that I omitted. In the ¤nal analysis, the organization of this or any book is an intensely personal judgment. I had to decide what Alabamians value and consider most important. It may well be that citizens should value ballet over basketball and calculus over football. But they dont. If I had my way, the chapter on sports would mostly have been about college basketball, not baseball, football, boxing, track, and NASCAR. But I dont get to impose my preferences on fellow citizens. The book is about what Alabamians valued in the 20th century, not what I considered most important. In determining the sequence of the 11 topics, I followed the most logical progression to help readers understand increasingly complex ideas and patterns. Leading with the 1901 constitution was simple. The document was crafted at the beginning of the century and still prevailed as the states fundamental organic law when the century ended. Both the inception of the constitution and its tenacious endurance were testaments to the power of the states political and economic elites. So they constitute an obvious unit. In fact, the chapter on politics needs to be conceived as the hinge of a door, holding the panels in place. I introduce most of the topics and cast of characters there as well as the books chronology. All following topics draw some of their life from politics and frequently interact with it.


xiv PR E FACE

To speed readers on their way, I have reduced scholarly trappings to a minimum. Only extended or essential quotations are footnoted. Only the rarest controversial, nonquoted assertions warrant documentation. In compensation, I list at the end of the book sources from which I derived my opinions and analysis. They constitute a grand lesson in learning. For the most inquisitive readers, these sources will carry them through life and into a pleasant and informative retirement. Every historian leans heavily on all who preceded him, and I am in debt to one and all of them. I especially thank Clyde Bolton, Joey Brackner, William Christenberry, Wilson Fallin Jr., Virginia Hamilton, David Edwin Harrell, John Shelton Reed, Sam Webb, and the late Bailey Thomson for reading individual chapters and offering constructive criticism. Thanks also are due to archivists and librarians in every nook and cranny of Alabama and even in places far a¤eld. They live thankless and anonymous lives but make the historian’s craft possible. To the staff at The University of Alabama Press, I offer similar thanks. Scholarly presses are an endangered species these days, but they are no less important to the creation and distribution of learning. Peggy Mason, typist extraordinaire, once again deciphered my scratchings, corrected my spelling, and expeditiously cranked out the pages. Laura Katz, my editorial assistant, tracked down photographs and assisted me in many other ways as well. My son Sean salvaged photographs I believed to be unusable. Most of all, thanks to my beloved Dartie. Through nearly half a century of marriage, she more than anyone both encouraged my writing and made it possible. Her solicitude for my welfare, anger at my detractors, enlightened conversation about my subjects, assistance in my research, and help in turning my garrulous nature toward solitude made her in the absolute intellectual and spiritual sense a coauthor of all I wrote and a source of good humor in tense times.


Introduction A

mericans were so anxious to greet the new century that they could not wait an entire hundred years. So the 20th century of¤cially lasted only 99 years, beginning January 1, 1901, and ending December 31, 1999. It is no wonder they were glad to have the century over. It witnessed the greatest depression and the bloodiest war in human history. It also recorded momentous changes. In 1901 journalists were just as happy to see the 19th century end. In fact, Chicago demanded that it cease on December 31, 1899, earning a scolding in the December 30, 1899, Mobile Daily Register: “The twentieth century begins day after tomorrow, in Chicago exclusively.”1 The 19th century also had recorded great wars and incredible changes. Some journalists pronounced the world remarkably improved, with more creature comforts, reduced cost of living, and greater wealth even for ordinary people than ever before. The bicycle, steamboat, railroad, telegraph, telephone, elevator, gas and electric lighting, camera, sewing machine, typesetter, phonograph, typewriter, chloroform, ether, cocaine, cocktails, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, searchlights, free libraries, iron bridges, and stenographers all began between 1800 and 1900. So remarkable had been the changes of that century that journalists did not doubt even greater things to come. The Mobile Daily Register predicted that “the marvels of this century now ended will doubtless be cast into the shadows of the discoveries of the twentieth century.” Predictions were of course imperfect. Most notable among the disappointments of the previous epoch had been the failure of ®ight. “Possibly, the hundred years of experiment,” the Mobile editor speculated, “teach us that we will never ®y in the air as do the birds, or, if we do so, it will be merely for the pleasure of the thing. Flying in so variable an element as the air can never, we think, be reduced to a science.”2


xvi I N T RODUC T ION

The Birmingham Age-Herald chose less technical subjects for speculation, featuring an essay by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As long as American society assigned women an inferior place, she mused, refusing them the right to vote, hold of¤ce, or preach the gospel, so long would the condition of women be degraded and vice continue. Other guest editorialists predicted sweeping changes: the popular election of U.S. senators, trust regulation, and national divorce laws. The Birmingham journalists were also less enthusiastic about the 19th century than their south Alabama colleagues. The century had opened with promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity but had ended with kings and emperors abounding. America’s common people lived little better than they had in 1801, and trusts had destroyed competition. Class cleavage between a “multi-millionaire plutocracy” and the masses had grown rather than diminished.3 Giving former slaves the ballot had not uplifted them nor had universal education. Religion was no stronger in its in®uence on society. Predictions of change, as expansive as they were, could hardly capture the promise and potential of the 20th century. In the summer of 1900 the United States contained only 8,000 automobiles and 144 miles of paved roads. The average life expectancy was 47 years. Only 6 percent of Americans possessed a high school diploma; 11 percent were illiterate; and the average public school year lasted a mere 99 days. Barely 14 percent of American homes contained a bathtub and only 8 percent a telephone. Motion pictures had just been invented (1893–96); the radio was not patented until 1891 and would not be perfected for another decade. Heavier-than-air manned ®ight would not occur until December 1903, and Robert Goddard’s early experiments with rocket engines would only commence in 1914. Diesel engines were introduced in 1897, the X-ray in 1913, the ¤rst motor-driven vacuum cleaner in 1899, rayon in 1902, and thermosetting plastic in 1909. Even greater jolts were beginning in literature and morals. Literary realism and naturalism shocked traditionalists with their moral relativism and depiction of humans as near helpless pawns of an impersonal, rapacious environment. In 1909 Sigmund Freud visited America to lecture, and translations of his Interpretations of Dreams appeared four years later. Freudian theories, often exaggerated or distorted, encouraged the expression of feelings and urges previously repressed. Youthful rebels cited naturalism and


I N T RODUC T ION xvii

Freudianism to justify what they intended to do anyway. Victorianism reeled in chaotic retreat. A revolution in morals, hastened by wider availability of birth control and greater freedom for women, accompanied changes in literature and psychological understanding. Economically, the age of iron and steel dawned; southerners moved north; northerners moved to Florida; cattle moved east and cotton moved west. Amid all the chaos Alabamians greeted the new century with ¤rm resolve that change was the order of the day. And they reckoned they knew just what needed to be changed and how it ought to be done.



PART O N E

Alabama’s Political Economy



1 In the Beginning The 1901 Constitution

September 27th 1902 Dear Stella, I sent you the pen because I thought you would be more apt to keep it than any of the other grandchildren. I wrote my name to our new Constitution in September 1901 with it, and ¤fty or as many years as we live under that Constitution the signers names will be before the people. If it shall prove to be a wise thing we will be honored for making it. And if it should not prove to be a good one it can be amended to suit the people. This will never be forgotten: we have virtually disfranchised the negro, reduced the taxes, and largely increased the school fund. So keep the pen as a souvenir, remembering your Grand Pa wrote his name as a member of the convention that drew up said Constitution. —Dabney Palmer of Leroy, Washington County, to Stella Palmer

Few states other than Alabama were governed throughout the 20th century by a single constitution. Other states updated their governing documents as they modernized. Alabama should have been so lucky. As it was, most if not all the state’s formidable problems had their origins in the 1901 document. The virulent racism of that original charter reminded one and all that at the beginning of the century chief among the issues of governance in the minds of white citizens was the subordination and exclusion of black citizens. That such a document could still govern Alabama at the end of the century is testimony to the continuing power of the economic and political elites that put it in place, the racial insensitivity of many whites, and lack of concern about the state’s negative national and international reputation.


4 CHA P T ER ON E

Origins The origins of the 1901 constitution demonstrate the folly of assuming that any pivotal historical event stands alone. It was shaped by a history of racial and class con®ict, opposition to taxes, ambivalence about industrialization, and lack of commitment to public services, including public education, that dated well back into the 19th century. Antebellum Alabama was slow to provide public schools, not establishing its ¤rst statewide education system until 1854. Even then the system was a mixture of state and private schools, all underfunded. Nor was the state inclined to adequately fund other social services such as prisons, mental hospitals, or public health. Antebellum taxes, at least what few existed, were raised by a surprisingly equitable mix of levies on land, slaves, and luxury items. Those who owned most wealth paid most taxes. Like nearly all Americans, taxpayers bitterly resented paying any taxes at all and considered the governments that levied them pro®igate and inef¤cient. Before the Civil War, virtually all whites farmed for a living and saw no reason to encourage manufacturing, banking, or business. In fact, the state legislature, the governor, or both regularly rejected requests by private entrepreneurs for state subsidies to help build roads, canals, railroads, or other economic infrastructure. Because wealthier and better-educated Alabamians were more receptive to higher taxes and government inducements to encourage business, improve education, and provide public services, regional divisions developed along class lines. Jacksonian Democrats tended to be leery of any government activity or intrusion into their lives, while Whigs tended to be more supportive of business. No whites of any class believed that blacks should participate fully in government or society. Civil War and Reconstruction shook all these assumptions to their foundations. Freedmen began to vote, hold public of¤ce, and draft laws. Together with their white Republican allies, they paid taxes, levied taxes, and dispersed the proceeds. They offered state ¤nancial inducements to private businesses. They favored increases in public services, particularly for education. With slavery ended and luxuries greatly reduced, they shifted the primary burden of taxation from af®uent planters to struggling yeomen


T H E 1 9 0 1 C ONST IT U T ION 5

farmers. White small farmers cursed Reconstruction government, partly because it included African Americans, “traitorous” Alabama scalawags, and “opportunistic” northern carpetbaggers; but even more, they despised it because the new Republican government tripled property taxes. The ensuing war—for that is what it was, complete with murders, fraud, and intimidation—between Republicans and Democrats continued for a decade until white conservative Democrats regained control of government in 1874. The winners institutionalized their victory in the 1875 constitution. Of the 100 delegates to that convention, 80 were Democrats, 12 were Republicans, and 7 called themselves independents. Only 4 were African Americans. Conservative Democrats wrote their ideology into the document. They prohibited the state from loaning money or extending credit for internal improvements. They placed a cap on both state and local property taxes. They segregated schools and abolished the state Board of Education. Only fear of federal intervention prevented the convention from limiting black suffrage, segregating passengers using public transportation, and forbidding interracial marriages. As a consequence of the new constitution, taxes declined as did revenue for education. During subsequent years, conservative white Democrats used a variety of methods to reduce the number of black voters: they gerrymandered town limits to reduce the number of enfranchised African Americans; they made state and local of¤ces appointive rather than elective, especially in areas of majority black population; they complicated election laws (the 1893 Sayre Election Law arranged candidates alphabetically under the of¤ce they ran for without listing party, required voters to produce a certi¤cate of identity, and only registered new voters during May). All these measures fell short of their ideal. In 1900 more than 100,000 African Americans were still eligible to vote, and they had created signi¤cant mischief, along with their white allies, during the 1890s Populist insurrection. Theoretically the end of Reconstruction and the 1875 constitution had restored law, order, and integrity to Alabama. In reality none of these occurred. Violence, especially lynching, had become more common rather than less. And political corruption reached new heights during the 1890s as well.


6 CHA P T ER ON E

The object of much of this political violence and corruption was the Populist movement. Populism was rooted in the decline of agriculture that impoverished so many small farmers after 1865. Only about 10 percent of Alabama white farmers had been bereft of both personal property and land when the Civil War began; by 1880 nearly half of all farmers were landless tenants. Populism was born in this decline. In fact, the single most important factor in determining whether or not a county voted Populist was the rate of tenancy increase and the decreases in the percentage of owneroperated farms. Although Populist demands varied, at heart these agrarian radicals sought to expand the power of government in order to enlarge opportunities for ordinary citizens. By appealing to Democrats, Republicans, and independents, blacks and whites, on a frankly class-based platform, Populists terri¤ed conservative Democrats, especially in the Black Belt, where planters envisioned a neo-Reconstruction coalition taking over and imposing higher taxes. Their worst fears nearly came true. In 1892 and again two years later, planters had to steal black votes in the Black Belt in order to deny Populist leader Reuben Kolb the governorship. The ¤rst time Kolb reluctantly conceded. The second time he ordered his legions to Montgomery on inauguration day, determined to be sworn in as the lawful chief of¤cer of the state. He marched up Dexter Avenue at the head of his followers to confront a line of Montgomery police, the Montgomery Mounted Ri®es, and other militia units. More people probably expected civil war that day in 1894 than had expected it in 1861. Kolb’s statesmanship saved the day. He mounted a wagon, had himself sworn in, then told his bellicose supporters: “Let us be peaceable, and justice and right will reign in Alabama.” He was only half right. His followers did not provoke violence, but their forbearance did not cause justice and right to prevail. By 1900 whites agreed that something must be done to change the political climate. Political corruption threatened the very existence of orderly government. Even ministers participated in stealing votes in order to maintain white supremacy. And the Selma Times frankly admitted in December 1895: “The Times is one of those papers that does not believe it is any harm to rob or appropriate the vote of an illiterate Negro. We do not believe they ought even to have had the privilege of voting.”1



The U.S. senatorial race in Alabama that year became a referendum on suffrage, with the incumbent U.S. senator arguing for a disfranchisement convention to rewrite the state’s constitution and the sitting governor opposing both disfranchisement and constitutional revision. The proconvention incumbent won, causing the legislature to poll voters about their desire for a new document that would disfranchise blacks. More than 60 percent of voters supported the call for a convention. Strongest enthusiasm came from the Black Belt and greatest opposition swelled in the northern hill and southeastern Wiregrass counties. Of the 155 delegates elected to the 1901 constitutional convention, 141 were Democrats, 7 were Populists, 6 were Republicans, and 1 was an independent; 96 of the delegates were lawyers and 12 were bankers. No Negroes or women were elected. The 1901 Constitutional Convention Delegates set the tone for their proceedings by electing a corporation lawyer from Anniston, John B. Knox, president of the convention. Knox’s presidential address left no doubt about the chief agenda of the gathering: “And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State. This is our problem, and we should be permitted to deal with it, unobstructed by outside in®uences. But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law—not by force or fraud. These provisions are justi¤ed in law and in morals, because the negro is not discriminated against on account of his race, but on account of his intellectual and moral condition. There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government, which is wholly wanting in the negro.”2 The 155 delegates represented four divergent points of view. The weakest delegation contained Populist remnants, but these delegates could do little more than wage a rearguard action against those seeking to disfranchise poor whites. A larger cadre of urban Progressives expressed support for humanitarian causes, clean government, better funding for education, expanded public services, antilynching legislation, and prison reforms. The two groups that dominated proceedings—as well as the political and economic life of the state during the new century—were planters and


8 CHA P T ER ON E

“Big Mules.” Planters were large landowners most prevalent in the Black Belt. Big Mules represented the state’s banks, railroads, and industries, and were centered in the so-called Birmingham district, a belt of industrial towns stretching from Anniston and Gadsden to Tuscaloosa. They were the coalition that elected Knox president and dominated the proceedings. With their purpose clearly stated and their opponents either unrepresented or divided and dispirited, the planter–Big Mule coalition set about their business. Suffrage restriction had driven the call for a convention and now dominated debate. With no African American delegates and with virtually no support for them among any white faction, blacks had no way of protecting themselves from disfranchisement. The main question to be resolved was whether blacks would be eliminated in a process entirely aimed at them or whether delegates would add poor whites as secondary casualties of a process transferring all governmental power into “the hands of the intelligent and virtuous.” Some delegates among the predominant planter–Big Mule coalition left no doubt about their objective. To them, poor white Populists—the great unwashed, uneducated masses of white tenant farmers; textile, steel, and sawmill workers; coal and iron ore miners—were as much a threat to their class hegemony as were black voters. Why discriminate against blacks, who “knew their place” within the social and political hierarchy, when the greater threat came from uppity whites? Former governor William C. Oates, himself a near political casualty of Reuben Kolb’s populistic masses, maintained that “there are some white men who have no more right to vote than a negro and not as much as some of them.” Newspapers in Alabama’s major cities agreed, with the Birmingham Ledger dismissing out of hand the plea to spare Confederate veterans and their sons from the literacy requirements of the new constitution: if “Confederate soldiers and their sons who have not pride enough to learn to read” tried to vote, they “should be laughed back to the woods.”3 Nor were the most insightful Populists surprised at such sentiments. The Populist Tuscaloosa American noted prophetically that “past history teaches us that the rule of the so-called ‘virtuous and intelligent,’ the rule of the rich and the favored has ever been one of the most tyrannical and despotic. Under such rule, but two classes exist, the master and the slave.”4



About blacks there was even less equivocation. One planter delegate proposed to replace the “doubtful methods” used to disfranchise blacks in the past with legal disfranchisement. J. Thomas He®in, future U.S. senator and a delegate from Chambers county, believed that “God almighty intended the negro to be the servant of the white man,” claimed that race war was inevitable, and therefore concluded, “I do not believe it is incumbent upon us to lift up and educate him [the black man] and put him on an equal footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat comes.”5 The suffrage provisions of the new constitution re®ected these ideological debates. Residency requirements of two years in the state and one year in the county were aimed at transient tenant farmers and industrial workers. The poll tax of $1.50 per year, cumulative if unpaid to a maximum of $36, effectively struck down both white and black tenants and laborers; the average tenant farm family earned less than $100 a year and few industrial laborers made more than a dollar a day (with many days of unemployment during a typical year). Crimes that disquali¤ed voters included not only felonies such as murder, rape, and robbery, but also homosexuality, bigamy, adultery, vagrancy, and hoboing. Perhaps the most obvious intent of delegates could be found in the property requirement. In a state with ever increasing numbers of yeoman farmers losing their land to mortgage foreclosures or inability to pay property taxes, the constitution required that registrants own 40 acres of land with all taxes paid or $300 worth of personal property. The one concession to poor whites was a one-year window when military veterans or their descendants could register without being subject to the state’s new literacy test. After severely restricting suffrage, delegates moved to other matters. Having been suf¤ciently bold to challenge the will of the federal government to protect black political rights, delegates did not hesitate to restrict their social freedoms. The new constitution required segregation of schools and banned interracial marriages. Freedom to vote was not the only liberty denied by the 1901 document. So was the right of local communities to govern themselves. Once again, the origin of this restriction was located squarely within the politics of the Populist revolt. Half of Alabama counties had voted Populist during the


10 CHA P T ER ON E

1890s. Only the suspiciously one-sided Democratic vote in a handful of Black Belt counties had preserved that party’s hegemony. If counties were left to their own devices, who knew what mischief local of¤cials, elected by poor white constituencies, might foist on property owners. Restricting the vote only to those who owned property helped ensure dominance by wealthier Alabamians. But just to ensure that “radical” local of¤cials were stripped of their powers, control was transferred to the legislature in Montgomery. To accomplish virtually any change in a county, of¤cials after 1901 had to hold a public hearing, gain the consent of the local legislative delegation, have a bill introduced in the legislature amending the constitution (even a single “no” vote sent the amendment to a statewide referendum), then win support both of a majority of the statewide vote and within the county. Planters and Big Mules reasoned that their power would be signi¤cantly diluted if they had to wage electoral campaigns in 67 counties, in hundreds of local political races, or on behalf of thousands of pieces of local legislation. How much simpler it would be to concentrate all their energy, resources, and lobbying on the governor, lieutenant governor, and 140 state legislators. Control more than half those 142 of¤ces and they controlled every town and county in the state. Even governors not beholden to them could be effectively checked by a sympathetic lieutenant governor or Speaker of the House who could load key committees with sympathizers of the rich and powerful. Next, delegates turned to taxes, enacting little that was new. They set county and municipal tax caps at 5 mills (a mill is one-tenth of a cent), reduced the top state millage rate from 7.5 to 6.5, limited the power of a county or municipality to enter into debt, and stripped school districts of the ability to raise taxes for schools. Delegates did provide a minimum guarantee of 3 mills for education, which caused some to praise the constitution for providing “liberal” education for Alabama’s children. But in fact, the tax provisions remained essentially the same as in the 1875 constitution. To fund schools adequately, local and state governments could not rely on revenue from property taxes. They either had to sell bonds, with attendant high interest payments, or enact sales or income taxes or license fees. Voter resistance to higher taxes ultimately forced reliance on “sin” taxes, such as those on alcohol or tobacco products, or on bonds, which made Alabama a bond lawyer’s paradise. Nor would communities have ®exibility to raise taxes in



order to recruit industry, build roads and bridges, or fund other internal improvements. The Battle for Ratification The only democratic aspect of the new constitution was the provision to ratify it. The constitution was completed in September. Delegates provided for a public referendum on November 11 during state elections. Former governor Joseph F. Johnson led whites who opposed rati¤cation, rallying supporters mainly in the traditional Populist strongholds of mountainous north Alabama and the southeastern Wiregrass. Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and arguably the most in®uential black American, led opposition within his race. Confusing the Populist faithful were a multitude of former leaders who endorsed the constitution, praising especially disfranchisement of blacks. Among these was the 1890s Populist standard-bearer Reuben Kolb, who went over to his historic enemies on the issue of race. Their defection did not convince the majority of ordinary whites, but it did make the vote in Populist counties close enough to leave the decision with the Black Belt. The debate during September, October, and November focused nearly exclusively on race. Prorati¤cation forces adopted a simple mantra: “White supremacy, suffrage reform and purity in elections.” The planter-oriented Montgomery Advertiser led the charge with an ironic prediction that all white voters “who are not carried away by prejudice” would vote to ratify. Then the paper, completely carried away by prejudice, used little else but race to convince readers to ratify: “The great incubus of unlimited negro suffrage will undoubtedly be removed by rati¤cation. This alone ought to commend it to white voters concerned about [the] Negro vote.”6 Few African Americans cared one way or the other, the editor assured readers, because they had found the right to vote of little bene¤t anyway. Negro voters had thus decided to allow whites to resolve the issue among themselves. Other papers agreed. The Choctaw Advocate in southwestern Alabama called for whites to stand together: “The new constitution was made by white men for white men and now will any one of them turn his back upon his race.” Mobile’s Daily Register was persuaded to back rati¤cation after discovering that under the requirement that voters must own property, only


12 CHA P T ER ON E

168 Negroes in Montgomery County would control enough wealth to be eligible to vote. And in most counties, even fewer Negroes would be quali¤ed. The Birmingham Age-Herald argued that a vote for legal disfranchisement was a vote for lower taxes, economical government, better schools, and white supremacy, and against the political corruption that had been required to control black voters. “What is most wanted for the general good,” the editor summarized, “is assured white supremacy.”7 Only occasionally did a state paper take the opposing side. The Orphan’s Call in Evergreen bucked the trend, arguing against rati¤cation. The editor wrote prophetically that the low ¤xed tax rate for education would not provide adequate funding for schools, and the “grandfather clause” exempting illiterate white veterans from literacy tests while excluding blacks was unjust. Such moral sensibilities were rare in the 1901 debate. Paradoxically the constitution that was intended to eliminate electoral corruption in Alabama was adopted by the very corruption it was designed to end. The vote to ratify carried by a vote of 108,613 to 81,734. Thirty-four counties went for rati¤cation, 32 against. The vote in 54 counties was 76,263 against rati¤cation to 72,389 in favor. The victory margin came from 12 Black Belt counties with a Negro population of more than two-thirds that reported late returns. The vote in those 12 counties was 36,224 to ratify and 5,471 against. Dallas, Hale, and Wilcox Counties cast 17,475 votes for the constitution and only 508 against, or 12,360 more than the total white male voting population, assuming that every white male voted and every one favored rati¤cation. So much for the “purity of elections” rati¤ers had promised. Of course, it is possible to argue that the Montgomery Advertiser had been correct. Negroes had decided the ballot counted for nothing and determined to let whites decide the issue. But this apathy apparently did not extend far. Mobile’s Daily Register attributed the close vote statewide to larger than expected black turnout that solidly opposed rati¤cation. In Montgomery, where the Advertiser had earlier predicted a light Negro vote, black turnout was instead heavy and solidly antirati¤cation. One contemporary analysis of Opelika precincts found that only 85 of 912 antirati¤cation votes had been cast by whites; all the rest had come from blacks. In the light of such returns statewide, how can one explain why a majority African American population in the Black Belt overwhelmingly sup-



ported rati¤cation while blacks elsewhere overwhelmingly opposed? The answer is embarrassingly obvious. White planters who dominated the Black Belt and employed virtually all blacks as landless, powerless sharecroppers either intimidated black voters to support rati¤cation or, more likely, simply reported the necessary huge majority without bothering to cast votes at all. Such “irregularities” in the same Black Belt counties had cost Reuben Kolb the governorship in 1892 and 1894, and now fraudulently gave Alabama a new constitution. The organic law that governed Alabama during the 20th century was, like the political process that created it, stained with racism and corruption. And the progenitors of this political bastardy were Alabama’s ¤nest, wealthiest, and self-proclaimed “best” citizens. In 1905 John B. Knox, president of the 1901 constitutional convention, conceded that for all the talk of ridding politics of the Negro, the objective of the convention in fact had been “to place the power of government in the hands of the intelligent and virtuous.”8 The intelligence of the delegates after a century of their rule cannot be doubted. Whether that intelligence was employed on behalf of civic virtue is a more doubtful proposition. Given the alleged lassitude, apathy, and timidity of African Americans, rati¤cation should have been the end of the matter. That it was not is a powerful argument for revising Booker T. Washington’s historical reputation as an Uncle Tom accommodationist and the image of Alabama’s black males as hapless victims of their own political emasculation. Jackson W. Giles worked at the Montgomery post of¤ce. After opposing rati¤cation, he sought to register in 1902 under the provisions of the new constitution. He was a perfect candidate to vote even under the restrictive terms of the new document. He could read and write. He and his wife owned their home. And he had paid his poll tax. But he was also black, and Montgomery’s three white registrars rejected his registration. Giles was one of many African Americans rejected by the board, including a Methodist bishop. That same year the registrars rejected not a single white applicant. Giles protested. In fact, he organized the Colored Man’s Suffrage Association and became plaintiff in a series of lawsuits, two of which reached the Supreme Court, both challenging whether the new Alabama constitution violated the U.S. Constitution, with its guarantees of equal protection. Booker T. Washington privately raised money from sympathetic blacks and whites to retain lawyers. Giles’s counsel became the ¤rst black lawyer to ar-


14 CHA P T ER ON E

gue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He contended that Montgomery’s registrars had rejected more than 5,000 black applicants solely because of race. As evidence of intent, he quoted the words of John Knox to the convention. Proving that racism was by no means con¤ned to Alabama, the Supreme Court brushed aside his pleas and certi¤ed the new state constitution. Giles lost his job at the Montgomery post of¤ce, then disappeared into the shadows of history. Consequences of the Constitution The most dramatic consequence of the new constitution was the one most desired by its drafters, the sudden and dramatic decline in voting. In 1900 approximately 181,000 Negro voters had been eligible under the old 1875 constitution. By January 1, 1903, only 2,980 had been permitted to register under the new. Particularly dramatic was the decline in the Black Belt, where Negro registration in 14 counties declined from 79,311 to 1,081. Among white voters the decline was less dramatic but still substantial. In 1900 the state contained 232,800 eligible white voters; three years later, only 191,500 white males were registered, a decline of 41,300 despite increasing population. Some 25,000 to 50,000 who registered did not pay their poll tax during the ¤rst year, hence becoming ineligible to vote. As decades passed, the effect of the poll tax became more punitive and exclusionary because of the accumulative feature that required voters to pay it every year from age 21 to 45 whether or not there was an election (a feature found elsewhere only in the Georgia constitution). When the Alabama Policy Institute carefully studied voter participation in 1941–’42, it estimated that some 600,000 whites and 520,000 Negroes were disfranchised by various provisions of the 1901 constitution. In most counties more whites were disfranchised than registered, limiting the vote to a select elite. Negroes remained totally shut out of participation in their own government despite the fact that some of them were at that very moment ¤ghting in the armed services to protect it. The most obvious consequence of suffrage restriction was the decline in voting. Ironically, by the middle of the century Alabamians would grouse about low turnout for elections. Yet that was precisely the intent and effect of the state’s constitution. In 1900 153,300 voters cast ballots in the guber-


THE 1901 CONSTITUTION 15

natorial election. Six years later only 94,700 voted in the highly contentious 1906 governors race, nearly a 40 percent decline despite a population increase. In presidential elections Alabamas turnout declined from 34 percent in 1900 to 21 in 1904 and 14 in 1924. In the decade before 1900, as many as 80 percent of eligible Alabamians, white and black, voted. In 1940 only a third of adults were even registered. What makes the 1901 suffrage provisions even more signi¤cant is comparison with the states ¤rst constitution. Otherwise one might assume that the operative principle in Alabama public policy had always been antidemocratic. Actually, the opposite was true. The 1819 constitution, which ushered Alabama into the Union, was a projection of the towering presence of Thomas Jefferson and the democratic aspirations of the American Revolution. Delegates to that convention had pointedly refused to restrict suffrage based on literacy, ownership of property, or even church af¤liation. Any white male 21 years of age or older could vote, whether or not he could read, write, owned property, belonged to a church or even believed in God. But the democratic assumptions of that ¤rst gathering of founding fathers at Huntsville in July 1819 were not shared by their successors in Montgomery in the summer of 1901. Nor was the democratic assumption of Alabamas own past the only principle violated in 1901. So was the dominant democratic thrust of the 20th century both in America and throughout the world. It was the federal government and not the state of Alabama that enfranchised women in 1919. It was the Supreme Court that demanded that every vote count the same by compelling reapportionment after the Alabama legislature refused to do so for six decades. It was Congress in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ¤nally enfranchised Alabama blacks. And it was the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 that ensured the right to vote for all the states poor of whatever color when it struck down the poll tax. If the century-long wail for states rights by Alabamas white elite struck many Americans as hollow and hypocritical, perhaps it was because that otherwise noble ideal for restricting tyranny was so often employed in Alabama on behalf of tyranny. For in Alabama, the constitution did not empower the people; it empowered the legislature. Without recall, initiative, referendum, or home rule, power was vested in government, not in citizens. Democracy was forfeited to the federal Congress and to federal courts.


16 CHA P T ER ON E

White power was the central, though not the only, consequence of the new constitution. The Alabama Democratic State Campaign Committee urged party members to ratify the new constitution with a curious modi¤cation of America’s motto e pluribus unum (of many, one). Printed on each envelope soliciting a vote to ratify the new constitution was the motto “White Supremacy, Honest Elections, and the New Constitution One and Inseparable.” Living in a nation newly engaged in building an American empire, colonizing dark-skinned people, and rationalizing white supremacy by way of Darwinian science, the architects of the 1901 constitution were not surprised when the Supreme Court upheld their handiwork. After all, their racial ideology had taken root in the most elite American universities, in government of¤ces in the nation’s capital, and in popular culture. Why not in the chambers of the Supreme Court as well? So the constitutional fathers of 1901 operated with immunity for their racial assumptions. An earlier generation that had written the 1875 constitution had sought the same racist ends but was restrained by uncertainty regarding federal reaction. No such qualms prevailed in the summer of 1901. What had been merely implicit in 1875—that African Americans must expect far less in government services—became explicit in 1901: African Americans could not vote; they could not marry whites. Black anger focused on these matters. But greater long-term damage was wrought by the cap on taxes. As the state’s poorest citizens, African Americans had most to gain from public services. Free public schools, universal public health programs, humane prisons, and mental hospitals all would disproportionately favor them. After 1901 there was neither the will nor the money to provide such services. Some, such as constitutional convention delegate Tom He®in, sought to deny rights because they envisioned a future race war, which education would better equip blacks to wage. Others, like John Knox, were paternalists who discriminated according to class rather than race. All poor and uneducated people should be denied full rights of citizenship; there was no reason to set blacks apart for special discrimination. But whether one were a hill country racist like He®in or an urbane, well-educated paternalist like Knox, the effect of the constitution was the same. Blacks would attend inferior schools, die more frequently of most diseases, experience worse



health, and be overrepresented in the convict lease system. Striking down overtly racist sections of Alabama’s constitution became the easy task of the civil rights movement. The less obvious and more profound discrimination was deeply embedded in provisions dealing with tax policy, education, and home rule. Tax policy was central because taxes funded virtually all public services. Alabama ranked throughout the 20th century at or near the bottom among all states in three interrelated categories: property taxes, public services, and quality of life. This was no accident. It was the intent of the 1901 framers that government have a dif¤cult or impossible task taxing property. Even those with little property, black and white, joined in concert with those who had much. Virtually all Alabama’s 20th-century problems were somehow related to the state’s tax structure. The Brookings Institution concluded in 1932 that the taxing authority of the 1901 constitution “warped and distorted” revenue production and created a “gravely defective” budgetary system. With property taxes capped by the constitution, of¤cials struggled to locate alternative sources of revenue to fund state services: license and privilege taxes, sales and occupational taxes, personal and corporate income taxes—a hopeless “conglomeration,” as the Brookings’s experts phrased the situation. By 1940 more than 75 percent of the state’s tax revenue came from sales or other direct taxes on individuals. As sales taxes increased, property taxes as a proportion of state revenue declined. In 1920 property taxes provided 63 percent of state tax revenue. In 1978 the ¤gure was 3.6 percent. By 1992 it was less than 2 percent. The next lowest state’s property taxes were 30 percent higher than Alabama’s, and the national average was 375 percent higher. Reliance on sales taxes also shifted the tax burden from those best able to pay to those least able. By century’s end Alabama had the nation’s most regressive and unfair tax system. The wealthiest 1 percent of Alabamians paid some 3 percent of income in state and local taxes. The poorest one¤fth paid 12 percent. In 1933 Birmingham spent less money on vital city services than 67 of 68 American cities of 120,000 population or more. Even sales taxes applied differently to various businesses, which hired lobbyists to win individual exemptions. Tobacco distributors purchased tax stamps from the state that granted them discounts (a tax exemption that


18 CHA P T ER ON E

amounted to $5.5 million in lost revenue in 1990). Farm interests were particularly adept at winning exemptions. Sales of food and milk carried sales taxes; sales of fertilizer and chicken litter did not. Because local governments could levy sales taxes without legislative approval, these taxes steadily increased after they were ¤rst permitted in the late 1930s. The original state sales tax was 2 percent; by 1963 the rate had doubled. In 1969 local governments gained the authority to add taxes on retail sales, and the combined city/county/state sales tax sometimes reached 10.5 percent, with 8 percent being common statewide. Despite the nation’s lowest property taxes, some special interests—notably the forest products industry and the Alabama Farmers’ Federation, or ALFA—demanded still greater protection. At their urging, Gov. George Wallace and the legislature passed Amendment 373 in 1978, placing yet another cap on the amount of taxes that could be collected. The amendment also changed the way land was assessed. This legislation applied value to land based on “current use” rather than its actual market value. The state set a single standard for farm and timberland statewide, and determined the value of each category, $443 per acre for farmland and $275 per acre for timberland, well below market value in most cases. Tax assessors were responsible for determining current use and enforcing payment of taxes. But they were locally elected and feared suits challenging assessments. So the easy way to do business was simply to grant all applications for current use. The result was incredible abuse of the system and chronic underfunding of schools, which otherwise would have received the money. In 2000 a parcel of land in Montgomery County was taxed at $1.84 an acre based on its current use to grow trees; later it sold for $200,000, meaning it could have been assessed at its actual value of $35,000 an acre. In Fairhope, the owner of a house and a half acre lot valued at $41,000 paid 25 times more property taxes than owners of a prime piece of Gulf Shores waterfront property valued at $95,000 but taxed under current use for its timber value. In 1994 three dozen subdivisions in Baldwin County contained lots whose current use was listed as timber. Half a decade later CG Investment Venture in Mobile paid taxes of $38 on a 19-acre tract in a choice timber-covered Mobile suburb. When CG Venture sold the property in June 2000, the buyer paid $912,871 or $48,046 per acre. For the county as a whole, half the property in 2000 enjoyed current use protection and produced 1 percent of the county’s



property taxes. Taxed at its real market value, that property would have generated $2.4 million in taxes; taxed under current use, it yielded $1.3 million. Current use gave Alabama a tax advantage over other southern states. An Alabama home owner in 1984 with a house valued at $100,000 paid $352 in ad valorem taxes compared to $1,069 in Georgia, $1,090 in Florida, and $1,410 in Mississippi. Businesses valued at $500,000 paid $4,160 in Alabama compared to $5,600, $7,250, and $3,750 in the other states. Timber and farm owners with property worth $500,000 market value paid $1,475 in Alabama compared to $3,150, $7,250, and $5,625 in the three neighboring states. But the advantage in property taxes translated into an equally huge disadvantage in comparisons of per pupil expenditures for education. As each new funding crisis struck Alabama, public of¤cials desperately sought another bandage to stop the bleeding. After much of the state’s school system closed in 1933 for lack of funding, educators lobbied legislators to allocate speci¤c new taxes exclusively for education. As a consequence of this practice, called “earmarking,” Alabama ended the century with the highest percentage of state spending restricted by law (Alabama earmarked 87 percent of its revenue, compared to Nevada, in second place with 65 percent, or the national average of 22 percent). Ideally, state constitutions omitted reference to speci¤c rates of taxation, leaving such policies to legislative bodies. Not Alabama. The constitution dedicated most of the state income tax to paying teacher salaries and nearly half of the state’s property tax revenues to education. Gas taxes and state motor vehicle registration fees went exclusively to expenses for roads and bridges. Inadequate revenue and excessive earmarking tied the hands of legislators, who were restricted from moving revenue from one location to a more critical need during ¤nancial crises. As a result the state was frequently sued for violations of the constitutional rights of state prisoners, the physically and mentally handicapped, juveniles in protective custody, and children in foster care programs or public schools. One mental health suit took 30 years to resolve. A case challenging the child welfare system remained ongoing at the turn of the century after 13 years. So did the equity funding lawsuit after a decade. Legislators could not resolve these cases for lack of revenue. But they could and did allocate tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to litigate cases. Another palliative that legislators tried unsuccessfully was to tax out-of-


20 CHA P T ER ON E

state corporations at rates higher than in-state businesses. Section 232 of the constitution required companies incorporated outside Alabama to establish in-state headquarters and pay a special franchise tax. Reynolds Metal Company sued the state in 1989, charging that “foreign” corporations should not be made to pay higher taxes than their “native” competitors. ALFA helped sponsor this discriminatory legislation and advertised the fact that it charged lower insurance rates than competing companies. Of course, there was an obvious reason it could charge lower rates. It forced competitors to pay higher taxes that had to be added to operating costs. As a result of section 232, 18,556 companies based out of state in 1994 paid a total of $90 million in state taxes; 63,777 Alabama-based companies paid a total of $10 million. As almost all tax experts predicted, the U.S. Supreme Court declared section 232 of the Alabama constitution unconstitutional at the end of the century, throwing the state into yet another ¤nancial crisis. At least by then the state had nearly a century’s experience dealing with ¤nancial crises generated by the ®awed tax structure created by the 1901 constitution. The primary state function crippled by insuf¤cient tax revenue was education. The problems were fourfold: citizens’ historic resistance to taxation; lack of commitment to education; inadequate funding; unpredictable and unreliable existing funding. The ¤rst two problems were rooted in culture. The last two were rooted in the 1901 constitution. Because property taxes were so constitutionally dif¤cult to increase, school systems relied ever more heavily on revenue from sales and income taxes. By 2000, for instance, the city of Mobile derived $524 (56 percent of total revenue) per person from local sales taxes. It generated only $41 per capita from property taxes. This distribution not only unfairly taxed the city’s poorest citizens but also created a volatile budgetary system. During economic good times, revenue from retail sales and income taxes ®ooded into state coffers, encouraging wasteful and duplicative expansion of community colleges and state universities. During recessions, sudden and precipitous declines in sales and income taxes required prorating education budgets. But property taxes virtually never declined; they moved slowly, predictably higher as property values were reassessed every four years. The result of overreliance on sales and income taxes was painfully obvious. On average about every three or four years the state education budget had to be



prorated in midyear because of unanticipated declines in state tax revenue. Most other states escaped such severe disruptions by obtaining a much larger share of education funding from property taxes. Complicating the problem still further was the constitutional bar against local education funding, which was set extraordinarily low. A local community or county had to generate only 10 mills in taxes (which produced less than $100 per student in some school districts). As a result, the state furnished more money and the local community less for education than any other state. Differing land values across the state compounded the lack of local revenue. The 10 mills of local effort produced sharp variations in revenue depending on the value of local property. If one lived in Huntsville, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, or Mountain Brook, where property values were high, local millage rates produced a great deal of money. And welleducated citizens in those communities, who both valued education and were committed to excellent public schools, raised local property taxes from 3 to 10 times above the state minimum. The situation was quite different in rural Coosa county, where parents cared less about education and had fewer resources. Acres of timber outnumbered people in the county by 32 to 1. But the 360,000 acres of timberland generated insuf¤cient revenue to balance the education budget, and the state had to bail out the county. The top four county landowners together controlled 130,000 acres in 1994 but paid only $98,000 in property taxes, averaging less than a dollar an acre. When the school system was unable to balance its books, the superintendent proposed a 12 mill increase in property taxes (the increase would have cost $58 a year more on a house valued at $48,600). Angry voters defeated the referendum by a three to one margin. County commissioners, under terms of the 1901 constitution, had the authority to obtain the needed money by raising sales taxes without a public referendum. But in addition to requiring more political courage than most commissioners had, there was only one grocery store and one hardware store in the entire rural county (and no Wal-Mart), so sales taxes were not a realistic option either. The solution, as so often happened with education in Alabama, was to rely on charity. Kimberly-Clark Lumber Company, headquartered in


22 CHA P T ER ON E

Texas, objected to higher property taxes but consented to a tax-deductible, charitable contribution of $660,000. County parents helped raise $100,000 more in matching funds. Ironically, one of the major projects funded with the contributions was a new football stadium for the consolidated Coosa County High School. Other money went for books and computers, although schools could not afford professional improvement days for teachers to become pro¤cient in new technology or teachers’ aides to help children use computers. Lack of adequate funding left school systems in shambles. Schools asked parents to donate paper, pencils, even cleanser and toilet tissue. Public schools increasingly charged students what amounted to tuition (though they were called “recommended donations”). Foreign languages, advanced placement, art, music, and honors classes disappeared from curricula. Rapidly growing schools like Castlen Elementary in southern Mobile County operated portable classrooms. (Castlen, constructed to serve 350 children in 1968, enrolled 3 times that many in 2000, housing them in 27 portable units served by 2 portable restrooms.) Three times Mobile County voters rejected higher taxes necessary to build a new school. If one consequence of the 1901 constitution seemed the greatest anomaly, it was the denial of home rule. Localism, devotion to community and states’ rights, antipathy to outsiders, resistance to external threats, opposition to centralized authority, all these attributes inclined even the casual observer to predict that Alabamians would ¤ercely resist any attempt to infringe their capacity to govern themselves or remove that power far from them. Yet that is precisely what the 1901 constitution did. Neither towns nor counties initially had much control over their own affairs, though subsequent amendments loosened the legislative grip over cities. Counties were not so fortunate. Although residents elected county commissioners, these of¤cials had little authority. Only the legislature could write local laws for unincorporated areas, meaning the county’s legislative delegation functioned as its de facto government. And a single senator in the delegation could veto any proposal merely by exercising what the legislature referred to as “local courtesy.” Alabama was the only southeastern state that denied its counties even minimal authority to plan land use. The results became painfully apparent as the century progressed. In the early 1990s 87 percent of Cullman County citizens voted to elect school



board members. But they had no authority to do so. Instead, the county’s legislative delegation had to introduce an amendment to the constitution. The legislature had to approve it. If a legislator objected, it had to be passed in a statewide referendum as well as in the county of its origin. Two years after nearly 90 percent of Cullman County voters exercised their democratic option, they were ¤nally granted permission to do so by the state. The Cullman case was silly and time consuming but successful. Not all cases ended so well. Where con®icting interests collided, especially when one of the interests was that of ordinary citizens and the other of powerful special interests, the outcomes were not so gratifying. In Mobile County real estate developers opposed efforts to require paved roads or sewer systems in new developments. As a consequence, during one 12-month period in the late 1990s developers constructed 68 substandard dirt roads for 41 private subdivisions. Nor were developers required to grade, drain, or repair roads. In DeKalb County a 4,000-head commercial hog farm was located next to rural houses. For Brenda Ivey it was like the end of the world. She tried everything to remedy the problem. She hung sheets in front of air vents, emptied cans of air freshener in rooms, stuffed towels in door cracks, wore a mask while mowing her lawn, held her breath on the way to her car, and complained to county commissioners. Local of¤cials sympathized but had no zoning authority and could not help her. To protect hog farms, ALFA sponsored legislation guaranteeing the right of owners to use land any way they desired without regard to rights of neighbors. Brenda Ivey may have expressed as much insight as frustration when she told a reporter: “I don’t feel like we live in America.” Her problems were serious but not unique. The Jefferson County Department of Revenue had to ask legislative permission to allow residents to renew car, boat, and mobile home registrations over the Internet in order to avoid long lines at the county courthouse. Limestone County had to seek an amendment to dispose of dead farm animals. Mobile County begged the legislature to allow it to control mosquitoes and rodents. Jefferson County petitioned the legislature to allow removal of junk cars. Mobile citizens discovered they needed a constitutional amendment to close a sex parlor near a school, where children walked past patrons selecting from a menu that included women disrobing and showering. Rural residents in Jefferson and


24 CHAPTER ONE

Calhoun Counties had to request constitutional amendments to remove brothels from their jurisdictions. One frustrated journalist-professor perfectly captured conditions. Bailey Thomson wrote: Our situation is like asking Moses to tack a few hundred amendments onto the Ten Commandments, including one to legalize camel racing for the tribe of Judah. Local matters just dont belong in the fundamental law.9 The fact that purely local matters such as these had to be enacted by the state legislature meant that lawmakers spent approximately half their time passing purely local legislation. That is, passing it if it proved noncontroversial. If any powerful special interest opposed a local bill, its fate was pretty well sealed. By the end of the century Alabamas constitution was the oldest, longest, and one of the most complex in the nation: 315,000 words, more than 700 amendments, 40 times longer than the U.S. Constitution, which had been amended only 27 times in more than two centuries. And the pattern of amendments was not encouraging. As life became more complex, the constitution had to be amended more and more frequently: 326 times between 19011974; 246 times between 19741994; more than 140 times between 1994 and 2001. Well over half the amendments dealt with a single county or municipality. By contrast, from 1819 to 1901, under the states ¤rst ¤ve constitutions, the people rati¤ed only 6 amendments. One result of the lack of home rule was a dysfunctional, inef¤cient state government. As decades of judicial and congressional intervention clearly proved, legislators were far better at governing counties than governing the state. Several national surveys by Governing magazine and other nonpartisan professional groups rated Alabamas legislature the least effective of the 50 states. It was not that part-time legislators failed to understand the need for adequate state services. They simply lacked the money to pay for them. With power vested in the statehouse rather than in 67 counties, Montgomery became a magnet for special interests. Control eight votes on the House Rules Committee, and a lobbyist could shut down a legislative session. The result was government of, by, and for special interests. The citizens of Alabama did not control their government. Trial lawyers, the Business Council of Alabama, ALFA, AEA, and their cohorts did. Other than denying home rule, the most obvious problem with the 1901 constitution was the death grip it often imposed on economic development.



For a century, of¤cials sought to attract business and industry to Alabama by nearly any means. Yet in even this the constitution failed, as almost any impartial analysis of the state’s economy during the century demonstrated. Section 93 of the 1901 document prohibited the state from building roads and other public works. Of course, 1901 was part of a horse-and-buggy age. But by 1912 the state contained 3,385 automobiles, by 1920, 75,000, and by 1930, 277,000. Everyone wanted a car, and every driver wanted a hardsurfaced road on which to drive it. Businessmen realized if roads didn’t improve, other states would take away their markets. Farmers realized if they could not transport crops to market more ef¤ciently, farmers from other states would capture Alabama’s share. Lawmakers hastily amended the constitution in 1920 to allow bonds to be sold to build and pave roads. And a state that spent $1 million on roads in 1921 spent 20 times as much in 1928. What followed was more than 40 amendments to evade or change the language of section 93 in order to ensure modern life in Alabama. The constitution hindered economic development in other ways as well. Local governments could not enter into partnerships with industrial prospects or lend them money, an original prohibition altered by 50 amendments by 2001. For 10 years Calhoun County commissioners and the Anniston Chamber of Commerce cooperated on an Economic Development Council to recruit industry for the county’s ailing economy. In 1993 the chamber asked the county to formalize the legal status of their cooperation. County commissioners concurred and contacted their legislators. Legislators agreed to sponsor an amendment in the legislature. The legislature passed the amendment, which required a statewide vote. But Calhoun County’s proposed change, along with 17 other local amendments, were put on hold while a federal judge impounded some 2,000 absentee ballots in a disputed race for Alabama’s chief justice. What Calhoun County business and political leaders could have done in a matter of minutes to improve the local economy required many months. By century’s end the 1901 constitution crippled economic development in more substantive ways. The advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) led to hemorrhaging of low-wage, low-skill jobs out of America to developing countries. But they also created millions of high-wage, high-


26 CHA P T ER ON E

skill jobs in America. The problem was that to obtain high-tech industries and manufacturing required economic incentive packages. Unfortunately, the constitution denied such incentives and had to be frequently amended, slowing response or requiring innovative searches for hard-to-¤nd spare millions (the Retirement Systems of Alabama and the Oil and Gas Trust Fund were typical sources). Sometimes the governor had to pry funds out of hard-strapped local governments. Some companies attracted by state incentive packages and low taxes located elsewhere because of Alabama’s crumbling roads and bridges. Or they ®ed from a constitution ¤lled with 200 amendments establishing speci¤c local taxes, providing tax exemptions, and creating special tax districts, a procedure so complicated that just listing all the exemptions to sales taxes required hundreds of pages. And the best and most high-tech American businesses avoided the state because of chronically underfunded schools and colleges, a poorly educated workforce, high rates of poverty and illiteracy, and a paucity of cultural attractions. The 1901 constitution set Alabama’s course as a low-tax, low-service state that had not even enough money for essential state services much less enough left over for adequate state parks, theaters, museums, and other cultural amenities. Nor did Alabamians have to wait for historians to tell them all this. At least eight times in the 20th century visionary political leaders insisted that the 1901 constitution be revised or replaced. In 1915 conservative outgoing governor Emmett O’Neal warned that meaningful progress was impossible under the state’s outmoded constitution. Gov. Thomas Kilby repeated the warning in 1923 late in his term. In 1932 the nonpartisan Brookings Institution made the same point. In 1946 James E. Folsom attached constitutional reform to his bold populistic agenda, but his personal foibles and legislative ineffectiveness doomed that effort. Opposition from special interests and growing obsession with race sidelined Folsom’s second attempt when he was elected to another term in 1954. Reform governor Albert Brewer renewed the call in 1969 and appointed a commission to draft a new constitution. By the time the commission submitted its recommendation, George Wallace had defeated Brewer and the only reform adopted was a new judicial article. Chief Justice Howell He®in guided the article through an obstreperous legislature. That success made



Alabama’s judiciary one of the most ef¤cient in the nation and became a national model for reformers, proving (if anyone needed evidence) that Alabamians, with effective leadership, could craft a constitution as good as anyone’s. In 1979 Fob James prepared a new constitution, which senators accepted, but which the House, heavily lobbied by special interests, rejected. Unfortunately, James’s political attention span lasted no longer than a hooker’s virtue, and constitutional reform was shelved again. Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley together with senatorial allies drafted a new constitution in 1983 and submitted it to voters. But the state supreme court ruled that the legislature could not place a wholesale revision on the ballot as a single amendment. Thus ended Baxley’s attempted reform. There the matter languished. At end-of-century Bailey Thomson (a journalist and professor who had written perceptively about the problems created by the constitution); former U.S. Representative Jack Edwards of Mobile; Odessa Woolfolk, a professor of urban studies; Samford University president Thomas Corts; Samford law professor and former governor Albert Brewer, together with many other modernizers and reformers, organized Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform. At ¤rst ignored by Gov. Don Siegelman and ridiculed by special interests as a bunch of naive “do-gooders,” this new generation of reformers gained traction when an economic downturn and proration of the education budget propelled the state into another of its periodic crises. Polls indicated that citizens who had previously ignored the issue altogether ranked constitutional reform of highest priority. Numerous legislators of both parties endorsed reform, though disagreeing on how best to accomplish it. Even many special interests were forced to concede the need for some changes though they often used delaying tactics to ¤nd some way to blunt reform. Perhaps the most hopeful sign as a new century began was the inability of opponents of reform to ¤nd a high-pro¤le leader to champion their cause. Eunie Smith, president of the ultraconservative Alabama Eagle Forum, and ALFA spokesmen complained that constitutional reform was merely a cover for tax increases. And a new addition to Alabama fringe politics, the Association for JudeoChristian Values (with ties to the Ten Commandments judge and Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore) incomprehensibly extolled Alabama’s constitution as one of the nation’s ¤nest. The association’s director, Sandra


28 CHA P T ER ON E

Lane Smith, claimed that attempts by some reformers to rede¤ne shifting state borders were actually a move to eradicate state boundaries and substitute regional planning groups run by the United Nations. She added that rewriting the constitution threatened its preamble that acknowledged God and advanced a radical antifamily feminist agenda by substituting the words “All men and women are created equal” for the 1901 wording that “All men are created equal.” As zany as such allegations were, reformers had to take them seriously because oftentimes more powerful opponents hid behind such groups, which they lavishly funded. A century of failed efforts at constitutional reform made one thing certain: replacing the ®awed 1901 document would be no walk in the park. Inadequate as it was, at least the architects of the 1901 constitution frankly stated the arguments of class privilege and racism, which were paramount in their deliberations. By 2001 arguments against reform were couched in appeals to biblical origins and American virtue, neither of which had played much of a role in the morally ®awed document that had governed Alabama for a century.


2 Every Man for Himself Politics, Alabama Style

You know as well as I do that Southerners, with all their charm, are worm-eaten with unreasonable prejudices. The lower order of Southerner is one of the most bestial human beings ever born of woman. He has been ®attered continuously by fawning politicians for more than 100 years, so that today he has all of the vanity of an authentic aristocrat. . . . He is the active enemy of every civilizing force in southern life. —Grover Hall, editor, Montgomery Advertiser, to Major Howell, editor, Atlanta Constitution, November 29, 1936

The political scientist V. O. Key Jr. had a unique vantage point from which to analyze Alabama politics. In 1946 the Bureau of Public Administration at the University of Alabama hired Key away from Johns Hopkins University. A Texan by birth, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Key’s assignment was to supervise a study of southern politics. He brought to the task encyclopedic knowledge, a lucid writing style, an insider’s fascination with his subject, and an outsider’s perspective. Key wasted no time locating the heart of Alabama’s political culture. Unlike Virginians, who deferred to the state’s “¤rst families” and other political elites, Alabamians adhered to their state motto, We Dare Defend Our Rights. They venerated frontier Jacksonian values that rejected pretentiousness, scorned outsider meddling, and held “¤rst families” in suspicion at best and contempt at worst. Key cited two examples. When the Alabama legislature debated an antisedition act in 1935 (it would have made advocacy of overthrowing the gov-


30 CHA P T ER T WO

ernment a misdemeanor), Julian Hall, outraged editor of the Dothan Eagle, admonished citizens to arm themselves with “shillalahs, set out for Montgomery, and whale hell out of . . . the Alabama legislature.” Twelve years later when conservative state senators blocked Gov. James E. Folsom’s controversial appointments to the Auburn University Board of Trustees, one carload of Auburn students bound for the capitol to demonstrate on behalf of Folsom’s nominees, sported a poster conveying the same message: “To Hell with the legislature.”1 Traditional Alabama Political Culture A half century later, little had changed. Citizens regularly elected as governor outsiders who campaigned against Montgomery’s sorry political establishment (even though newcomers often settled into it quite comfortably once they took of¤ce). As for “¤rst families” and social elites, they could expect the same treatment Republican William J. Cabaniss Jr. received at the hands of Democrat Howell He®in during the 1990 U.S. Senate race. Cabaniss had impeccable credentials: grandson of a former Alabama governor; a distinguished veteran of both houses of the Alabama legislature; former chair of the state delegation to the Republican National Convention; president of a successful Birmingham business; resident of Mountain Brook (a Birmingham suburb and one of the whitest and wealthiest communities in America); a political moderate with a strong environmental record. He®in swept all these credentials aside and mercilessly ridiculed what he claimed to be Cabaniss’s aristocratic fastidiousness. The incumbent Democrat brought partisan crowds to foot-stomping gales of laughter with a parody of a popular advertisement for Grey Poupon mustard (the ad featured an elegantly attired man in a limousine offering a passerby mustard out his window while pronouncing the product’s name in an affected accent). He®in also turned to his advantage several fund-raising visits on behalf of Cabaniss by Pres. George H. W. Bush (who was burdened by an aristocratic image similar to Cabaniss’s—they had summer homes near each other in Kennebunkport, Maine, both descended from wealthy families, and both tried hard to identify with ordinary people, Bush by attending NASCAR races and expressing his dislike for broccoli). He®in satirized Cabaniss as “my Gucci clothed, Jacuzzi-soaking, Mercedes-driving, Perrier-


P OL IT IC S , A L A BA M A ST Y L E 31

drinking, polo-playing, debutante-dancing, high society ritzy-rich Republican who has a summer home in Kennebunkport, but who eats broccoli.”2 When pronouncing Grey Poupon, He®in slowed down his comic Col. Foghorn Leghorn pronunciation even slower than usual, until it had the same ®ow as sorghum molasses on a cold December day: “Graaay Poooo-pon,” he drawled, eliciting mirth at every stop. Mountain Brook Republicans fumed. The state’s elite ¤dgeted. Ordinary citizens chortled with delight. In Alabama, every important political decision belonged rightfully to the people, or so they believed. They might reject referenda to prohibit liquor or establish a state lottery, write a new constitution or legalize abortions, but they expected the right to determine such matters for themselves, not have the legislature decide for them. In 1901 Alabama was the only southern state to allow a public referendum on a disfranchisement constitution. It remains one of the few states to elect its supreme court justices. And despite evidence that the state’s best school systems have appointive superintendents, most systems and the vast majority of citizens prefer to elect chief school of¤cials from a pool of local candidates. If every political decision in Alabama began with Jacksonian Democratic assumptions, few ended there. Powerful economic elites conceded the strength of Populist assumptions and recast themselves as spokesmen for ordinary white people. In the 1870s Bourbons (conservative Democratic leaders representing planters and industrialists) portrayed themselves as defenders of white supremacy and low taxes against “tax and spend” black Republicans who had vastly expanded state services. Writing their will into the 1875 constitution, Bourbons established a strong countertradition to Jacksonian democracy. The Populist uprising of the depression-battered 1890s combined desperately poor coal miners with black and white tenants and small farmers. Bourbons put down this threatening coalition by fraud, force, and ¤nally the 1901 constitution. The Bourbon elite had combined south Alabama planters and Birmingham area industrialists and businessmen into a formidable coalition often challenged, seldom defeated, and never vanquished. After the Bourbons “redeemed” state government from Republican rule in 1874, the GOP could usually command about a third of the voters, at ¤rst consisting mainly of black men living in south Alabama, but after 1901 and disfranchisement, increasingly centered among hill country


32 CHA P T ER T WO

whites who had resisted secession, voted Populist in the 1890s, and who refused to be reconciled with what they considered to be a corrupt Democratic Party. Without an opposition party of any consequence to enforce order within its ranks, Democrats were characterized more by personality cults than by disciplined party procedures. “Friends-and-neighbors” and “courthouse gangs” became the prevalent ways in which localism and sectionalism de¤ned state politics. Geography and political localism largely dictated these patterns. The size of the state—330 miles long and 150 miles wide—made it dif¤cult to win statewide of¤ce on the ¤rst try, at least before the age of television. So the tradition was established that a gubernatorial candidate ran at least twice, the ¤rst time to gain name recognition outside his home region and the second as a serious contender. The aim ¤rst time round was to ¤nish second, expand one’s base, and emerge as front-runner in the subsequent race (until amended in the 1970s, the 1901 constitution prohibited consecutive gubernatorial terms). In the ¤rst race, a candidate relied on friends and neighbors from his home and adjacent counties. This network of friend and kin had elected him to local of¤ce and was bound to him by a variety of connections: family ties, political friendships, church membership, sports, college alma mater, civic activities, or common occupation. When Chauncey Sparks of Barbour County ran for governor in 1938, he received less than 24 percent of the vote statewide in the ¤rst primary but won 85 percent in his home county. In the ¤rst 1946 primary, James E. Folsom carried his native Coffee County by 65 percent and Cullman County, where he then resided, by 72 percent. In adjacent counties, he won 40 to 50 percent. But statewide he took only 29 percent of the vote. Friends and neighbors could launch a political career. But to expand that career beyond a candidate’s locale required mastery of the state’s courthouse gangs. With the voting base already reduced by literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, and other devices designed to disfranchise the poor, a small local elite unduly in®uenced the remaining citizenry. Trusting local of¤cials for advice about statewide candidates from other regions who were unknown to them personally, voters often took cues from circuit or probate judges, sheriffs, county commissioners, or mayors. The local political elites,



typically meeting informally at a local café for coffee and breakfast, or for barbeque and sweet tea at lunch, or at night to drink some stronger libation at a roadhouse or hunting club, informally decided on which candidates to back in statewide contests. A local, well-known candidate was best; but failing that, they sorted through the pack of candidates for those who would be most compatible with local interests, ideology, or their own personal ambitions. The prospective candidates might offer a paved road, sewer system, or cabinet appointment. Money might or might not change hands. The point is that long before aspirants for of¤ce appeared on courthouse squares with sound systems and country bands, they had already appeared before the local inquisition of powerful courthouse of¤cials, requesting the blessing that could tip the scales in party primaries. County of¤cials might have little formal power under the 1901 constitution, which denied counties home rule. But they extracted their pound of ®esh as the price for endorsement. Although citizens in all parts of the state boasted democratic assumptions, different regions processed historical patterns in different ways. The Tennessee Valley’s economic and transportation ties to Tennessee had caused voters in that region to oppose secession in 1860. White subsistence farmers thrived in the mountains south of the valley, which was a region of small farms and scattered plantations. The poor soils of the southeastern Wiregrass had spawned a similar population of mostly white herders and small independent farmers. During the Populist uprising, the hill country and Wiregrass had been allies against the planter-dominated Black Belt. That alliance would continue through the Folsom years. The New Deal strengthened progressivism in north Alabama through the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electric cooperatives, and support for collective bargaining (which won the loyalty of the region’s numerous coal miners and textile and steelworkers). Alabama north of Shelby County became a stronghold of reformist Democratic politics. South of that line, planter control and black disfranchisement reinforced conservative values. No discussion of Alabama’s traditional political culture strays far from race. From the time freedmen received the vote in the late 1860s, race played a pivotal role in state politics. First mobilized by the Republican Party, African Americans favored more state services funded by higher taxes. Because most were poor and few owned property, they bene¤ted from such


34 CHA P T ER T WO

Reconstruction policies without having to pay the costs. And their party took on a clear political agenda: higher taxes and more state services; government incentives for new businesses and industries; inclusion of black men within the party apparatus; openness to social change. The Democratic Party positioned itself in opposition to Republicanism: lower taxes and reduced expenditures for state services such as education and prisons; cessation of government subsidies for industry; white supremacy and racial segregation; traditional values and opposition to social experimentation. Conservative elites might not be able to convince working-class whites that they shared the same class interests. But they could set themselves up as champions of white supremacy and extol the virtues of racial solidarity. In time the ideological positions of the two parties would reverse. And so would the loyalties of their racial constituencies. What would not change is the racial identity of most whites with one party and most blacks with another. By appealing to conservative traditions, Bourbons and their elite allies neutralized the natural advantage of Jacksonian Democrats/Populists and gained control of gubernatorial politics. With the advent of the direct white primary in 1902 (which replaced the elite-controlled party convention), ordinary whites gained only a theoretical advantage. Disfranchisement made sure of that. Nor did the shift of population to north Alabama seriously cripple gubernatorial candidates from the south. Of the 23 governors who served during the 20th century, 10 were from north Alabama and 13 from the south (2 were born in one region but lived most of their adult lives in the other). Ideologically they were evenly split, with 8 identi¤able conservatives, 7 who followed a more progressive path (except, of course, on race before the 1980s), and 6 of mixed ideology (several served partial terms too short to identify ideologically). The 7 clearly identi¤able progressives (Comer, Kilby, Graves, Folsom, Brewer, Folsom Jr., and Siegelman) served for nearly a third of the century (although 2 of the 7 were lieutenant governors who inherited the governor’s of¤ce and were defeated when they ran for full terms). A number of contradictions—democracy versus privilege, north versus south Alabama, poor and working class versus middle and upper class, white versus black—permeated Alabama’s political culture. And the way one group gained power over another was by the often illegal and always unethical application of raw force (as whites did to blacks in the 1901 con-



stitutional convention, or as more-educated and af®uent citizens did to lesseducated and poorer citizens of both races in the same undemocratic assembly). Those who lost such power struggles were not unaware of what had happened to them. Many Populists in the 1890s, or black men in 1901, or exploited industrial workers later, accurately perceived what was being done. The result was a widespread perception of the illegitimacy of the political order. The defeat of Populism and the rati¤cation of the 1901 constitution by manipulating black votes in central Alabama, or the legislature’s half century–long refusal to reapportion itself, or its rejection of woman suffrage, or its imposition of racial segregation, or the dominant in®uence of special interests, all these and more set the stage for public distrust and put in motion various concerts of citizens headed toward Montgomery metaphorically to “whale hell out . . . of the Alabama legislature.” Issues that aroused the masses were seldom the incompetence or corruption of that body. Many honorable men and even a few women served the state with distinction during the 20th century. And those legislators and public of¤cials who shamed themselves and their state were probably no more numerous than in sister states. But under terms of the 1901 constitution, all roads to power and preferment led to Montgomery. County of¤cials and initially municipal of¤ceholders as well had no power to solve local problems. Nor were their domains an auspicious launching pad for statewide political preferment. Although they might begin careers as county commissioners, probate judges, or mayors, no such local of¤cials could hope to be elected governor or lieutenant governor. Such ambitions had to be realized through service in the state legislature, where real power resided. And the centralization of power in Montgomery both fed Populist resentment and created a system easily primed against modernization and reform and incredibly susceptible to the in®uence of powerful interest groups. Coupled with legislative resistance to strong ethics legislation, it is no wonder that, although most citizens trusted their own legislator, they considered the species in general to rank slightly below graverobbers and loan sharks. One aberration fostered by such suspicion was a political strategy of simply turning out the rascals. Candidates increasingly ran as outsiders (even if they had in fact been quintessential insiders). They opposed incumbents,


36 CHA P T ER T WO

who had been tainted by Montgomery’s political culture. But oftentimes they offered no clearly distinguishable course of their own because speci¤cs could be dangerous to political ambitions. Part of Alabama’s political backwardness compared to other southern states was organized and related to the static consequences of the 1901 constitution. But at any time voters could have chosen leaders committed to changing the constitution or reforming the state. They chose not to do so. It is worth noting that on numerous occasions they came close: during the 1940s and ’50s with Big Jim Folsom, whose personal idiosyncracies failed him and them; in 1970, when white racism barely cost Albert Brewer a mandate for change; in 1994, when only some 10,000 votes defeated the bold reform agenda of Gov. James Folsom Jr. Nonetheless, fail they all did. And the root causes were always the same: racism, class con®icts, opposition to more taxes, regional divisions, social conservatism, resistance to change, parochialism, and suspicion of incumbent politicians of all political parties and ideologies. Cynicism and a sense of betrayal thrived in such an environment, causing a frightful number of citizens to opt out of the political process altogether. B-Four, a novel by political journalist Sam Hodges of the Mobile Register, caught their sentiments exactly. In the novel, a cynical ace reporter for the imaginary Birmingham Standard-Dispatch predicted that one day Alabama legislators would “reveal themselves to be a troupe of European surrealist performance artists.” And the state press that should have been investigating their failures and revealing their foibles was on “the buttering” instead of the “cutting edge” of journalism.3 What made the failure of legislative leadership more damning was the vacuum it created for demagoguery. Without meaningful oversight from an elected supreme court that often cowered before the glare of angry voters and con¤rmed their prejudice, the imperial legislature was more interested in posturing than in posterity. Whereas American politics has been characterized by governance from the center, in Alabama candidates who were right of center usually won. Politics moved toward the margins, with muted but thoughtful candidates easily dismissed amid voter preference for the rhetoric of simpli¤cation, racial solidarity, or resistance to outsider interference. And clearly no woman need apply. Nor, oftentimes, should anyone with an education or law school degree from outside the state.



The much-vaunted value of separation of powers, which the Alabama Supreme Court cited regularly as the reason for not correcting ®agrant abuses of constitutional rights, was honored as a principle and ignored as a fact. The bench, like the legislature, often viewed the result of a public referendum as binding. And the governor trumped the legislature by selecting the speaker of the lower house and through him that body’s committee chairs. Until a rebellion by the state senate in 1975 (when the lieutenant governor began organizing the senate independent of the governor) and another in 1998 (when the emergence of the two-party system and the election of the ¤rst Republican lieutenant governor led to a rebellion by the Democratic majority), the governor could count on sympathetic legislative leaders at least to push his agenda to a ®oor vote. But if a progressive governor alienated the Big Mules, he quickly discovered that his leverage over a malapportioned, conservative, interest group–controlled legislature was limited at best. Hovering near the capitol were ®ocks of lobbyists who understood all too well the way in which the 1901 constitution had centralized power in Montgomery. Spared the energy and expense of funding races for county commissioners and probate judges, they could focus on the real prize: the legislature and a handful of statewide constitutional of¤ces. Strong interest groups thrive in states with weak political parties, and few states had weaker party systems than Alabama. At ¤rst, special interest groups were few in number but in®uential: the Farm Bureau Federation, Alabama Education Association, Alabama Power Company, and assorted industry groups. Later came the Association of County Commissioners, the League of Municipalities, the State Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries of Alabama, and the Alabama Labor Council (AFL-CIO). In time, banks, rural cooperatives, universities, tax assessors, and others swelled the ranks until Alabama had a secret government within a government. The Progressive Tradition, 1900–1930 Any attempt to periodize politics is ®awed and inexact. Patterns in state politics do not perfectly conform to national movements. Within each period, con®icting currents produce suf¤cient tension to muddy most generalizations about who won and who lost.


38 CHA P T ER T WO

One example of these problems is the epoch referred to by historians as the Progressive Era. Although historians quibble about the nature and extent of reform as well as the chronology (some date Progressivism from 1900 to 1916, others 1900 to 1917, still others 1900 to 1920), few extend these reforms into the 1920s. Yet Alabama’s two most progressive governors prior to the Great Depression, Thomas E. Kilby and Bibb Graves, served in the late teens and 1920s. Nor did Alabama Progressives, however suspect their reform credentials, dominate the ¤rst three decades of the century. None was liberal on matters of race; only one was sympathetic to organized labor; just two offered lukewarm endorsement for woman suffrage; and not one offered initiatives to lighten life’s burdens on tenant farmers. All but three essentially supported the brutal convict lease system. Of the nine governors who served between 1900 and 1930, ¤ve were essentially conservative Bourbon Democrats; two were Progressive Democrats; and the other two vacillated between the two ideologies. Reformers constituted an extremely diverse coalition. Allies on one issue became opponents on another. For many progressive businessmen, “reform” consisted of rationalizing the business order, regulating huge predatory trusts, and restoring a level playing ¤eld for small business. Their goals included regulation of railroads and other large corporations, modernization of the state through projects such as the good roads movement, making government more ef¤cient, and improving education and public health. Many preachers and laypeople went well beyond these goals. Already mobilized politically on behalf of prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol, they found additional inspiration in northern social gospel ideals. They centered their efforts in rapidly growing towns and cities such as Anniston, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile, where many Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians advocated what they called institutional Christianity. More than providing temporary charitable services, such ministries brought in®uential people into contact with the poor. Horri¤ed by what they saw, heard, and learned, many Christians turned their outrage into sustained campaigns for reforms in child labor, the convict lease system, public health care, and education. Women formed the core support for such moral crusades, and many were changed by the experience. When they organized and petitioned male governmental of¤cials for reform, they were often patronized or ignored.



Slowly but surely more and more female churchwomen swelled suffragist ranks, convinced that 500 organized female voters would be treated seriously by public of¤cials whereas 500 female supplicants without ballots would be summarily dismissed. Organized labor had only sporadic success among Alabama workers. The pattern between 1900 and 1930 became familiar: an economic slowdown, which triggered salary reductions; this, in turn, sparked organizing drives and strikes; these were broken by governors who mobilized the National Guard to protect company property; such action defeated strikes and decimated unions. Nonetheless, the state af¤liate of the American Federation of Labor continued to organize skilled white workers, and in 1919 even tried to organize Jefferson County schoolteachers, prompting the legislature to enact an antistrike law. Birmingham district coal miners struck the industry in 1907, 1919, 1920, and 1921, often with bloody consequences on both sides and without long-term bene¤ts to workers. Even as progressive a governor as Thomas Kilby used the state militia to break 1919–20 coal strikes. Newly organized middle-class professionals also cautiously tested the changing waters. Social workers, teachers, physicians, ministers, and others championed one or more of the many reforms being advocated. Unfortunately, such professionals often approached their “clients” as much determined to socialize them in middle-class values as to empower them to make decisions for themselves. Immigrants, working men, and the poor must give up alcohol, practice good hygiene, learn Americanism in public schools, and become evangelical Protestants. At its worse such high-handed presumptions could be lethal, as in the case of medical progressives who favored eugenics (the forced sterilization of “mental defectives,” criminals, and even indigent people to prevent them from “reproducing their kind”). The Ku Klux Klan was an even more bizarre addition to the 1920s reform coalition, a largely new organization with few ties to the older and more racist Klan. The Klan of the 1860s and ’70s had arisen to neutralize freedmen who were using ballots to assert and protect black political rights. There was no such urgency in the 1920s when virtually all African Americans had been disfranchised. Furthermore, the small, violent Reconstruction Klan had operated at the margins of Alabama society and was often shunned by respectable whites. Not so in the 1920s. Inspiring Christian


40 CHAPTER TWO

evangelicals against Catholicism, prostitution, bootlegging, immigrants, adolescents who rebelled against traditional moral values, women who rejected appropriate family spheres, and other threats to 100 percent Americanism, the Klan mobilized a huge statewide constituency. William J. Simmons, the founder of the newly organized national Klan, was a sometimeMethodist preacher turned fraternal organizer from Harpersville. By 1926 the Klan heavily in®uenced state politics, helping elect two of its members, Bibb Graves and Hugo Black, governor and U.S. senator, together with many lesser of¤cials. A womens auxiliary, the Kamelias, ®ourished, as did an af¤liate for youth. By 1924 the rejuvenated Klan claimed 18,000 members in Birmingham (nearly half the citys 32,000 registered voters), Jefferson Countys sheriff, at least two county judges, most Birmingham policemen, and a majority of Protestant ministers. Birminghams Robert E. Lee klavern, established in 1916 as the second in the newly reorganized national Klan, boasted 10,000 members by 1924 and was considered by many observers to be the most powerful klavern in the Southeast. Statewide, an estimated 100,000 Klansmen belonged to 148 klaverns. Some Klansmen were essentially violent psychopaths who delighted in partially stripping a divorcee and beating her nearly to death on Red Mountain, or lashing a Greek artist in Clay County for marrying an American woman, or forcing blacks to sell their land at ridiculously low prices to white farmers. Others were merely perverted voyeurs who delighted in sneaking up on young couples petting in automobiles on lovers lanes, ®ashing lights on them, and reporting their conduct to families. At its worst, the Klan strengthened a climate of bigotry and intolerance that led to campaigns to ¤re Catholic employees of the city of Birmingham and the murder of a Catholic priest by an enraged Methodist minister. Organized labor split over the Klan, and gradually many courageous ministers began to denounce its excesses as well. After membership peaked in 1926, it fell to 10,000 in 1927 and only half that total the following year. Revelations of Klan violence had alienated decent people whose main concern was restoration of traditional moral standards, a goal that seemed inconsistent with Klan excesses. But while it thrived, Alabamas Klan generally supported political reformers such as Bibb Graves and Hugo Black, while drawing ¤re from established elites, led by Grover Hall of the Mont-


POLITICS, ALABAMA STYLE 41

gomery Advertiser. In 1928 even Mabel Jones West, president of the Alabama Womans League for White Supremacy, resigned from the Klan, citing its violence and attempt to control state politics. Alabamas diverse reform coalition, which lacked both coherence and unity, ¤red at a variety of targets. For reform governor Braxton Bragg Comer (190610), who was born into a Barbour County planter family but became a Birmingham businessman, reform meant prohibition, improving education, and regulating railroads. As one legislative ally remarked, the people must enact Comers package of reforms or concede industrial peonage to railroads.4 Gov. Thomas Kilby (191822) ¤ts a different pattern of reform. More expansive than Comer in his progressivism, he nonetheless endorsed a central reform of businessmen governors, the good roads movement. Begun by automobile enthusiasts early in the century, the movement reached its apex when Alabamas senator John H. Bankhead authored the 1916 Federal Highway Act, appropriating $299 million for road building nationally and vastly expanding federal power and bureaucracy. To provide required matching funds, Governor Kilby proposed and voters in 1922 rati¤ed a $25 million bond issue for highways. At least $250,000 was allocated to each county. Bibb Graves followed with a similar bond issue ¤ve years later. Between 1916 and 1934, the federal government allocated nearly $50 million in federal highway funds to Alabama, allowing the state to build 2,000 miles of paved roads by 1927. Many progressives were quite content to leave reform at such rudimentary levels of modernization and ef¤ciency as these. Others pushed for more fundamental changes that sought social justice. Among these were education and labor reform, especially child and female labor, the convict lease system, urban governmental reforms, and woman suffrage. All progressive Alabama governorsnotably Comer, Kilby, and Graves urged increased spending for public schools, and even some conservative chief executives agreed. The high school movement brought secondary institutions to most communities, democratizing college entrance, which previously had been tied to expensive college preparatory boarding schools. Rural schools were consolidated in a sometimes misguided effort to create more ef¤cient schools, which unfortunately were also remote from local


42 CHA P T ER T WO

communities and thus poorly supported by parents. In 1915 a coalition of AEA and women’s clubs created a state commission to eliminate illiteracy; volunteers taught mainly poor people how to read and write. School surveys revealed a familiar pattern that would plague the state throughout the century. Schools were inequitably and inadequately funded, condemning many children to a woeful future. In Montgomery County for instance, the value of 47 white schools was less than half the cost of the county jail and one-quarter that of the courthouse. The county had desks for only a third of its 3,000 students. And 28 schools had no desks for teachers either. Only 2 of 47 schools had proper ventilation, and most lacked sanitary toilet facilities. Most children had to bring their own water. Despite consolidation, in 1919, 60 percent of Alabama students still attended oneor two-teacher schools, and 7 in 10 rural teachers held only the lowest certi¤cation. One reason children received little education was because they were gainfully employed. The early stages of industrialization in Alabama produced a system known as the family wage, which required both parents and children to live in company housing in a company village and work for the mill, mine, or factory. Between 1885 and 1895 the number of adult male Alabama textile mill workers increased only 31 percent; but the number of girls under age 18 increased by 158 percent and underage boys by 89 percent. By 1900 59 percent of all Alabama males and 31 percent of females ages 10 to 15 were gainfully employed (a total of 123,000). Ten years later, the percentages had increased to 62 and 41 percent (155,000). In 1901 25 Alabama textile mills worked 430 children 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for a salary of between 15 and 30 cents a day. To be entirely fair to managers and owners, many parents moving into mill villages from tenant farms had worked their children just as hard on the land. And many children, frustrated by their poor preparation in rural schools and unable to keep up in more-demanding mill village schools, begged to drop out and go to work. With mills booming and labor scarce, some benevolent mill owners argued they had to conform to mill-hand culture and defer to parents who wanted the extra income derived from their children’s jobs. Nevertheless, managers and owners were still culpable for paying heads of families so little they could not survive without the family wage. And more than a few mills illegally worked children as young as six.



By 1900 child labor had become a thinly hidden state secret waiting to be discovered. Reformers who did the discovering were often outsiders more outraged by what they found and less restrained by community pressure than local citizens. Irene M. Ashby, a 29-year-old English social reformer, came to Alabama in December 1900 to lobby against child labor on behalf of the AFL. She became friends with Julia Tutwiler and a number of Montgomery churchwomen and reformers, as well as with the rector of Saint Johns Episcopal Church, Edgar Gardner Murphy (also a newcomer to the state). Ashby widely publicized her ¤ndings and recruited Murphy to lead the cause after she left the state in 1902. A politically conservative advocate of the social gospel, Murphy organized the Alabama Child Labor Committee and began lobbying for reform. His churchs settlement house in a west Montgomery mill town provided all the stories of abuse he needed. Augmented by social workers such as Kimball Murdock, Lura Harris Craighead, who also headed the Alabama Federation of Womens Clubs, the Womens Christian Temperance Union, and throngs of evangelical ministers and laypeople, plus Frank W. Barnett, the social reform editor of the Alabama Baptist, Murphy declared spiritual war on child labor. Strengthened by the stark black-and-white photographs of Alabama children taken by Lewis Hine, one of Americas ¤rst social documentary photographers, Murphy railed at conservative legislators and recalcitrant mill owners. Speaking to the Alabama legislature while it considered a package of reforms in July 1907, Murphy sounded like an Old Testament prophet: Some of my cautious friends tell me I must be moderate? Gentlemen, I cannot be moderate. I have seen these children. I have photographed them, not as an intruder but with the consent of superintendents who themselves detested this evil and desired its mitigation. [Many mill owners are] good men. But there has never been an industrial or social evil, from the beginning of history, which has not found good men, men who have been really good, to excuse it and defend it.5 The child labor issue demonstrated the ¤ssures within Alabamas progressive coalition. Reform governor B. B. Comer allegedly worked more child labor in his textile mills than any other state industrialist. And Murphy called him the most bitter opponent of child labor legislation I have ever known.6 Alexander J. McKelway, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, which Murphy founded and headed, visited Comers


44 CHA P T ER T WO

Avondale Mill in Birmingham during the summer of 1906 and declared it to be the second worst mill he had investigated, with several children as young as 10 employed full time. This unrelenting moral crusade ¤nally overwhelmed even legislative resistance, and Alabama’s legislature passed child labor reforms in 1903, 1907, 1915, and 1919 that gradually reduced age limits to 14 and hours to 48 per week, required work certi¤cates, and created a state child welfare department. Governor Kilby appointed Loraine Bedsole Bush Tunstall, an active churchwoman and reformer, to head the new agency and enforce child labor laws. She vigorously conducted her work, and by July 1921 had reduced the percentage of gainfully employed Alabama children from 45 to 24 percent. Mobilization of Christian progressives and women reformers came about partly as a result of the era’s greatest social crusade, the temperance movement. Often ridiculed by historians as busy-body do-gooders and forerunners of Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, and antiabortion zealotry, the temperance movement was actually part of a much broader reform impulse. It did share features of later Christian crusades in that it sought ¤rst to educate and then to compel compliance. But it differed from them by being a moral reform movement from the left side of the political spectrum rather than from the right. During the 1880s and 1890s, many Baptist temperance leaders deserted the Democratic Party for Populism because agrarian reformers endorsed their cause. Prohibition also mobilized large numbers of evangelical women. To be sure, prohibitionists adopted elements of social control rhetoric (prohibition was necessary to remove the temptation of John Barleycorn from black men, who might become liquored up and rape white women, or from Italian immigrants, who might lay off work because of hangovers). But the movement also drew women into political debate, swelling the ranks of suffragists, and it mobilized preachers on behalf of legislative reform. Once engaged in politics on behalf of prohibition, it was dif¤cult for evangelical Christians to ignore other problems such as child labor or the convict lease system. Prohibition politics tended to de¤ne both sides of the ideological split in Alabama. Factions as disparate as the KKK, WCTU, Anti-Saloon League, and evangelical churches endorsed temperance. So did progressive politicians such as Congressman Richmond Pearson Hobson, who also supported woman suffrage and other reforms.



Even more dramatic was the challenge that prohibitionist L. B. Musgrove— owner of coal mines, newspapers, and banks—launched against U.S. senator Oscar W. Underwood. A longtime champion of Big Mule interests in Birmingham, Underwood while a congressman had been a serious candidate for president in the 1912 Democratic primaries and had subsequently defeated Richmond Hobson for a Senate seat. Opposing most progressive reforms—Underwood fought woman suffrage, prohibition, and organized labor—the senator provoked a strange alliance against him in the 1920 Democratic primary. Suffragists organized against him because he had opposed allowing women to vote. Organized labor fought him because he urged the use of the state militia to break the 1919–20 coal strike in north Alabama. The Ku Klux Klan hated him because he despised the Klan and its nativism. Evangelical Christians joined the anti-Underwood movement because he fought prohibition. This alliance backed Musgrove against the incumbent. A bachelor and renowned storyteller famous for his possum dinners for New York celebrities, Musgrove was also chairman of the national Anti-Saloon League and a reformer who endorsed woman suffrage, federal aid to education, farm extension, and the right of workers to organize. Former Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan appeared in four Alabama towns on behalf of Musgrove’s candidacy, condemning Underwood as a wet and a Wall Street reactionary. Although Underwood narrowly turned back the challenge, he deepened his problems by leading a move at the 1924 Democratic convention to denounce the Klan and prudently decided not to seek reelection in 1926. The Klan sweep that year would have taken him out of of¤ce anyway. Prohibition politics peaked during the 1928 national election. When national Democrats nominated New York governor Alfred E. Smith, the stage was set for a massive defection of Alabama Democrats. Although Smith carried many liabilities into the campaign (he was a Catholic, a conservative, and a New Yorker), his chief problem in Alabama was his opposition to prohibition. With more than 500,000 Baptist and Methodist citizens, Alabama was a highly politicized evangelical hornet’s nest. Preachers urged their congregations to “vote as you pray,” and “vote as Jesus our captain would have us vote.” Demagogic U.S. senator J. Thomas He®in bolted the Democratic Party to oppose Smith, mobilizing prohibitionists, Klansmen,


46 CHAPTER TWO

and anti-Catholics with his stem-winding stump speeches. The rebellion took strongest root in the north Alabama hill country, stronghold of progressive white Republicans, many of whom had moved from Populism to Republicanism as a result of Democratic Party corruption during the 1890s. South Alabama Democratic loyalists trumped this rebellious nativism and temperance enthusiasm with racism, sectionalism, Jacksonian defense of the right to have a drink when a man (or woman) felt like it, and their own brand of religious bigotry. According to Thomas D. Samford of Opelika, the safety of the civilization of the South rests with the Democratic party, the white mans party.7 Rep. Henry B. Steagall even blasted Smiths Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover, as an evolutionist and wondered how orthodox Protestant ministers could support such a man. Few presidential elections of the 20th century so galvanized Alabama voters. Out of approximately 300,000 eligible voters, nearly 250,000 cast ballots. Smith won by only 7,000 votes (and even that margin of victory represented the typically suspicious one-sided Democratic landslide in the Black Belt). Although Alabama barely remained in the ranks of six southern states that voted Democratic in every presidential election between 1900 and 1944, the states Republican vote increased from 32 percent in 1920 to 49 percent in 1928. A democratic purge of party bolters such as Tom He®in and the advent of the Great Depression and New Deal temporarily swept the opposition back into obscurity. But the Republican Party would not go away, nor would the politics of moral insurgency. Although the prohibition crusade cast the widest net over evangelical church members, the iniquitous convict lease system posed many of the same moral issues. At root the debate between reformers and advocates of convict leasing devolved into a century-long dilemma of social justice versus low taxes. Escalating numbers of state prisoners required expensive prisons. The convict lease system turned a state ¤nancial liability into a resource. Private companies leased convicts for a stipulated payment to the state. The care and upkeep of county and state prisoners then became the responsibility of the leasor. From the outset, convict leasing was rank with abuses. Industrialists bribed convict directors to accept bids for a tractable labor force that could not unionize or dispute working conditions. They also bribed state inspectors not to report abuses. With an endless supply of convicts, they made little



effort to provide adequate diet, housing, clothing, or health care. Whereas the death rate among state prisoners in Pennsylvania and Ohio coal districts was 1 to 2 percent, the rate in Alabama led the nation at 9 to 10 percent. Unskilled, poorly supervised convict miners endangered other workers with carelessness that often proved lethal in coal mines. On April 8, 1911, an explosion at Banner Mine killed 128 coal miners, 122 of them convicts (all but 5 were black, like most convict labor). As disturbing as the death of convicts was the trivial sources of their incarceration. In the case of Banner Mine fatalities, 30 percent were serving sentences of 20 days or less for misdemeanors such as gambling, vagrancy, and violating prohibition. The mangled, charred bodies removed from Banner Mine were a terrible price to pay for such tri®ing offenses. Public support for convict leasing rested not on moral arguments but on issues of ¤scal policy. The Convict Department generated 17 percent of state revenue in 1914, 19 percent in 1919, and 15 percent in 1923. During the years from 1910 to 1914, the state leased an average of 2,500 convicts: 1,300 to coal mines, 300 to sawmills, 175 to turpentine mills, 75 to a stove foundry, and 600 to a state-owned farm and cotton mill. Reformers challenged the system in 1913 by forming the Alabama Convict Improvement Association in Birmingham. They addressed ¤scal policy by proposing the transfer of prisoners from private lessees to state roadwork. By 1915 they had placed their agenda before the state legislature, where a special investigating committee issued a damning indictment of leasing: “The convict lease system of Alabama is a relic of barbarism, a species of human slavery, a crime against humanity. . . . It has been too much the policy of this state to look upon the commercial side of convict life. . . . The humanitarian side of the question has been entirely lost sight of.”8 Reformers found a champion in 1918 when Thomas Kilby, an Anniston banker, ran for governor, refusing to accept any interest-group funding and advocating penal reform. He urged abolition of convict leasing and transfer of state prisoners to roadwork. But once in of¤ce, Kilby hedged at the substantial loss in state revenue such a reform would entail. Although he pushed through construction of the South’s most modern prison, named in his honor, and removed convicts from lumber and naval store camps because of well-publicized abuses, he did not remove them from mines. The bill he proposed to the legislature called for a phased end to leasing de-


48 CHA P T ER T WO

signed to terminate the practice in January 1924. But Kilby’s conservative successor, Gov. William W. Brandon, did not share the reform impulse, and Big Mule interests launched a full-scale counterattack on reformers. Blaming reform propaganda on do-gooders, reform-minded newspapers, “public agitators,” and “misled citizens,” conservatives mobilized behind Brandon. The governor refused to investigate alleged beatings of prisoners and blocked a Jefferson county grand jury investigation. The legislature bypassed Kilby’s termination date by working the convicts under direct state supervision in state-leased mines. Reformers renewed their crusade by appealing to the broad reform coalition that had earlier been so successful on child labor. Pattie Ruffner Jacobs, longtime leader of the Alabama Equal Suffrage Association and at the time vice president of the League of Women Voters, endorsed abolition. So did the United Mine Workers, social reformers, and many ministers. Gardner C. Tucker, rector of Mobile’s Saint John’s Episcopal Church, and W. E. Lockler a Baptist pastor in Montgomery (and probably an African American), mobilized white and black Christians. The ¤ery Lockler condemned convict bondage “as great as that in which the children of Israel found themselves in Egypt.” Former governor Kilby deplored this reinstitution “of barbarism that no civilized government should sanction and no enlightened people should tolerate.”9 He regretted that he had not totally abolished the system during his term of of¤ce. Moral outrage infrequently overcame ¤scal conservatism in Alabama public policy debates, and Bourbons carried the day until three major new developments later in the decade. The chain of events that would end the convict lease system began with the mysterious death of James Knox, a short, ®abby white convict from Mobile who had passed a worthless $30 check, for which offense he had been sentenced to two years in prison. Assigned to Flat Top Mines in Jefferson County, Knox allegedly committed suicide weeks later. But in 1925 a fellow convict informed state attorney general Harwell G. Davis that Knox’s death had resulted from abuse by prison of¤cials. Davis, a prominent and upright Baptist layman, launched an investigation of the mine warden and alleged abuses of convicts. The investigation revealed that Knox had died from a heart attack likely triggered when warden Charles R. Davis had him dunked into a laundry vat ¤lled with scalding water. Convict testimony revealed a pattern of barbaric con-



duct by Charles Davis and state guards at Flat Top. These revelations polarized the state. Although a jury acquitted the warden, he did not help his cause by physically attacking the state’s attorney general on a Birmingham street, knocking him unconscious and sending him to the hospital. Negative national publicity accomplished what state reformers could not. The sensational details of the Knox case and the assault on the state’s attorney general brought out-of-state reporters ®ocking to Alabama. The Washington Post concluded that the state’s honor was at stake in “this hideous affair,” and the New York World sent a reporter to Birmingham to investigate Knox’s death and other abuses of convicts. Reformers ¤nally found a successful advocate in Klan-backed Bibb Graves. A native of Montgomery county, Graves was one of Alabama’s besteducated governors, with a Phi Beta Kappa key and civil engineering degree from the University of Alabama, two years of law school at the University of Texas, and a law degree from Yale. Elected governor in 1926 amidst publicity over the Knox case, Graves used abolition of convict leasing as a centerpiece of his campaign. Once in of¤ce, he forced a bill terminating the system through both houses of the legislature in 1927, and a year later Alabama became the last state in the union to end the practice. State convicts were transferred to state road camps where other kinds of abuses occurred for the next seven decades. Progressivism gravitated outward from its state and local core onto a national stage. Between 1896 and 1920, farmers and laborers fundamentally reshaped America. Populists and Progressives from the agrarian peripheries of the South and Midwest restructured American capitalism and reversed the concentration of wealth and power toward corporate America. Agrarian congressmen who were neither socialists nor defenders of unregulated capitalism took control of the Democratic Party and made it an instrument for controlling runaway, rampaging capitalism that had abused most Americans. Their creation was an activist federal government ¤nally willing to intervene on behalf of the welfare of ordinary citizens. Their agenda was complex: prohibit monopolies; impose uniform railroad freight rates for short and long hauls; prohibit commodity speculation; expand currency; establish an eight-hour day for labor; recognize the right of workers to join unions; democratize politics by direct election of U.S. senators, direct primaries, universal suffrage, initiative, reform, and referendum; reduce tar-


50 CHA P T ER T WO

iffs; enact a progressive federal income tax; appropriate federal funding for schools, agricultural and vocational education, and highways. Alabama’s congressional delegation, though split ideologically between conservatives and progressives, played an important role in these reforms. Conservative Oscar Underwood sponsored Wilson administration legislation lowering tariffs, and Sen. John Bankhead Sr. offered the ¤rst bill to provide federal aid for highways. As the Progressive Era continued, Alabama’s delegation became more reformist. Henry D. Clayton of Eufaula backed currency expansion and reform as well as antitrust legislation. George Huddleston Sr., elected to Congress from Birmingham in 1914, was friendly to organized labor and opposed U.S. imperialism and entry into World War I. Two other agrarian mavericks from north Alabama also opposed war and consistently advocated agrarian reforms. Richmond Hobson from Greensboro advocated regulation of railroads and other monopolies, prohibition, woman suffrage, and the popular election of U.S. senators. Henry B. Steagall of Ozark served in Congress from 1915 until his death in 1943. Steagall had cut his political teeth on the Populist ideology of Reuben F. Kolb. A thoroughgoing Progressive, he later played a critical role in the New Deal as chair of the House Banking and Currency Committee. Despite this progressive cadre, Alabama’s congressional delegation contained conservatives as well. John McDuf¤e represented the Mobile district from 1918 to 1933 and compiled a consistently conservative record, as did Stanley Herbert Dent Jr. from the second congressional district (1908–20). A “gold Democrat” from Eufaula, Dent opposed currency in®ation and other reforms until defeated by Alabama Supreme Court justice John R. Tyson in 1920. Tom He®in of Lafayette ¤ts neatly into no ideological camp. A racial and nativist demagogue with no legislative legacy to his credit, he was essentially a spellbinding mimic and storyteller who could enthrall an audience for hours on end without adding one degree to their knowledge, wisdom, or intelligence. As one diminutive Alabama opponent once said of the rotund He®in: “If you stick a pitchfork in Tom He®in and let the wind out, a pair of my breeches would swallow him.” The Birmingham News came closer to the truth in a 1923 editorial: “The man who might have been the nation’s one really genuine Picturesque Statesman in the drab and drear Coolidgian epoch is burning with an inner and . . . unhealthy ¤re.”10 As it



was, He®in mainly provided a convenient target for national (and largely unfair) stereotyping of Alabama. His decade-long attacks on the Knights of Columbus, Al Smith, and Catholics in general provoked Marylands U.S. senator to dismiss He®ins views as the ®imsiest bubble that ever found lodgement in an empty head. When Senator He®in reported threats on his life from Catholic and political enemies, the episode became an occasion for national parody. New Yorks U.S. senator called for immediate and effective steps . . . to protect this senator. The army should assign troops to surround the capitol. The navy should send a large part of the ®eet into the Potomac. The marines should be called . . . to protect his precious life. Your greatest fear, one letter writer advised He®in, should be from what you eat and drink. And the New York Sun summarized: The feeling of most Americans toward He®in is one of undescribable loathing. Sentiment among loyal Alabama Democrats mirrored these national opinions. Montgomery mayor William A. Gunter refused in 1928 to allow He®in to speak against Al Smith in the city, declaring: As long as I am mayor I will not permit the use of city property to persons who preach religious hatred.11 Loyalist repudiation of He®ins bolt from the Democratic Party that year became ¤nal two years later when John Bankhead Jr. defeated him handily for his U.S. Senate seat. Though He®in challenged party progressives thrice more in congressional races against New Dealer Lister Hill, he lost badly each time. Despite victories, progressives did not sweep conservatives from the ¤eld of political combat. Bourbons contested every inch of ground, winning as many skirmishes as they lost. One central issue was not even a bone of contention between the two factions. Except for African American reformers, neither camp proposed reform for blacks. These decades in fact were arguably the worst in the 20th century to be black and to live in Alabama. Denied the ballot by the new constitution, they were also denied equitable and adequate education. Many countiesincluding Montgomery County where the state capital was did not even provide a high school for black youngsters. Many AFL labor unions refused to accept black apprentices. Even the United Mine Workers, which did allow the majority black workforce to join and to serve as union of¤cers, insisted they serve as secondary of¤cials and remain in the background. Pattie Jacobs, the states leading suffragist, constantly reassured


52 CHA P T ER T WO

nervous white citizens that she did not envision the enfranchisement of black women who would, she was con¤dent, be as completely disfranchised by the state constitution as black men. And the state’s two most successful progressive politicians of the era, Bibb Graves and Hugo Black, were both members of the Klan. To the degree there was even paternalistic interest in Negro welfare or any political resistance to the Klan, it was more likely to originate in the conservative camp than in the progressive one. The quintessential late 19thcentury Bourbon leader Thomas Goode Jones, who as governor from 1890 to 1894 had led the conservatives who turned back Reuben Kolb’s Populist hordes, opposed disfranchisement of blacks in 1901. Jones was also a lifelong foe of the convict lease system, whose enrollment was nearly 90 percent black. So sympathetic was he to black education that Booker T. Washington secretly campaigned among African Americans for his reelection as governor. And it was Sen. Oscar Underwood at the 1924 Democratic national convention who came within a fraction of a single vote of pushing through a resolution denouncing the Ku Klux Klan. Progressives aligned with the Klan barely defeated his proposal, with the conservative Alabama delegation the only southern contingent voting solidly against the Klan. Although the Klan ridiculed Underwood as the “Jew, jug, and Jesuit” candidate, the national press extolled his statesmanship, tolerance, and courage.12 The conservative Underwood was not only a polarizing ¤gure on race but also the catalyst for class division as well. When L. B. Musgrove announced his candidacy against Underwood in 1920, he began the sharpest class campaign of the era. A year earlier the Bourbon-dominated legislature had enacted an antistrike law to break UMW work stoppages in north Alabama. That same year Senator Underwood voted to add an antistrike clause to the Esch-Cummins bill, which returned railroads to private control after government operation during World War I. All 10 of Alabama’s other congressmen lined up with labor against the Esch-Cummins bill; Underwood alone opposed them. As a result, the national AFL announced in February 1920 that Underwood was one of six U.S. senators targeted for defeat. Alabama labor unions rallied against Underwood in an unprecedented organizing effort. In Birmingham, 75 labor unions met for ¤ve hours in



February to determine strategy for registering working men and women. The result was an increase of 10,000 new voters to a total of nearly 30,000 (a ¤gure in®ated by female registration because this would be the ¤rst election after their enfranchisement). In Mobile an estimated 1,400 laboring people paid their poll tax for the ¤rst time due to a Central Trades Council registration drive. In Huntsville an Underwood strategist warned that the campaign had become a straight out ¤ght between labor and antilabor forces. Unfortunately for Underwood, the rural Populist tradition also gained traction as prices for agricultural commodities plummeted in 1919– 20. The Farmers’ Union used the crisis to mobilize its members against the incumbent, which cost him heavily in rural north Alabama. One Underwood loyalist wrote the senator in obvious distress: We just can’t keep from being a little worried about this situation: The union labor people will in a great majority be against you, and they have registered and paid poll tax more than ever before, many, many of them have paid up all their poll taxes which have accumulated since the Constitution of 1901 went into effect. Then we have been noticing for some twelve months or two years the union labor people have been working on the farmers, in an effort to get them to stand with union or organized labor in a political way.13 Clearly shaken and on the defensive, Underwood raced home to Alabama for the ¤ght of his political life. Denying that he was antilabor, a tool of the Catholic “conspiracy,” or a puppet of the liquor interests, he mobilized the state’s conservatives into a coalition as impressive as the progressive one forming against him. Yet Underwood’s beliefs did run counter to the reform mood of the times. He did drink liquor; he was personally liberal, even unorthodox, in his theological beliefs; he did deplore religious bigotry; he did detest organized labor; he was the quintessential spokesman for Birmingham’s Big Mules; and he did oppose woman suffrage together with virtually all other progressive reforms. So did many conservative Alabamians, and they ¤nally rallied from their lethargy. The president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce forced the Farmers’ Union to move its state headquarters out of the cham-


54 CHAPTER TWO

bers Birmingham building. Most major state newspapers endorsed Underwood as the spokesman of sound business against irresponsible labor. The Birmingham News captured the Big Mule agenda perfectly in an editorial blasting Musgrove: He boldly advocates that array of classes against classes. A very rich man himself, . . . he adds fuel to the radical ®ames of the day in advocacy of the union of the farmers and of the mine and factory workers for crushing capital and establishing a government of part of the people. . . . That is not only demagogy [sic], but is dangerous demogogy.14 On the other side of the political spectrum, Musgroves allies agreed with Underwood partisans on one thing: this campaign was essentially about class, not prohibition, Catholics, or unions. Harry Ayers, son of Baptist missionaries in China and progressive editor of the Anniston Star (one of the few state dailies to endorse Musgrove), charged that Underwood represented the capitalist class and his reelection would be an endorsement of government by and for Wall Street trusts. The outcome of this titanic campaign by progressives, farmers, and organized labor against planters and Big Mules came within a hair of deposing Alabamas most prominent conservative politician. Underwood lost Jefferson, his home county, for the only time in his career. Birmingham unionists also elected two members to the city Board of Education and George Huddleston to Congress. Although Underwood defeated Musgrove statewide 69,000 to 61,000, the incumbent lost nearly all of north Alabama to a highly disciplined farmer-labor coalition. Only a sectional sweep of the Black Belt and most of south Alabama saved him. Jelks H. Cabaniss (whose grandson William would later fall victim to the politics of class) and Forney Johnston, key Underwood lieutenants and representatives of Birminghams Big Mules, sent Underwood their electoral postmortem. They agreed that the senators loss of his home county resulted from the progressive alliance between prohibitionists and organized labor (they missed at least three other elements of the anti-Underwood coalition: women suffragists, voting for the ¤rst time and outraged by Underwoods stonewalling of their enfranchisement; the KKK, just emerging on the stage of political power in Birmingham; and the nativist tide of antiCatholicism coursing through evangelical Protestantism and reinforcing the politicization of white Christianity behind reform movements). Under-



wood agreed with Cabaniss and Johnston, writing a friend that “I have never had a more strenuous ¤ght, or opposition coming from so many different angles, but I am proud to say that I have not yielded to class demands.”15 Montgomery Advertiser editor Grover Hall managed Alabama’s most politically in®uential newspaper and had as little use for religious extremism and Klan excesses as Underwood. As part of the century’s most in®uential Alabama newspaper family (other family members, one of whom served as president of the Alabama Press Association in 1921–22, edited the Dothan Eagle and Anniston Star), the conservative, anti-Klan Hall clashed frequently with the common people and their reforms. A friend and intellectual soul mate of South-baiting Baltimore journalist-intellectual H. L. Mencken, Hall began a yearlong exposé of Alabama’s KKK that earned him the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in journalism. He also railed against the Klan political ticket, headed by Bibb Graves. Once elected, Graves and his administration came under relentless attack from the Advertiser. The administration, Hall wrote, consisted of a “callous gang of third-rate lawyers and backwoods politicians” who had imposed a “wild debauchery of spending by a be-Kluxed Governor and a be-Kluxed legislature.” Hall’s diatribes impressed Mencken so much that the sage of Baltimore urged him to submit his articles to American Mercury magazine. The leading cynic of the Lost Generation agreed with Hall’s estimate of Alabama politicians, claiming them to be “such stupid fellows that a super¤cial observer might reasonably conclude that the State is only half civilized.”16 In 1928 the Hall family turned their withering satire on another favorite villain, Tom He®in. The senator represented everything conservative patricians despised: the Klan, religious bigotry, disloyalty to the Bourbonled Democratic Party, and champion of the issueless aspirations of the unwashed and uninformed rural masses who lived at the forks of rural roads and isolated creeks. Julian Hall, Grover’s nephew, launched his attack on He®in from the editorial pages of the Dothan Eagle (a paper referred to by He®in ally and fundamentalist Baptist preacher Bob Jones as the “Buzzard”). After listening to a typical He®in stump speech during the 1928 presidential campaign, Julian wrote in disgust that He®in talked “like a half-civilized moron.” Extolling He®in’s conservative senatorial predecessors from Alabama, Hall groaned: “Oh, memories of Morgan! Oh, shades


56 CHA P T ER T WO

of Pettus! Oh, features of Underwood! Oh, He®in! Oh, Hell!” The New York Times could not resist reprinting the editorial.17 Marie Bankhead Owen was another Montgomerian who shared Grover Hall’s loathing of Graves, the Klan, and Democratic Party bolters such as He®in. A formidable leader of conservative women, Owen organized and headed the state’s female antisuffragists and provided in®uential support to the Democratic Party establishment. Her tolerance for lower-class whites was little more than that of an unnamed woman stockholder in an Alabama textile mill who lectured an opponent of child labor that in Alabama the institution was “a necessary evil”: “When you know more of these people, you’ll see that they’re just like animals. In the mill they have some chance of getting civilized. If we made laws restricting labor we should frighten away capitalists and wreck our very surest chances of progress and prosperity.”18 Conservative women found a natural ally in the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service (ACES) headquartered at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later Auburn University). Funded by federal enactment in 1914 as one of the more important Progressive reforms, the extension service ironically became one of the most formidable pillars holding up the Bourbon governmental edi¤ce. ACES helped organize the Farm Bureau Federation, which offered a conservative alternative to the Farmers’ Union and earlier agrarian radical organizations. The ¤rst director of ACES opposed “Yankee” in®uences in higher education, especially at Auburn, and used county agents as “middle class missionaries to the rural masses.”19 Thus by 1930 all essential elements of Alabama’s political culture were ¤rmly in place. Well-organized interest groups—unionists, small farmers, and tenants on one side, and ACES, the Farm Bureau, planters, and businessmen on the other—had clearly de¤ned divergent class interests. Big Mules detested the masses. The masses reciprocated in kind. Many politicized leaders of white evangelicals (both clergy and laity) were straying badly from a Protestantism concerned exclusively with saving souls. Enfranchised women were redirecting politics toward a more gendered and family-friendly reformist agenda. North Alabama and south Alabama (with the Wiregrass a swing region that might vote either way) were increasingly polarized along class as well as geographical lines. Racism constrained and dominated all reform causes. Reformers—divided by ideology,



cause, region, race, gender, racial and religious prejudices, and class status confronted a largely united patrician, business-oriented, conservative, Big Mule, Bourbon coalition, which though forced onto the defensive was armed with the 1901 constitution, traditionalism, racism, and contempt for the white masses. The legacy of these mutual animosities would divide Alabama for the rest of the 20th century and would provide citizens a political history at variance at least by degree from that of any other southern state. Progressivism contributed measurably to that variation, imperfect though it was. In some ways the Progressive movement in Alabama was similar to a semivirtuous woman. It was not as bad as it could have been, but it could have been lots better. And like a semivirtuous woman, Alabama Progressivism will never appear honorable to those who insist on absolute purity of motive and deed. Semivirtuous may seem an oxymoron, but if so, it is an extremely useful one. Progressivisms limitations were legendary: it tried to impose Anglo, Protestant, middle-class values on blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, workingclass, and rural people. It largely ignored the problems of tenant farmers and blacks. But it did create a new political ethos that the federal government should play an active role in helping ordinary people. It enfranchised women and mobilized many of them into reform movements. It largely ended the convict lease system and child labor. It substantially improved public health and education. On balance, then, the Progressive Era should be judged partly by what preceded it. Because it shackled Alabama with an undemocratic constitution, greatly reduced the franchise, and ignored the states poorest and most vulnerable citizens, it was both less democratic and less reformist than Populism. Because it promoted the welfare of women and children, broadened their rights, improved education and health, and ended the leasing of state convicts, it was a substantial improvement over the late 19th-century Bourbon dynasty. Depression, New Deal, War, and Civil Rights, 19301958 Political cultures under normal stress change slowly. But traumatic upheavals in societydepressions, wars, revolutions, or other calamities


58 CHA P T ER T WO

accelerate change. Between 1930 and 1958 there were four massive shakings of Alabama’s political foundations: the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal, the Second World War, and the beginnings of the civil rights revolution. Not surprisingly, each of these wrenched Alabama politics in a different direction. During the 1930s and early ’40s progressivism merged into class-based New Deal liberalism. Toward the end of the Depression, countervailing reactions against the most liberal New Deal reforms set in, bending state politics in a new direction. World War II had a domestic impact nearly equal to the war itself. And the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott completed the transformation from a political culture heavily in®uenced by class con®icts to one almost entirely de¤ned by race. Some major elements of the earlier Progressive coalition played only minor roles in New Deal liberalism. Though individual women such as Pattie Ruffner Jacobs continued prominent reform roles, the League of Women Voters virtually collapsed, partly as a result of the highly partisan and proDemocratic role it played in the controversial 1928 presidential election. On the other hand, Southern Negro Youth, a Communist-front organization, offered leadership opportunities to many African American women (including the mother of 1960s radical Angela Davis). Progressive hill country Republicans had constituted an important reform element in earlier decades. But during the 1930s even the GOP’s last bastion of power, Winston County, tumbled into the Roosevelt column, and the Republican presidential vote plummeted from 49 percent in 1928 to 14 percent in 1940. Conversely, organized labor and angry farmers played larger roles in reform. Even more radical factions (notably Alabama’s small cadre of Communists but even including a neophyte Wiregrass politician named James Folsom) tried to nudge the New Deal to the left. In other ways Alabama politics remained much the same. Progressives and conservatives still warred with each other. Friends and neighbors still counted for more than ideology. And Democrats of varying persuasions still won all statewide elections. Typical of the shifting currents of politics was Gov. Benjamin M. Miller (1930–34). Elected as a conservative who attacked Bibb Graves for his pro®igate ways and Klan af¤liation, Miller promised an administration charac-



terized by frugality and sound management of revenues. Instead the Depression plunged Miller and the state into a ¤nancial chaos that threatened to close public schools. Miller responded to the crisis courageously, rejecting calls for regressive sales taxes, authorizing a massive study of state ¤nances by the Brookings Institution (which criticized low taxes on farm property that accounted for less than 20 percent of state taxes), and proposing an income tax for education. Conservative businessmen were furious, accusing Miller of double-crossing “the very men that put you into of¤ce.” Organized into the Economy League, they mobilized against Miller’s statewide referendum and countered his “soak-it-to-the-rich” rhetoric. (Miller explained to anxious voters that the number of Alabamians paying federal income taxes had fallen from 15,000 in 1930 to less than 8,000 in 1932, so only a small minority of wealthy citizens would pay new taxes.) Reason seldom prevailed in 20th-century Alabama tax elections, and a panicked electorate overwhelmingly rejected the income tax by a vote of 146,000 to 74,000. Months later, in December 1932, as Miller had predicted, most public schools closed and state government virtually came to a halt. Once again ridicule rained down on the state. Hearst newspapers posed an interesting question for Alabamians to ponder: “Why should the people of the United States subsidize 67 county governments in the state of Alabama in order to save the public schools of that State from collapse?”20 Miller’s answer was to renew the tax ¤ght, branding his opponents a sel¤sh elite unwilling to pay their fair share. He pounded the theme that taxes should be paid mainly by those who were best able to pay. Conservatives led by Benjamin Russell of Alexander City, Sidney Smyer of Birmingham, and Gerald R. E. Steiner of Montgomery renewed their familiar refrain that economy in government and cutting waste could provide all the revenue needed for essential state services (arguments embarrassingly similar to the ones Miller had used before 1932). But with hundreds of schools closed during the winter and spring of 1933, angry voters were not fooled a second time. Miller’s income tax amendment passed by a majority of 37,000 votes. If a governor as conservative as B. M. Miller could endorse reform, the possibilities for less reluctant reformers seemed limitless. And even the far left received a hearing during tumultuous Depression years. Most Communists were black workers or tenant farmers, though a sprinkling of white intellectuals created in essence two wings of the party, one folkish, the other


60 CHA P T ER T WO

elite. For intellectuals such as radical poet John Beecher, Birmingham native and University of Alabama physics professor Joseph Gelders, or Auburn University graduate Israel Berlin (a 32-year-old Lithuanian-born Jew), genuine sympathy for Alabama’s underclass drew them to organizations advocating radical social change, and they apparently knew exactly what they were doing. For Fred Maxey—a white former labor department negotiator, beloved pastor of Mount Hebron Baptist Church outside Leeds, and a theological fundamentalist—the ties that bound him to the party were tenuous. He more likely shared many of the social objectives of the party without of¤cially joining it. At the other end of the class spectrum were hundreds of desperate, black unemployed Birmingham workers and south Alabama sharecroppers. Some of them were politically sophisticated despite lack of formal education. Indeed, the Birmingham ore miner Hosea Hudson and Reeltown sharecropper Ned Cobb spoke with near-Homeric passion about their troubles and trials. But most rank-and-¤le members of the Sharecroppers’ Union or the Birmingham unemployment councils understood little about Communism or its relationship to these organizations. Most black members of the party seem to have been attracted by sympathy for nine Scottsboro boys who were wrongly accused of raping two white Huntsville textile workers in 1931 and were subsequently defended by the Communist International Legal Defense Fund. Such members were often devoted Baptists or Methodists. Two leading Birmingham Communists sang in a gospel quartet, and Hosea Hudson was a deacon in New Bethel Baptist Church. From the party’s headquarters in Birmingham, established in 1929, and in the pages of the Southern Worker, which began publishing in 1930, the party began active recruitment in Alabama. By 1933 nearly 500 members paid the modest dues to belong to the party, and many more paid their two cents to purchase issues of its newspaper. The Sharecroppers Union did even better, claiming 10,000 members by 1935 in locals stretching from Birmingham to Lee County, thence west across the Black Belt. Although the party took over the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union (the iron ore miners organization, which had a long tradition of radicalism), most other unions resisted the Communists. Also, many northern party organizers understood little about southern culture, especially evangelical Christianity, which played a major role in African American cul-



ture. Local white of¤cials made it risky for Communist organizers, killing several in south Alabama, and using Birmingham’s “red squad” (a paralegal gang of white toughs employed by TCI [Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company]), the Birmingham police, and other groups to rough up radicals in the Magic City. The party sometimes attempted a “popular front” strategy in Alabama, throwing its support behind non-Communist leftists such as the 1938 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and Aubrey Williams’s National Farmers Union. Williams was a liberal New Dealer by Alabama political standards. Born in Populist Saint Clair County the son of an alcoholic blacksmith, Williams became a Presbyterian preacher of strong social gospel tendencies until theological doubts and liberal politics moved him away from the pastoral ministry to another kind of service to humanity. As deputy director of the Works Progress Administration, director of the National Youth Administration, and Roosevelt’s 1945 nominee as head of the Rural Electri¤cation Administration, Williams was arguably Alabama’s highest pro¤le, noncongressional New Dealer. One Senate Republican called him “one of the most radical men in the country . . . one of the pinkest of this pink New Deal.” Some conservative southern senators referred to him as an atheist, a Communist, and a “nigger-lover” to boot.21 To some degree Williams invited such invective by his forthright speeches and writings. Speaking to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Williams declared that a bit of class warfare might advance the cause of human dignity. He condemned Auburn and other land grant university extension services for catering to the Farm Bureau and planters while ignoring small farmers and tenants. He endorsed racial integration, tried to turn the National Farmers’ Union into a biracial organization, and attempted to explain southern poor whites to the nation. They had, Williams explained poignantly, been “worked to death on the land, worked to death in the mine or the mill or the factory,” and had gotten rid of their anger, frustrations, fear, and panic by “taking after the Niggers.” The poor white “had not been understood, he has been despised and insulted over and over, and he has been cheated and he has been gulled and he has been exploited. But the cause of the Negro cannot be won, the South cannot be saved until he too is saved.”22


62 CHA P T ER T WO

Hounded out of federal of¤ce by southern conservative Democrats and national Republicans, Williams returned to Alabama to publish the Southern Farm and Home, which championed abolition of the poll tax and other reforms. He enthusiastically supported Jim Folsom for governor, favored black voting, endorsed the Montgomery bus boycott, and won praise from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Ostracized by Montgomery white society, Williams found support among its small liberal cadre of New Dealers: journalists Gould Beech and Charles Dobbins, lawyer Clifford J. Durr and his activist wife, Virginia. The Durrs, like Williams, were refugees from New Deal life in Washington, and essentially like him as well in that Virginia’s energetic and controversial opposition to the poll tax had alienated Democratic conservatives. As Hugo Black’s sister-in-law, Virginia’s high-pro¤le support of radical causes reverberated well beyond usual 1930s Washington cocktail party chatter. Williams and the Durrs could afford the luxury of racial liberalism because they did not hold elective of¤ce. Alabama New Deal governors and congressmen had to walk a ¤ner line. Before race became the de¤ning issue of liberalism in the 1960s, regional reform was a truer destination of political ideology. Regionalist liberalism united blacks and whites on a broad range of economic and political issues (abolition of the poll tax, support for organized labor and farmer insurgency, registration of black voters). In time, voters decided that black and white southerners did not share common interests. But that time had not yet come. In the meantime, the careers of Alabama’s governors and congressmen often varied from other states where opposition to Roosevelt from the right, plus the congressional seniority system, forced the president to temper his liberalism. Although Alabama’s congressional delegation was split, the managing editor of New Republic magazine wrote Herman Clarence Nixon—Auburn graduate, Vanderbilt political scientist, and former secretary of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—in 1955 asking him if he could explain why Alabama had produced the most liberally minded public men of any Deep South state. If Nixon attempted to answer her question, there is no historical record of his reply. The answer lies within Alabama’s unique political culture: the long list of grievances and class con®icts between north Alabama/Wiregrass farmers, stirred to fever pitch by Populism; the fact that Alabama had the largest



number of industrial workers and by the 1940s the highest union membership of any former Confederate state; the role of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal agencies in helping poor and working-class Alabamians; the deepening ideological lines; two multiterm liberal governors (Bibb Graves and Jim Folsom) who directed patronage to liberal supporters; and the South’s most liberal congressional delegation on issues other than race. The 1934 gubernatorial campaign tested new alliances forged by the Depression and the New Deal. The United Mine Workers were in the midst of a successful drive to organize the state’s entire industrial workforce. During July, Huntsville textile workers walked off their jobs, launching what would become the largest strike to that time in American history. Communist sharecroppers in central Alabama were striking for a dollar a day. And Bibb Graves’s candidacy for a second term re®ected the state’s class polarization. Organized labor, small farmers, and New Deal partisans backed Graves. Small businessmen, Birmingham industrialists, planters, the Farm Bureau, and the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service supported Birmingham attorney Frank M. Dixon. Voters left no doubt where they stood: Graves carried 56 counties on his way to a 157,000 to 135,000 victory. He not only became the ¤rst governor elected to a split second term, as provided for in the 1901 constitution, but also allegedly coined the term “Big Mules” for his elite Birmingham-based political opponents. As Graves graphically described them, they reminded him of a farmer who had harnessed a small mule to a wagon heavily loaded with corn. As the small animal strained every muscle to pull the load up a long hill, a larger mule tied behind the wagon contentedly munched corn. The image was memorable. In of¤ce Graves did not disappoint his mainly working-class constituency. He created a new Department of Labor and appointed the president of the state Federation of Labor as its director. He also appointed two remarkable women, Daisy Donovan to head the Child Labor Division of the new department, and labor activist Mollie Dowd (who had served as an organizer for the United Textile Workers, leader of the National Trade Union League, and secretary of the Alabama League of Women Voters) as head of the conciliation division. Dowd worked to prevent strikes by urging companies to adopt tougher safety laws, a shorter work week, higher minimum wages, and stiffer child labor laws. Graves also appointed his wife,


64 CHAPTER TWO

Dixie, a longtime woman suffragist, to an unexpired U.S. Senate seat in 1937. He broke with the gubernatorial practice of sending the National Guard to break strikes, drawing withering criticism from business groups. He implemented the new Social Security Act by establishing the Alabama Department of Public Welfare, closed county almshouses, and pioneered unemployment insurance. He strengthened education by creating the minimum foundation program that sought to equalize educational opportunity no matter where children lived in the state, funded by a new state sales tax. (Graves proposed a tax on businesses, but the legislature balked and levied the sales tax instead.) The state began providing free textbooks for the lowest three grades and guaranteed a minimum seven-month school term. His administration also pro¤ted from massive New Deal work projects that transformed the capitol complex and funded federal highway construction. Had Graves been eligible to succeed himself in 1938, he would likely have won a third term. When he did enter the 1942 Democratic primary, most pundits considered him a shoe-in. But death overtook him before the primary, and his progressive faction split between several candidates. Chauncey M. Sparks won the 1942 campaign, and despite conservative Barbour County roots and legislative membership in the so-called economy bloc, he used wartime treasury surpluses to expand state services. He ignored Farm Bureau advice to cut property taxes, and he moved the University Medical College from Mobile to Birmingham, expanded it to a fouryear curriculum, opened a School of Forestry at Auburn, increased funding for Tuskegee University, multiplied appropriations for agricultural programs and farm experiment stations, and reestablished the Department of Labor, which conservative Gov. Frank M. Dixon (193842) had closed. The 1942 runner-up, James E. Big Jim Folsom, inherited much of Bibb Gravess labor and small farmer constituency. A native of Elba (Coffee County) in the Wiregrass, Folsom inherited a Populist heritage from his politically active family. Limited college attendance, work for New Deal relief agencies, and a move to Cullman County where he sold insurance gave Folsom friends and neighbors in both south and north Alabama, plus New Deal acquaintances statewide. What he did not have was support among the county courthouse gangs that usually determined the outcome of elections. Failing their endorsement and having no money to publicize his name, Folsom ran an outsider campaign, appealing directly to the people.



His enormous size (6 feet 8 inches tall, size 14 shoes) impressed ordinary people nearly as much as his humorous speeches. Sparks’s victory surprised no one. Folsom’s strong second-place ¤nish astounded nearly everyone. Service in the merchant marine and the death of his wife occupied Folsom’s time until the 1946 gubernatorial campaign season, when he rode his folksy outsider strategy (music by a country band called the Strawberry Pickers, promises to take a corn shuck mop and clean out the capitol gang, a suds bucket that was passed through crowds of listeners, whose nickels, dimes, and quarters would carry him to his next speech) to victory. Conservative opponents railed against the charismatic Folsom, but he put together a coalition of farmers, laborers, newly enfranchised veterans who did not have to pay the poll tax, African Americans, and New Dealers that delivered him a landslide victory. Unfortunately, the giant Folsom had feet of clay up to his armpits, and his bold liberal agenda was soon sidetracked by personal foibles. He drank heavily. After the death of his wife, his mistress charged him with fathering their child. Folsom paid off the woman to assure her silence during the 1946 race, but she reneged on the agreement, making the affair public in 1948. His appointees were accused of selling paroles to state prisoners and illegally bidding state contracts. The new governor also picked an unnecessary ¤ght with the Auburn board of trustees. Always political and traditionally aligned to the conservative Farm Bureau-Extension Service-Big Mule coalition, the trustees had permitted shamelessly open politicking on behalf of Folsom’s conservative opponent. Folsom and his New Deal advisers, already angry at ACES support of planters at the expense of small farmers and tenants, saw this as the opportune time to purge the board and neutralize ACES. They reckoned without conservative control of the state senate, which refused to con¤rm Folsom’s appointees to the board, handing him a humiliating defeat during his ¤rst months in of¤ce. The legislature also struck down his attempts to reapportion the legislature, rewrite the 1901 constitution, and abolish the poll tax. What he could accomplish by gubernatorial action—appointing county voter registrars who would expedite registration of blacks and working-class whites or vetoing a bill requiring an anti-Communist loyalty oath for public employees (which Folsom considered a violation of civil liberties)—he did. Barred from reelection by term limitation, Folsom appointed a woman


66 CHAPTER TWO

to the Alabama Court of Appeals, then returned to his Cullman insurance business. Four years later he reemerged as a candidate for governor with the same colorful style (though with a much better organized and funded campaign). He won without a runoff. One week after his victory in the Democratic primary, the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board decision, which sent Alabama politics spiraling in new directions. Blocked again on bolder reforms such as reapportionment (Jefferson County now contained 20 percent of the states population but elected only one of 35 senators) and rewriting the constitution, Folsom was more successful with other initiatives. His farm-to-market roads program improved rural life. Creation of an industrial development commission pleased business. Increased funding for old age pensions, education, welfare, and health impressed his farmerlaborer constituency. Unlike his progressive predecessors in the of¤ce, Governor Folsom expressed no interest in high pro¤le anticivil rights legislation. He called such bills clap-trap, like a hound dog baying at the moon and claiming its [sic] got the moon treed.23 Although Folsom persisted both in drunken antics and shameless cronyism, there is no evidence that he pro¤ted personally from governmental corruption. His family certainly never accumulated substantial wealth, and Folsom lived until 1987 in modest circumstances. One longtime supporter summarized the enigmatic Folsom: He was a combination of genius, moron, and alcoholic. And the thing that made it exciting was that each morning when you woke up, you never knew which one it was going to be.24 Folsom ran for governor again in 1962 against his former south Alabama campaign manager and legislative lieutenant George C. Wallace, but his style of class-based liberalism had outlived its time. Congressional politics matched the shifting terrain of the gubernatorial landscape. During the three decades following 1930, Alabamas senatorial delegation of Hugo Black, John H. Bankhead II, Lister Hill, and John Sparkman was one of the nations most distinguished. Despite his earlier Klan af¤liation, Hugo Black was a suf¤ciently fervent New Dealer that Roosevelt nominated him for a 1937 U.S. Supreme Court vacancy in an attempt to reverse the courts conservative majority. (National journalists who discovered his 1920s Klan af¤liation during Blacks con¤rmation hearings joked that if appointed he wouldnt even need to buy a black robe; he could just dye his white Klan robe.) As an associate justice for four decades, Black



wrote some of the high court’s most important decisions on separation of church and state (in®uenced heavily by his long service as a Sunday school teacher and lay leader of Birmingham’s First Baptist Church, though he later left the Baptists for Unitarianism). He also championed free speech, which he believed essential to contemporary democracy, though he feared that rhetorical excesses could lead to anarchy. He considered personal freedom a means to a nobler public end. Through his sister-in-law Virginia Durr, Black kept in close touch with Alabama liberals throughout his distinguished career. John H. Bankhead II defeated Tom He®in and represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate from 1931 until his death in 1946. Son of one of Alabama’s most illustrious political families (his father had served in the U.S. Senate and his brother William was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1917 and in 1934 became Democratic majority leader, then Speaker of the House), Bankhead beat He®in with an unlikely alliance of Big Mules, prohibitionists, and woman suffragists. In of¤ce he became a loyal New Dealer. From powerful positions on the Senate agriculture and banking committees, Bankhead sponsored legislation creating subsistence homesteads for the poor and the 1937 Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy law, creating the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Widely attacked by conservatives, the FSA became one of the New Deal’s most liberal agencies. By the late 1930s Bankhead began to revert to his earlier conservatism. Ties to county agents, Big Mules, and landed interests had remained important to him, and before his death he also played a leading role in blocking Roosevelt’s appointment of Aubrey Williams as head of the Rural Electri¤cation Administration. Lister Hill moved from the House to the U.S. Senate when he beat Tom He®in for Hugo Black’s old seat in a special 1938 election. Although Hill’s prominent Montgomery family provided him an usually ¤ne preparation for life (the Hills were well connected politically, and Lister’s father was a respected surgeon), they had departed from their Catholic and Jewish origins by joining the prohibitionist Methodist church and identifying with child labor reform, day nurseries, and other liberal causes. Despite Big Mule contempt for Tom He®in’s religious demagoguery, they preferred even him to the liberal Hill. So industrialists, timber barons, business leaders, and Farm Bureau of¤cials cast their lot with the aging and sickly He®in while


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Hill won the support of Bibb Graves’s partisans, voters in the Tennessee Valley, urbanites, and most newspapers. Hill relied heavily on his University of Alabama network as well. Fellow student Marc Ray “Little Foots” Clement had organized a powerful machine including fraternities, poorer independents living in dormitories, university law graduates, newspaper people, and liberal supporters of organized labor and social reform. Among Clement’s machine partisans were Kenneth Roberts, Bob Jones, and Carl Elliott. Marc’s brother, Charles “Big Foots” had begun an Arkansas athletic migration (that included Paul “Bear” Bryant) to the university to play football. Charlie had been captain of Alabama’s 1930 Rose Bowl team. And next to football, politics became the Capstone’s favorite sport. In the Senate, Hill backed Roosevelt’s New Deal and prepared for his 1944 reelection campaign. Conservatives, embarrassed by the dreadful He®in candidacy, found themselves a more respectable candidate in the person of Jefferson County legislator and Big Mule partisan James A. “Jimmy” Simpson. True to his conservative convictions, Simpson favored lower corporate taxes, opposed rural electri¤cation (which competed against the politically powerful Alabama Power Company), and even voted against appropriations for such essential educational expenditures as free textbooks. Growing conservative resentment toward FDR contributed to Simpson’s strength. Hill won the hard-fought race with 55 percent of the vote, carrying organized labor, TVA territory, many evangelical church members, and AEA; he also split the farm vote. Strong conservative opposition plus the relative security of a full six-year term turned Hill into a vigorous opponent of the poll tax and defender of TVA. He also backed Aubrey Williams as director of REA and cosponsored the Hill-Burton Act. Actually a more conservative compromise with Pres. Harry S. Truman’s proposal for national health insurance, the act appropriated federal funds to construct hospitals based on per capita income of the state’s population (hence favoring poor southern states such as Alabama). Passed in 1946, the ¤rst Hill-Burton hospital constructed in the nation was in Langdale in the Chattahoochee Valley. By 1968 Hill-Burton hospitals existed in 65 of 67 Alabama counties. Nationally, the law was responsible for 9,200 hospitals with 416,000 beds and had revolutionized American health care, particularly in rural areas. By the 1960s Hill had become perhaps one of the dozen most in®uential U.S. senators of the century.



Within Alabama, Hill enthusiastically backed John Sparkman’s candidacy for John Bankhead’s seat when the state’s senior senator died. Sparkman, son of Tennessee Valley sharecroppers, had worked his way through the University of Alabama, graduating with honors before completing a master’s degree in history. The 1946 alignment matched earlier races, with Sparkman sweeping north Alabama, organized labor, and splitting the farm vote, while planters, Big Mules, and the Farm Bureau backed his opponent. During his 32 years in Congress, Sparkman headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, helped craft bipartisan Cold War foreign policy, and became Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in the 1952 presidential race. He frequently allied with Florida’s New Deal liberal U.S. senator and longtime congressman Claude D. Pepper (a native of Camp Hill and also a University of Alabama graduate). Sparkman’s colleagues in the House were deeply split ideologically. The New Deal component from north Alabama—Albert Rains, Carl Elliott, Kenneth Roberts, Bob Jones, George Huddleston Sr., and Luther Patrick— was consistently prolabor. The most advanced of them (Luther Patrick for instance) also voted to repeal the poll tax. In some ways, the most remarkable of these congressmen was Carl Elliott. Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Elliott worked his way through the University of Alabama, earned a law degree, and in 1948 was elected to Congress. He and Lister Hill joined forces in 1958 to pass the National Defense Education Act, camou®aging their longtime desire for federal funding of education as a matter of national defense at a time when the Russian science and space programs created panic about the quality of America’s public schools. A voracious reader, Elliott also coauthored the Rural Library Act that brought mobile library service to rural America. Literally millions of young Americans experienced the liberating in®uence of books, college, and graduate school because of Carl Elliott’s congressional career. Later he even expanded his racial vision, appealing to black voters and offering Alabamians a moderate alternative to George and Lurleen Wallace in the 1966 gubernatorial race. By no means did Elliott and his liberal colleagues have a monopoly on the affection of state voters. In fact, south Alabama’s congressional delegation (especially after Henry Steagall’s retirement) was as conservative as north Alabama’s was liberal. Mobile’s Frank Boykin grew up a sharecrop-


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per’s son in Choctaw County, as poor as Carl Elliott, and had a 28-year congressional career (1935–63). But there the resemblance ended. Parlaying his skill at acquiring timberland with none-too-ethical concerns about how he obtained the acreage of MOWA (Mobile-Washington) Choctaw Indians or poor subsistence farmers, Boykin became a self-made millionaire. He also mobilized his business connections, conservative social philosophy, opposition to civil rights, and good old boy persona (he furnished national political leaders a vast hunting preserve where trophy deer, turkey, and bear could be slain even if the congressman had to release them from captivity in order to assure a kill). And the sport often included the services of Mobile prostitutes as a bonus. Famous for his non sequitur “Everything’s made for love,” Boykin also proved that liberals like Big Jim Folsom had no monopoly on womanizing, trying to seduce underage Mobile beauty queens, and taking breaks from congressional hearings to fornicate with secretaries, prostitutes, or anyone else available. Twice found guilty of federal crimes, the Te®on-like Boykin never served a day in jail (one conviction was overturned on appeal, and he received a pardon for the other). In Congress, Boykin brought home the bacon to his mainly rural district, fervently lobbied for construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Canal, and tried to block civil rights legislation. At the gubernatorial level, conservatives had better choices to lead them. The Big Mules helped put Frank M. Dixon in of¤ce to succeed Bibb Graves in 1938. Born in California and raised in Virginia, Dixon could match Graves’s elite education. He graduated from the Phillips Exeter Preparatory School and Columbia University, and took his law degree at the University of Virginia. He formed a corporate law ¤rm in Birmingham, fought the 1920s Klan, and represented conservative interests against Bibb Graves in 1934. As governor, he extolled the virtues of economy in government and eliminated six agencies and numerous state jobs. He also created a teacher tenure law and teacher retirement system, as well as state civil service. He forced reform in county assessment of property to make the process more uniform. For all his modernization of state government, Dixon was also antilabor and anti–New Deal, favored the poll tax, and renewed use of the National Guard against strikers. In the legislature he inspired loyalty among men much like himself: well-educated, wealthy, and conservative. Chief among them was million-



aire timberman Earl McGowin, Dixon’s legislative lieutenant in charge of steering administration bills to passage. A University of Alabama Phi Beta Kappa, McGowin continued his education at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Back in Alabama, he disparaged the lower classes much as did Grover Hall and Dixon. When explaining to one friend why he refused to run for governor, the erudite McGowin said: “I don’t chew tobacco, don’t wear overalls, and do wear a mustache which, I am reliably informed, is usually fatal to gubernatorial aspirants. I neither yodel nor sing hillbilly tunes but . . . I’ve studied in England and talk with an Oxford accent.”25 He was correct. That pedigree certainly disquali¤ed him from the rough and tumble class wars of 1930s and ’40s Alabama. McGowin did have fans in the state press. Grover Hall and his cousins continued to advocate a states’ rights conservatism that was racist in the sense of resisting African American attempts to achieve racial equality while at the same time condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Hall wrote proudly in 1942 as Dixon’s term came to an end that race demagoguery was less successful as a political device in Alabama than in neighboring states: “Alabama has had incompetent governors, greedy governors, good, bad, and indifferent governors. But it has been spared the shame of having a vicious governor or one willing to exploit the Negro issue.” That was about to change. As departing Governor Dixon warned when he left of¤ce: southern Democrats must scrutinize “their own party which is dynamiting their social structure, which is arousing bitterness and recrimination, which is attempting to force crackpot reforms on them in a time of national crisis.”26 Chief among these “crackpot reforms” were federal attempts to subvert white supremacy. Hamner Cobbs returned to his family home in Hale county in 1940 to publish the Greensboro Watchman. Like Hall, Cobbs detested the Klan almost as much as he did the New Deal. He defended the poll tax, segregation, farm tenancy, and the Black Belt. Witty, erudite, and widely respected as a journalist even by those who disagreed with him, Cobbs could skewer enemies with a single phrase (as in 1966 when he called Atty. Gen. Nicholas D. Katzenbach “a monumental, overeducated blot on a discerning society”).27 Farther north, Hall and Cobbs found an unlikely ally in Birmingham journalist John Temple Graves. Born in Georgia, educated at Princeton, and


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holding a law degree from George Washington University, Graves supported Roosevelt until the president’s 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court. From that moment on, Graves turned against the New Deal. Described by Newsweek magazine in 1937 as America’s ¤rst successful syndicated columnist, Graves gradually established a substantial regional following for his increasingly conservative opinions. Conservatives could play hardball when occasion demanded, a favorite strategy being to associate liberals with Communism and race mixing. Aubrey Williams’s Alabama Farmers Union sought to organize black and white farmers in a biracial union based on Populist principles. But the 1940s was not the 1890s, as Williams soon discovered. Farm Bureau spokesmen (Williams called the bureau agriculture’s “chamber of commerce”) spread rumors that Williams was a Communist and a theological heretic. Meanwhile, the Farm Bureau had essentially taken over Auburn University with Luther Duncan’s election as the school’s president in 1935. Even some Farm Bureau people complained about “Duncanism” (his manipulation of agricultural politics through Auburn’s county agents), and former bureau president J. D. Hays later admitted that the agricultural agenda at the university was an example of the “tail . . . wagging the dog.”28 The bureau employed Ed L. Lowder to move the farm organization into insurance, making it even more a Big Mule institution (but ultimately also leading the national Farm Bureau to expel its Alabama af¤liate when it began to hawk insurance in neighboring states). Between the bureau and the Cattlemen’s Association, they pretty well determined the fate of agricultural matters coming before the legislature and powerfully in®uenced tax policy as well. Rural Alabama was by no means the only center of conservative power. Mobile regularly voted for conservative candidates, and Birmingham was a ¤ercely contested battle¤eld. An unlikely Big Mule triumvirate ruled the Magic City in the 1930s and ’40s. James M. “Jimmy” Jones Jr. won election as president of the threeperson city commission in 1925 and held the of¤ce until his death in 1940. A trucking executive initially supported by the Klan, Jones was able to slash city services and ¤re employees during the 1930s despite resistance from two other commissioners. Jones gained an important ally on the commission in 1936 with the election of Eugene “Bull” Connor, who ironically ran as a reformer and



with some labor backing because of his childhood poverty, early union membership, and career as a baseball broadcaster. The two of them constituted a majority against unionism, public housing, and political radicalism. Though they seldom openly criticized the New Deal, they sabotaged its programs and candidates at every opportunity. Despite his lack of education and his autocratic ways (as public safety commissioner, Connor referred to his favorite policemen as “my nigguhs,” used threats of police raids to raise campaign funds, and transferred policemen who opposed him to bad details), Connor seldom lost. Corruption, cronyism, and low police morale characterized his four terms as commissioner. Despite a 1951 sexual scandal (he was arrested with his secretary in a room at the Tutwiler Hotel), the city’s Big Mules loved him for his ruthless prosecution of black and white “agitators” and “radicals.” In 1938, for instance, Connor tried to break up the organizing meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at the city’s Municipal Auditorium. With his infamous malapropism “Negroes and whites will not segregate together,”29 Connor forced the 1,500 distinguished delegates (including ¤rst lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Gov. Bibb Graves) to separate according to race on different sides of the auditorium. The third member of the Birmingham triumvirate was James A. Simpson. He was as unlikely a member as Connor. As a corporate lawyer and banker, he had appropriate Big Mule credentials. But there was a hidden past: his farmer father had belonged to a utopian commonwealth in southern Georgia based on Marxist principles. Simpson renounced his father’s radicalism, denounced the Klan, supported Oscar Underwood, and was the chief legislative water boy for the city’s Big Mules. Elected to the lower house of the legislature in 1926, he moved up to the senate eight years later. As head of anti–Bibb Graves, anti–New Deal legislative forces, he attacked one base of their support, the spoils system. He was able to enact a civil service system for Birmingham and Jefferson county that reduced the power of his opponents by stripping their appointment of public of¤cials. As a legislative ally of governors Frank Dixon and Chauncey Sparks, he promoted conservative causes. In 1944 and 1946 he ran close, Big Mule– funded but losing campaigns against Lister Hill and John Sparkman. What provoked Jones, Connor, and Simpson to oppose the New Deal was the rapid spread of liberalism in the city. By 1934 the city was like a stirred ant bed, vibrating with union and radical causes. The United Mine


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Workers succeeded in organizing most Alabama coal miners by the end of that year, and the Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC) did the same in 1937. The specter of tens of thousands of Birmingham-area unionists constituted an apocalyptic vision capable of throwing Big Mules into full-scale panic. The racial demography of the workforce revealed even worse news. African Americans constituted 41 percent of steelworkers, 56 percent of iron ore miners, and 63 percent of coal miners. CIO efforts had increased black participation in Birmingham’s unions to 30 percent by 1940. And although Communists numbered no more than 250 of these workers, their presence in Birmingham afforded conservatives a convenient target for counterattack. Because blacks constituted only 2 percent of city voters despite their 38 percent population and increasing dominance both of industrial jobs and union membership, they could not enlarge the city’s liberal political forces. That is where Connor played such a key role. Under his direction, police organized the “Red Squad” to handle radicals. TCI/U.S. Steel cooperated with city police by placing its security head in charge of union busting. Local radical Joseph Gelders identi¤ed him as the leader of a gang of toughs who beat him senseless with a baseball bat. Augmented by right-wing terrorism by the Klan, White Legion, American Legion, Silver Shirts, and Alabama Blackshirts, establishment violence against Communists and labor organizers in the 1930s soon became a familiar part of the city’s racial history as well. U.S. Steel was properly secretive about its role in such affairs, keeping a low pro¤le and destroying or squirreling records away from historians, including its role in establishing the League to Maintain White Supremacy to aid Simpson in his 1944 Senate race. Charles DeBardeleben had no such scruples. The son of Birmingham patriarch Henry F. DeBardeleben, “Uncle Charlie” (as he preferred his coal miners refer to him) hated labor unions as much as he loved Auburn football. He not only mounted machine guns to keep labor organizers off his coal mine property but also helped establish an antiunion, prosegregation magazine, Alabama: The News Magazine of the Deep South, as the unof¤cial voice of Big Mules. He secretly funded a black newspaper to advise blacks against joining unions. And he also helped bankroll James Simpson’s political career. Birmingham conservatives ¤nally remembered a classic lesson of



Alabama politics: if they shouted “nigger” often enough and loud enough, the white working class would listen. Gradually white New Dealers such as Klan activist Horace C. Wilkinson deserted liberalism for the anti-Negro states’ rights movement. Skilled workers followed, as did even some white CIO members. By the late 1940s Birmingham liberalism was in full retreat, symbolized by antilabor candidate Laurie Battle’s victory over Luther Patrick in the 1946 congressional race. The following year, Alabama’s entire congressional delegation except Lister Hill voted for the antilabor TaftHartley Act. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement precipitated another phase in the conservative resurgence. The revolt of Democratic conservatives against their party that year may be viewed entirely as a reaction to Harry S. Truman’s liberal civil rights agenda. But that would be a mistake. Conservatives had taken an increasingly anti–New Deal stance since the late 1930s, a trend that picked up momentum in the 1940s. Strong conservative governors such as Frank Dixon and Big Mule legislative leaders such as James Simpson had provided them competent leadership. Now it was New Deal liberals who were on the defensive, not Big Mule conservatives. Dixiecrats also plucked allies from among 1920s progressives: prohibitionists, Klansmen, religious evangelicals and fundamentalists, white unionists. Together they took control of the state Democratic executive committee and much of the party apparatus. They elected states’ righters to half the delegate slots to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, who walked out when delegates passed Truman’s civil rights proposals. The loyalist half who remained (including alternate delegate George C. Wallace) denounced the bolters and remained faithful to the national party. Some 6,000 States’ Rights Democrats descended on Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium in July 1948, the same building that had given birth to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare a decade earlier. Confederate ®ags drooped on staffs in the sti®ing meeting hall while the band played verse after verse of Dixie, inspiring delegates to utter frequent Rebel yells. Most delegates came from Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina and were largely unknowns, though a few were second-rank political stars such as Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Gov. Fielding Wright of Mississippi (who became the new party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees, respectively), former Alabama governor Frank Dixon, and


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Mississippi’s U.S. senators James Eastland and John Stennis. Local Baptist preacher John Buchanan delivered the invocation in which he prayed that God might purge prejudice from the delegates’ hearts. His prayer did not have the desired effect, as a series of stem-winding racist speeches soon demonstrated. The ¤rst morning’s events ended with a Texas speaker blaming the nation’s problems on New Englanders who brought “howling, screaming savages” to America from Africa.30 Assorted hatemongers wandered the convention ®oor, among them Gerald L. K. Smith, anti-Semitic founder of the Christian Nationalist Party; J. E. Perkins, anti-Semitic author of The Jews Have Got the Atom Bomb; J. B. Stoner, founder of the AntiJewish Party; and Jessie Welch Jenkins, head of the Patrick Henry Organization that favored abolition of both national parties. Horace Wilkinson, now in full retreat from his earlier New Deal affections, helped organize the meeting. In their subsequent Alabama campaign, the party apparatus assured a Dixiecrat victory by giving the party space under the Democratic symbol (in Alabama the ¤ghting rooster had appropriately replaced the historic donkey, above which appeared the party’s motto: “White Supremacy for the Right”). Organized labor, Gov. Jim Folsom, and north Alabama congressmen tried in vain to hold Democratic voters in line. They were more successful after Thurmond’s victory in the state, winning a hard-fought battle for control of the state Democratic executive committee. Purged from power, a number of states’ righters began what would become a half-century migration of conservative white Democrats into the Republican Party. In 1940 the GOP had taken only 14 percent of Alabama’s presidential vote. In 1952 it won 35 percent despite the presence on the Democratic ticket of Alabama’s own vice presidential nominee, John Sparkman. The Politics of Race, 1958–2000 Despite the endurance of ideological bifactionalism that split the Democratic Party into liberal (except on race) and conservative wings, state voters had begun a process of signi¤cant realignment. Whereas the story of Alabama politics was diverse before 1962, with many centers of power, from that date forward all lines of power ran through



George Wallace, who was without question the most successful, nationally in®uential, and powerful Alabama politician in history. But Wallace was only the most obvious evidence of much broader changes in the state’s political culture. Race increasingly de¤ned all political discourse, reducing both class and section to secondary importance. By the end of the 1960s, repeal of the poll tax and the 1965 Federal Voting Rights Act had enfranchised hundreds of thousands of black voters, and in political reaction nearly that many whites had registered. More than 1 million voters cast ballots in the 1980s, twice as many as before 1965. Forced federal reapportionment of the legislature had realigned the political balance between rural and urban Alabama. The new racial politics had put two of Alabama’s most venerable political traditions—friends-and-neighbors voting and courthouse gangs—on life support. New political action committees (PACs) littered the political landscape, creating huge caches of money for the expensive, media-driven television campaigns that replaced political rallies on courthouse squares. The two-party system challenged Democratic hegemony at the same time it enforced discipline on that party (the individualistic “every man for himself ” Democratic ethos slowly withered). The rise of Sunbelt prosperity, epitomized by Huntsville’s aerospace industry, required a new, high-tech labor force and better schools. This reality both eroded support for labor unions as Alabama lost manufacturing jobs and increased support for tax reform in order to improve public education and transportation, add cultural amenities, and improve the state’s woeful image. Religion, which had developed strong social justice components, increasingly polarized along racial lines. Black churches provided the backbone of the civil rights movement while white churches overwhelmingly mobilized against it or at best remained neutral. Coupled with white evangelical reaction against Supreme Court decisions that banned state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in schools and various secular assaults on conservative religious values (the women’s, antiwar, and gay rights movements, abortion, birth control, pornography) the so-called Religious Right stormed the ballot box. Politically mobilized in 1980 by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and afterward by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, white Christian conservatives provided many foot soldiers for the Republican takeover of the state supreme court and other public of¤ces. Nationally, the percent


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of registered voters actually casting ballots declined. But in Alabama politics retained a raw and compulsive passion second only to college football in its power to mobilize citizens. The planter–Big Mule alliance that had dominated Alabama politics for half a century initially gained strength from racial polarization. But later it came unglued due to the civil rights movement, Voting Rights Act, urbanrural clashes, the metropoliticization of Alabama (especially the migration into the state of new high-skill, well-educated populations), clashes over demands for improved infrastructures, and a slow but steady modernization that accompanied Sunbelt growth. The Black Belt wing of the old Bourbon regime was ¤ghting for its life by the 1960s and virtually gone by century’s end. Between 1940 and 1960 alone, the region lost more than 4 percent of its population, while Jefferson, Mobile, and Etowah Counties grew by nearly 50 percent. Within these counties, some Big Mules reluctantly conceded the obvious: rapid economic growth was incompatible with low property taxes, poor schools, wretched social services, a poorly trained labor force, racial polarization, and widespread poverty. Elites particularly and increasingly grated over the state’s backward image and inef¤cient government. The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University reported in the February 1, 1999, issue of USA Today that it had ranked Alabama as the poorest governed state in America (it was the only state to earn an average grade of D on the ¤ve categories of ¤nancial management, human resources, information technology, capital management, and planning). The report cited numerous court orders required to guarantee minimum state services, discrimination law suits, and almost total lack of ¤nancial planning or an information technology system. The 2001 report recorded slight improvements in some areas but still ranked the state as the worst governed in America. This embarrassment resulted primarily from lack of funds, vision, leadership, and staff, not from malfeasance or corruption. As late as the 1990s most Alabama legislators had no access to a major research staff or personal secretary. That was one reason lobbyists proliferated. As public policy issues became more complicated, lack of independent staff forced legislators to rely on lobbyists for information on nearly every bill that came before them. So powerful did PACS become that even lobbyists began referring to themselves as the “third house” of the legislature or as the “secret government.”



Alabama’s secret government was highly unrepresentative of its population. Of the more than 500 PACs at the beginning of the new century (up from 10 in 1974 and 188 in 1988), the overwhelming majority represented individual businesses (39 percent in 1990) or business groups and professional associations (35 percent). Labor unions accounted for a mere 2 percent in 1990, as did education groups. Most lobbyists were males (82 percent), white (96 percent), conservative (54 percent), college graduates or postgraduates (86 percent). By 2001 the major players were not necessarily the earlier ones that had dominated the ¤rst two-thirds of the century. ALFA remained a huge player within Alabama’s secret government even as the number of farmers fell both in the legislature and general population. By 2000 only one fulltime farmer served in the 35-member state senate and three in the 105member house. Farmers represented less than 2 percent of the population. But thanks mainly to “voluntary” fees added on to ALFA insurance policies and seldom explained to customers, ALFA ranked in the top four PACs (with more than $2 million to dole out during an election cycle). Its in®uence was decisive in passing current-use tax legislation as well as blocking tax, education, and constitutional reform. ALFA could rightly claim credit for much of Alabama’s backwardness. And the arrogance of the organization under the leadership of John Dorrill and Goodwin Myrick was breathtaking. In 1994 Myrick boasted to a reporter for the Anniston Star: “We got Fob James. I feel like we did. We got Jeff Sessions. I’ll tell you another one we got. We got the Supreme Court chief justice. Do you know how important that is?” On another occasion, he told a reporter: “We should have just told the House to adjourn.”31 Big Mules were well represented at century’s end through the Business Council of Alabama, which had nearly $3 million to distribute. Of 91 legislators who listed their occupations in 1990, 78 percent classi¤ed themselves as professional, managerial, or clerical. Only 1—a die maker— referred to himself as a laborer, and only 2 were homemakers. Such a con¤guration resulted partly from the power of organized business. In 1983 Birmingham industrialist Charles B. Webb Jr., accusing Alabama of having the most liberal, antibusiness legislature in history, challenged the business community to action. The result was organization of the Business Council of Alabama, another of the state’s big four. After a brief reign of uni¤ed


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effectiveness, the council split in 1996 over the independent lobbying effort of its most powerful member, Alabama Power Company. Long one of the dominant Big Mules, the utility forced legislation through that required industry either to use Alabama Power–generated electricity or pay a fee. A secession by manufacturers led to formation of the Alabama Industry and Manufacturers Association. Early in the century Big Mules rallied their business constituencies around the alleged peril from organized labor. But by end-of-century unions were largely a contrived bogeyman that inspired little panic among business (though Paul Hubbert of AEA served as a convenient union surrogate to demonize). So the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association became the new threat to all business held sacred—notably protection from high jury settlements. Blunted in the legislature by a coalition of labor, blacks, trial lawyers, and AEA, the council increasingly focused its attention on supreme court races. By pouring money into judicial campaigns, business was able to elect a bench favorable to tort reform (limitations of punitive damages awarded by juries in liability cases). Trial lawyers protected their interests by raising the most money of any PAC, followed closely by the Business Council. And though they lost control of the supreme court, their legislative alliance held ¤rm. The other big four PAC was A-VOTE, Alabama Education Association’s PAC. It had $2 million to dispense in 1990 campaigns. More importantly, it had Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert, the shrewdest politician in Alabama even though he never held elective of¤ce. ALFA, businessmen, and Republicans blocked Hubbert’s gubernatorial ambitions by depicting him as a dangerous labor union boss whose concern was limited to the welfare of teachers, not the children they taught. Hubbert presided over the merged white AEA and the black Alabama State Teachers Association and installed ASTA leader Joe Reed as his second in command. Reed was the founder and long-term leader of the ¤rst powerful statewide black political organization, the Alabama Democratic Conference. After mobilizing legislators to block Gov. George Wallace’s attempt to divert teacher retirement funds to solve mental health problems in 1971 (the Hubbert-Reed team stunned Wallace with a 72–9 legislative defeat), AEA emerged as perhaps the state’s most effective PAC. By adding lunchroom workers, bus drivers,



and community college faculty to its ranks, AEA spiked its membership to more than 70,000. Although these four PACs were the proverbial elephants among hundreds of mice, other in®uential new interest groups carved out spheres of in®uence. As racial tensions diminished, New South Coalition challenged the Alabama Democratic Conference for political in®uence among African Americans. Organized by urban black leaders—Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington, Selma’s Hank Sanders, and Mobile’s Michael Figures— New South eclipsed ADC by the 1990s. White religious conservatives mobilized around “culture wars” issues such as support for school prayers and Bible reading, and opposition to abortion, homosexuality, gay rights, feminism, women’s rights, salacious movies and television programs, and the general secularization of society. Consisting mainly of the Alabama Family Alliance (Christian Coalition), Eagle Forum, and the Alabama Baptist State Convention, this coalition moved from second rank to major player with a defeat of Gov. Don Siegelman’s proposed state lottery. PACs took on more and more power as campaign ¤nance became a larger issue and a weak ethics law created inviting targets of opportunity. By end-of-century, statehouse races, which could be run for $10,000 in the 1980s, cost $200,000. The cost of senate races increased from $25,000 to $500,000, and this for a part-time job paying a salary of less than $40,000 annually. PACs, loaded with nearly $8 million in potential campaign contributions by 2000, could contribute money to legislators while legislation lobbyists wanted passed or killed waited in their committees. If lobbyists had received no favorable votes for these contributions, the contributions obviously would have stopped. This was possible because of Alabama’s weak ethics laws. The original ethics law did not fund the agency adequately or provide it subpoena power to compel testimony (the Alabama Ethics Commission was the only such state agency in the U.S. without subpoena power). Though public pressure forced improved staf¤ng and funding, PACs under state law could still contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns, hide contributions by transferring them from one PAC to another, and spend up to $250 per day to wine, dine, and entertain legislators without even a report to the commission. Meals, golf trips, beach parties, and other fringe bene¤ts turned


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Orange Beach and Gulf Shores into Alabama’s unof¤cial capital where the real business of government got done. In one session ¤lled with gallows humor, the legislature passed a “reform” requiring that lobbyists wishing to contribute to legislators while bills they favored were being considered had to do so in legislative of¤ces rather than in halls, thus avoiding traf¤c congestion and the appearance of impropriety. The ethical principle that legislators should not vote on matters that bene¤ted them directly seemed a foreign, liberal, perhaps even Communistic violation of old-time Alabama tradition. In May 2000, for instance, 49 legislators with ties to Alabama public schools, colleges, and universities (the highest percentage of any state legislature) voted in favor of a 4 percent pay raise for all public school employees. That year, Gov. Don Siegelman had strong AEA support; house speaker Seth Hammett was president of Lurleen B. Wallace Junior College; senate president pro tem Lowell Barron served as an Auburn University trustee; and his wife worked at Northeast Alabama Community College. Of course businessmen and trial lawyer legislators also voted on tort reform and farmers on farm legislation. But none of them came close to equaling the number of educator legislators. Lobbying in Alabama, like politics, was highly personal and often lucrative. The most effective lobbyists—John Dorrill, Jr. (Alabama Farmers Federation–ALFA), Paul Hubbert (AEA), Barney Weeks (Alabama Labor Council), or the ¤rm of Fine and Geddie—raised interest group politics to a high art. Often in®uential former legislators themselves (Joe Fine) or longtime heads of powerful and well-funded interest groups (Hubbert, Weeks, Dorrill), these men cultivated long-term legislative relationships, supplied critical data, carefully scrutinized complex legislation affecting them, and provided legislators various personal services. Sometimes the personal services could be overextended, as when a lobbyist for a telephone company took too literally the ad campaign of an industry giant, “reach out and touch someone.” The lobbyist provided a legislator the services of a prostitute, whose activities violated provisions of the 1973 ethics law prohibiting a lobbyist from providing “a thing of value.”32 The jury that convicted did not speculate about what the “thing of value” had cost, though she seemed to have provided above-average value to the company. To be fair, the lack of an independent state legislative reference service for most of the century, which could have provided legislators objective data, and their



part-time pay for what was increasingly a full-time job made them vulnerable to lobbyists services. But the result was nonetheless all too obvious. When asked by an opinion poll at the beginning of the 21st century who controlled government in Alabama, 8 percent said the people, 20 percent answered the legislature, 30 percent listed the governor, and 40 percent cited special interests. One reason for such public cynicism was a rising tide of political scandal. Consecutive administrations from 1962 forward (George Wallace, Guy Hunt, James Folsom Jr., Fob James, and Don Siegelman) were tainted by scandals. One reached all the way into the governors of¤ce. The others involved close relatives, cabinet members, or appointees. In April 1993 an Alabama jury found Republican governor Guy Hunt a farmer, Amway salesman, and bivocational preacherguilty of ethics violations for diverting $200,000 from his tax-exempt inaugural fund to his personal use. A cynical electorate smelled political partisanship in the conviction of the states ¤rst Republican governor since Reconstruction. The New York Times (under a revealing headline that announced Hunts Fall Cant Hurt Alabama Politics Reputation) quoted one angry citizen as saying: I think if theyd been on the other Governors like they got on Hunt, theyd have got all of them. And a fellow Primitive Baptist excused Hunts crime as the result of his lack of education: Whatever Brother Hunts done, he only did it because he didnt know what he was doing.33 Removing Hunt from of¤ce ended one set of problems but precipitated another. No sooner did James Folsom Jr. assume of¤ce than his advisers went on a looting spree of their own. Before it ended, James Dill (state insurance commissioner), John Smith (director of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management), Dan Turner (with the Alabama Center for Quality and Productivity), Ray Campbell (head of the Alabama Center for Quality and Productivity), and key legislative allies Bill Drinkard and John Tanner had either been indicted or pleaded guilty to ethics violations. When Fob James became governor he lobbied hard for vigorous prosecution of Folsoms cronies, but then defended his indicted highway director, who pleaded guilty to similar violations. Don Siegelmans administration experienced similar problems. As the public began to express outrage at such practices, Alabamas political establishment circled the wagons. Convictions of key legislators (Bill


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Drinkard had been chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee before turning to a more lucrative career as a Montgomery lobbyist) came too close for comfort. One legislator refused to cooperate with an investigation of his income tax returns, citing legislative immunity. State senator Lowell Barron mobilized the same defense against multiple speeding tickets. Rep. Thomas Reed of Tuskegee, who served prison time for extortion before his citizenship rights were restored and he was reelected to the legislature, raged at a legislative proposal to allow Gov. Fob James to pardon Hunt. Democratic house speaker Jimmy Clark termed Hunts administration a complete ®op and House Speaker Pro Tem Jim Campbell of Anniston admitted that talking to Governor Hunt is like watching reruns of The Andy Grif¤th Show. But Clark also felt sorry for Hunt: He did a lot of things he didnt realize were illegal.34 That logic carried the day. Hunt won a pardon, regained his rights, and early in the new century ran for the legislature, proving once again that ethics laws could make political corruption illegal in Alabama but could never make it unpopular. Taxes remained a central public policy issue of the state, and the conservative coalition that had put the 1901 constitution in place rallied repeatedly to defend their handiwork. A March 24, 1999, report by the Bloomberg List of Wealth Friendliest States ranked Alabama third behind Wyoming and Nevada as most supportive of wealth and most opposed to taxes. Ironically the announcement came one day after the U.S. Supreme Court declared Alabamas franchise tax unconstitutional for taxing out-of-state corporations at a higher rate than state companies. Demanding that taxpayers from other states fund Alabamas expenditures was another longstanding state tradition. Because Alabama was one of the nations poorest states, income revenue transfers (higher taxes on populations in wealthy states in order to pump money into poor states, a policy that took shape during the New Deal) greatly bene¤ted its citizens. For every tax dollar that Alabamians sent to Washington during the 1990s, they received approximately 1.3 dollars in federal spending. By 1992 federal funds accounted for 58 percent of Alabamas state budget, the highest rate in the nation. In 1996 the State Department of Education received nearly 90 percent of its budget in federal funds. Medicaid got more than 70 percent; the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, 86 percent; Emergency Management, 92 percent. Government spending from all sources provided 31 percent of



total nonagricultural employment in Tuscaloosa, 27 percent in Anniston, 25 percent in Montgomery, 24 percent in Huntsville, 21 percent in Dothan, 16 percent in Birmingham, 14 percent in Mobile, 13 percent in Gadsden. During the same period, Alabama ranked 49th or 50th in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (with a maximum welfare bene¤t of $164 a month for a mother and two children in 1996). While Goodwin Myrick, head of ALFA, raged against the welfare system, he also warned the national Republican Party against a proposed seven-year farm bill that would end federal subsidies to farmers. Obviously federal welfare was not the issue in Alabama. The issue was who received such assistance. Meanwhile crises growing from the states regressive and inadequate tax system steadily worsened. Court orders against the state for inadequate or inequitable funding of public schools, mental health facilities, prisons, foster children, and other basic services earned the state increasingly negative national and international attention. In 1996 Citizens for Tax Justice listed Alabama as one of the Terrible 10 states for excessive taxation of poor and middle-class citizens. In 2000 ¤nancial woes piled up as a result of franchise lawsuits against the state for a return of $680 million unconstitutionally collected against out-of-state corporations. David Bronner, director of Alabamas retirement system and the nearest thing to a political statesman to be found in state government, denounced the states system as the most screwed-up tax system in America, bar none.35 ARISE, a new lobby for poor people, publicized inequities and managed to prick the consciences of the states mainline religious denominations. In 2001 Alabamas white Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians all adopted resolutions calling for tax reform. Alabama might be the buckle of the Bible Belt, but these well-meaning resolutions got nowhere in a legislature controlled by PAC power, not by pious Christian platitudes. Nor did evangelicals devote the political energy to just taxation that they directed at defeating a state lottery. A series of journalistic exposés revealed the price Alabama paid for being the ¤rst state to provide its citizens tax freedom. A 1990 series in the Birmingham News won Ron Casey, Harold Jackson, and Joey Kennedy the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The states personal income in 2001 ranked 42nd among all states. Economic momentum ranked 36th. Rankings on per pupil spending came in at 48th place, jobless bene¤ts and


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aid to dependent families in 50th, prison corrections of¤cers in 50th, ¤re protection at 38th, expenditures on highways at 43rd. After midnight no troopers patrolled thousands of miles of Alabama highways in 2003. Environmental conditions were calamitous because of per capita spending that dropped the state into 50th place. Drinking water quality ranked 41st (the Wall Street Journal reported in 1997 that Alabama was the only state in the South not to allocate money toward gaining a multimillion-dollar federal grant for improvements in water quality because the state could not fund the required state match). The state was 1 of only 2 without mandatory dam inspections, thanks mainly to opposition from ALFA. Only 3 of 67 counties had zoning authority. The national “poison index” (pounds of toxic waste released into waterways and air per person) also awarded the state a dubious 2nd place distinction among all states. In 1990 the Institute for Southern Studies ranked Alabama last among southern states in environmental health. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management was so weak, underfunded, and dominated by the interests it was supposed to regulate that polluters were asked to help fund the agency, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency threatened to assume its duties. Threatened federal takeover was a familiar pattern in Alabama, part of what one federal judge contemptuously referred to as the “Alabama punt syndrome.” Drawing the inevitable analogy from football, the meaning was clear: when a team was backed up to its own goal line and unable to generate any offense, the team needed to punt the ball to the other team. Alabama’s political system, with a hundred-year record of not being able to solve its own problems in race relations, education, humane prisons, mental institutions, human resources, reapportionment, treatment of women, children, or the poor, simply punted the ball to federal courts. Then when forced to ¤x the problems, legislators with notoriously weak spines loudly denounced meddling federal judges. Of course the problem for much of the century was rural political domination of an increasingly urban state. Refusing to abide by the constitutional requirement to reapportion the state every 10 years (and given immunity from violating their own constitution by the state supreme court), rural legislators unconstitutionally retained their stranglehold until the 1960s. Jeffer-



son County with a ¤fth of the state’s population elected only 1 of 35 senators and 7 of 105 representatives. Wilcox County also elected 1 senator. Wilcox contained 16,000 people; Jefferson County, 600,000. The 1960 census precipitated a political crisis, revealing that slow population growth had cost Alabama 1 of 9 congressmen. Unable to agree on a reapportionment plan, the legislature made all 9 run statewide for 8 seats, with the lowest votegetter eliminated. Rural legislators from the Black Belt and northern Alabama also attempted to carve “Imperial Jefferson” County into four pieces, each located in a different congressional district. This proposal triggered a 78-hour ¤libuster that united many urban legislators and signaled the beginning of the end of the planter–Big Mule coalition. Subsequent Supreme Court rulings (Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Simms) imposed the principle of “one man one vote” whereby the legislative power of a single vote in one county had to be worth approximately the same as a single vote in another. A Mobile case (Bolden v. Mobile) led to further re¤nement, requiring public of¤cials to run from single districts within cities and counties rather than in county- or citywide general elections. These rulings not only greatly reduced rural power but also forced single-district elections that gave greater representation to speci¤c populations within neighborhoods. This led to an unlikely coalition in a state where Democrats had completely monopolized county- or citywide at-large elections. By replacing general at-large elections with single districts, black Democrats were more likely to win of¤ce from their neighborhoods and white Republicans from theirs. The losers were white Democrats. In a variety of lawsuits, liberal black Democrats joined with conservative white Republicans to successfully redraw district lines that enhanced their political power. Although conservative white Republicans from urban areas such as Birmingham voted much like old-time Big Mules, black Democrats neutralized them. By end-of-century Jefferson’s legislative delegation was equally split between black Democrats and white Republicans. In 2001, for the ¤rst time in 100 years, the Alabama legislature successfully reapportioned itself. A special session called by Governor Siegelman swept aside objections both from black lobbyist Joe Reed and Republicans to reapportion both congressional districts and the legislature in ways that protected black majority districts while giving white Democrats a better chance by slightly increas-


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ing the black minority population in other districts. Federal courts at last upheld an Alabama legislative reapportionment, proving that Alabamians could occasionally solve their own problems without outside interference. That was most certainly not the case with George C. Wallace, Alabama’s most in®uential 20th-century politician. Wallace had four ideological phases and a matching number of political careers. Before 1962 he was a populistic ally of Big Jim Folsom and the national loyalist wing of the state Democratic Party. After his defeat by John Patterson in the 1958 gubernatorial election (in which Wallace was the “liberal” candidate appealing for the New Deal and Negro vote and Patterson won Klan endorsement), Wallace allegedly vowed never to be “outniggered” again (a charge he denied but several others con¤rmed). In his successful gubernatorial campaigns in 1962 and 1966 (on behalf of his wife Lurleen), and in 1970, he represented strident racism at its worst. After hundreds of thousands of blacks registered to vote, Wallace apologized for his earlier racism and drifted in a more liberal direction during his 1974 and 1982 races. After Republicans began to sweep state elections, he changed again, endorsing the GOP. More opportunist than anything else, Wallace at one stage or another of his career betrayed populism, liberalism, conservatism, and even racism. His career began as an astute county judge and state legislator. He made his second career as a charismatic, combative Alabama governor standing up to the federal government. His third career propelled him into four national presidential campaigns (1964, 1968, 1972, 1976). He ended his political career as a champion of racial reconciliation during two more gubernatorial terms. Wallace was born in 1919 to a politically well-connected but ¤nancially insecure family in Barbour County. A job with a New Deal agency helped him through high school and into the University of Alabama. At the university, Wallace waited tables to pay room and board and earned spending money driving a cab and clerking in the registrar’s of¤ce. Northern students remembered him as friendly and unpretentious. Nonfraternity and -sorority students remembered Wallace describing himself as a GDI (goddamned independent), and they elected him president of the freshman class. But his outsider status did him no good at a machine-dominated school, and the powerful fraternity system trounced his political campaigns after his freshman year. If he had frustrations about losing political races on campus, he may well have taken them out on fraternity boys foolish enough



to step into the boxing ring with him. As a bantamweight division boxer, Wallace was undefeated his ¤rst year, knocking out half his opponents. Fraternity boys might make fun of Wallace’s unsophisticated ways behind his back. In his presence, they kept their peace—and their noses intact. Proceeding rapidly through his combined undergraduate and law school curriculum, Wallace found time to court and marry Lurleen Burns, a fetching teenage dime store clerk of even more humble origin than Wallace. The outbreak of world war hastened his marriage. Wallace served as a crewman of a Paci¤c Theater B-29 and carried debilitating psychological wounds from his service. He returned from the Paci¤c to tend his growing family and launch his political career. Doing both well proved impossible. So he concentrated on politics and left Lurleen to manage the family’s meager ¤nancial resources and four children. In his successful race for the state legislature, Wallace was as liberal a candidate as the state produced in the 1940s. He advocated better veterans’ bene¤ts, higher welfare, old age and Social Security payments, more money for mental hospitals, schools, and health care, and won the epitaph from conservatives as the legislature’s leading “do-gooder.” He proposed scholarships for medical students willing to practice in rural areas and opposed a sales tax as regressive. He also sponsored bills that allowed municipalities to ®oat bonds to ¤nance new industrial facilities. He was allied to Gov. Jim Folsom and the national loyalist wing of the Democratic Party. Frustrated by conservative control of the legislature and seeking a platform for his own career, Wallace decided not to seek reelection to the legislature. Instead he beat a conservative candidate for circuit judge in Barbour County, where he built a reputation for fair treatment of black and poor white plaintiffs. He also befriended men like Seymour Trammel, a white tenant farmer’s son who would become a key adviser. Traveling incessantly on behalf of both Folsom and his own ambitions, Wallace carefully cultivated courthouse gangs so essential to political power in the 1940s and ’50s. Convinced the time was right, Wallace declared for governor in 1958 but lost to John Patterson (who on matters other than race was nearly as liberal as Wallace). Impatiently biding his time, Wallace also altered his politics to conform with the growing rage of white Alabamians over racial integration.


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By the time of his gubernatorial victory in 1962, Wallace had adopted Pattersons 1958 racist assumptions, a point made unmistakable in the new governors January 1963 inaugural speech (where he proclaimed segregation forever and hurled the gauntlet of de¤ance at the federal government). He had already found Alabamas new generation of villains. They were not the fraternity boys, sons of planters and Big Mules, who had run the state for their own bene¤t for half a century. They were Washington bureaucrats who couldnt park their bicycles straight. Or, more ominously, they were traitorous white Alabamians like federal judge Frank M. Johnson, a former university classmate and friend, whose family had often provided Wallace with meals. Wallace now demonized Johnson publicly as an integrating, scallawagging, carpetbagging liar (or when drinking with friends privately as a no-good goddamn lying son-of-bitching race-mixing bastard).36 Only months into his new administration, Wallace encountered his date with destiny. Martin Luther King Jr. had brought national attention to the state by launching a new phase of the civil rights movement in Birmingham that Easter. As summer arrived, Wallace matched the sweltering heat with speeches that in®amed his constituency, even as state newspaper editors warned that Wallaces strident rhetoric about Communist domination of the movement and its ultimate aim of intermarriage and miscegenation overstepped the boundaries of responsible political discourse. In Birmingham there was an alarming coincidence between Wallace speeches to angry white crowds and subsequent violent attacks on African Americans. But it was after his stand in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama that history surprised Wallace. Confronting federal of¤cials on national television with states rights doctrine, Wallace suddenly found himself a celebrated hero of Americas political right. With Wisconsins Sen. Joseph McCarthy now in disgrace and a liberal Democratic administration in Washington (which had followed a moderate Republican president who had sent federal troops to enforce integration in Little Rock, Arkansas), the nations political right had no national champion. Wallace seemed a strange champion to thoughtful American conservatives. One northeastern Libertarian dismissed him as a country and western Marxist because of his appeal to blue-collar voters. But such criticism from stuffy elites was precisely what endeared Wallace to common folks. In



the days after Wallace’s Tuscaloosa confrontation (all carefully orchestrated with Washington of¤cials beforehand), the governor received a hundred thousand letters and telegrams of congratulation, many of them from nonsoutherners. Wallace realized that his message had a potential audience far larger than he had imagined. As one civil rights confrontation followed another, Wallace’s popularity increased. Within Alabama the governor silenced critics by threats from the newly established State Sovereignty Commission, which prepared ¤les on thousands of suspicious ministers, college professors, civil rights leaders, and other potential subversives. In speeches, pamphlets, and a state-made movie about alleged orgies on the Selma-to-Montgomery march, the Wallace administration linked civil rights activists to Communism, interracial sex, and perversion. The 58-minute ¤lm was widely circulated in the South by white citizens’ councils and in other regions by right-wing conservative groups. The director of public relations for the John Birch Society requested the ¤lm for a showing in San Marino, California. The Anti-Communist Committee of Western New York requested material for his region, and the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties sponsored a showing in Virginia. The executive secretary of the Indiana Committee for Captive Nations praised Wallace’s 1965 appearance on national television’s popular interview program Face the Nation, connecting Christianity, patriotism, and political conservatism: “Freedom and Christianity are now in great danger by the Anti-Christ Forces masquerading behind Communism. De¤nitely this is what is causing all the trouble in Alabama and the nation.”37 This became a regular theme in Wallace’s correspondence, demonstrating that the Methodist governor played a major role in mobilizing white evangelical Christians nationally into political action. Long before Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority or Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, George Wallace clearly perceived the power of a politically mobilized church. From South Carolina, the Baptist Laymen’s Association wrote for the Sovereignty Commission’s ¤lm about the Selma march. Though forced by the group’s diverse party membership to maintain nonpartisanship, the group’s leader wrote that they were united by their literal belief in the King James translation of the Bible, their loyalty to the free enterprise system, and their rejection of ecumenism, coexistence with Communism, and a one world


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movement “directed by subversive forces . . . cloaked under long robes of education and religion, foreign to our beliefs as Baptists.”38 The group showed the ¤lm at South Carolina civic clubs, American Legion, and VFW posts. But such Christian political mobilization was by no means exclusively southern. The Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute in Colorado arranged to purchase the ¤lm through its tax-exempt status as a religious, nonpro¤t institution. Records in the State Sovereignty Commission ¤les indicate the ¤lm was shown in nearly every state and even in Canada. Another Wallace creation, the Legal Economic Cultural Research Association–In Defense of Principles of Constitutional Government (thankfully shortened to the acronym LECRA), provided the best thinking Wallace could mobilize on behalf of his ideology. Headed by Eli Howell, director of the State Sovereignty Commission, it included on its board of directors Wallace’s university friend and president of Troy State University Ralph W. Adams; I. J. Scott, an Opelika businessman and backer of private segregated academies; and Margaret Sizemore, dean of students at Samford University and a force among conservative women in the wealthy Birmingham suburbs. Howell anticipated Wallace’s 1968 third-party campaign by warning that the two-party system was “actually a revolutionary device which by the nature of its function cannot but advance equalitarian objectives” by providing racial minorities the balance of power between two evenly balanced parties.39 A John Birch Society member from Iowa was impressed. She wrote that “the majority of patriots left in America, come from the South. We look to you for our courage.”40 This outpouring of support was more than Wallace could resist. He decided to dip his toes in the presidential waters during the 1964 Democratic primaries, where he deftly countered discussion of racial turmoil in Alabama by turning attention to states’ rights, public accommodations, and open housing. A national tour of college campuses and network television talk shows brought him praise at home and support nationally. He consistently pro¤ted from low expectations. Opponents dismissed him as a reactionary rustic and racist, setting the stage for his cocky, well-informed counterthrusts. He once told a national reporter assigned to cover his campaign that one night in Indiana he was tempted to walk into a campaign rally and give the press what it expected: “They expect me to amble out on the stage and say, ‘Hi, y’all. Sho good to see y’all. I’m jes an ign’rant ol’



hookwormy redneck from Alabama come up to visit y’all. Ain’t had no education and didn’t wear no shoes ’til I was thirty, but I come to ask y’all for y’all’s vote.”41 He resisted the urge. And he won 30 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Wisconsin and Indiana. In Maryland he won 16 of 23 counties, sweeping Baltimore’s white ethnic neighborhoods, which had voted two to one for John F. Kennedy four years earlier (his 47 percent vote in Maryland fell short of a majority only because of a massive black turnout). Conservative Barry Goldwater’s upset victory at the Republican National Convention persuaded Wallace to allow Goldwater to sweep Deep South states, but he was already making plans for 1968. Alabama’s constitution complicated Wallace’s plans. Because the governor was limited to a single term, he would be out of of¤ce in 1968. That frustrated his ambitions in two ways. In 1964 he relied on an army of state employees to assist his national campaign. And he funded that campaign largely from Alabama contractors hoping to do business with the state. Although contemporaries claimed that Wallace’s contributions came mainly from wealthy right-wingers, he raised some 80 percent in small contributions of less than $50. The rest came mainly from state businessmen shaken down for contributions by Wallace’s brother Gerald. Ultimately pleading guilty to income tax evasion, Gerald was not always careful about the kickbacks reaching his brother’s campaign. The governor cheated on his wife, and drank liquor despite his pledge not to serve it in the governor’s mansion, but he did not enrich himself while in of¤ce. Power rather than wealth was his obsession. But his con¤dant and state ¤nance director Seymour Trammell, who would later serve prison time, frankly described the function of state government for Wallace: “Primarily, the use of the governor’s of¤ce was for the purpose of graft, so that we could have all the people that did business with the state . . . have to contribute 10 percent of the contract into the campaign fund, and that would generate hundreds of thousands of dollars.”42 To keep this pipeline open, Wallace had to win the governorship in 1966, constitution or no constitution. His initial strategy was to amend the document, but political opponents in the legislature blocked that. His backup plan was to persuade his wife, Lurleen, to run. But she had problems. Surgery had revealed early-stage cancer, information that George and her physician withheld from her. In addition, she was a private woman who


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enjoyed girl talk with close friends, ¤shing, smoking, and caring for her children. She also resented her husband’s political obsession and suspected his in¤delity. She had, in fact, several times separated from him and come close to divorce. But the prospect of raising four children alone and without ¤nancial resources was sobering. So was the prospect of leaving the governor’s mansion, where she had staff to help her and social outlets with her friends, to return to the isolation of tiny Clayton in Barbour County. At last she relented; whether from her own preference or her husband’s pressure remains uncertain. During the 1966 governor’s race, Lurleen made a brief, carefully rehearsed two-minute speech, then turned the platform over to George, who harangued the audience for an hour about how Alabamians were just as good as anybody. In a refrain repeated throughout his Alabama career, he would remind audiences how he had stood up for them: “I’ll look ’em straight in the eyes and tell ’em ‘Alabama’s all right, always has been all right, and we’re right and you’re wrong.’”43 Despite a massive black voter registration drive following passage of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, only 258,000 of Alabama’s 1.4 million registered voters were black. And Wallace opposition was fractured among 11 candidates, ranging from New Deal liberal Carl Elliott to racial iconoclast Richmond Flowers (who won Martin King’s endorsement and most of the black vote) to the usual zany fringe candidates, Decatur lawyer-rancher Sherman “Hoss” Powell, who attracted slim crowds by featuring go-go dancer Jackie Witley and the campaign slogan Go-Go for Powell. There was even an overlooked second female candidate, Leeds resident Eunice Gore, who explained that Christ had told her to run (apparently Christ did not communicate this message widely; in earlier races for mayor of Leeds, Gore had won a maximum of 32 votes). As it turned out, Gore’s expectations were not much more fanciful than Elliott’s or Flowers’s: Lurleen became the state’s ¤rst woman governor by trampling her 10 opponents without a runoff, winning 54 percent of the vote. With Lurleen securing his Alabama base, George could return to his ¤rst love (not Lurleen, but the national political stage that she made possible). Launching his American Independent Party early, he crisscrossed America for two years while Lurleen’s cancer reappeared. Taking brief breaks from campaigning to be with her in Houston for additional surgery, he soon re-



turned to the hustings. After refusing Lurleen’s last request to close the cof¤n at her funeral, Wallace mourned brie®y, then headed for California. Tapping the same right-wing, nativist, and anti-Jewish organizations as before, Wallace also made inroads among blue-collar Democrats. The years after 1966 had deepened the cleavages in American society. Urban rioting in the north, the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, busing children out of their neighborhoods in order to integrate schools in northern suburbs, growing in®ation, deep divisions over the escalating war in Vietnam, and youthful rebellion against traditional values all fed working-class resentments against many of the elites Wallace had long attacked. A variety of journalists, social commentators, and savants attempted to explain his constituency. One journalist referred to Wallace as “the Cicero of the cab driver.” Others borrowed from a popular television sitcom, calling the governor’s backers “Archie Bunker” voters (urban, working-class, white, ethnic, alienated Democrats). Secret labor surveys estimated that one in three members of the AFL-CIO supported Wallace. Although national polls predicted that Wallace would receive 20 percent of the popular vote and might throw the election into the House of Representatives, he actually carried only a block of southern states. The South split three ways between Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey. Despite pledges to his friend and new governor Albert Brewer that he would not run against him in 1970, Wallace’s national aspirations required a state launching pad. So, months after the November 1968 presidential election, Wallace was campaigning yet again in Alabama. Brewer was a formidable candidate. A quiet, thoughtful problem solver, Brewer typi¤ed the emerging New South governors who were transforming southern politics. Cautiously reaching out to black voters, they focused on modernizing the states through increased funding for schools, rewriting antiquated constitutions, economic development, and other business-oriented reforms. Brewer championed educational and constitutional reform, establishment of a state ethics commission, and recruiting new industry. He patched together a remarkable coalition stretching from organized labor to ALFA, from white Alabama Baptist leaders to pastors of black churches. Much of his ¤nances came from Pres. Richard Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP). Obsessed with Wallace’s candidacy, which threatened to siphon conservative votes away from him especially in the


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South, Nixon authorized giving Brewer $400,000 to defeat Wallace and deny him an Alabama base. Brewer’s press secretary–¤nance chairman Bob Ingram—a witty, shrewd, Montgomery journalist—traveled to the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City to pick up the ¤rst installment of money. Ingram failed to appreciate the logistical problems involved in Nixon’s dirty tricks (such sums of money were transferred in cash, not by paper transactions, which could be traced). In a New York hotel lobby Ingram was presented with $100,000 in hundred dollar bills and no way to transport them. His contact man stuffed the bills into a manila envelope in sight of hotel employees, each one of whom appeared to Ingram to be a Ma¤a don waiting to take the money and dispose of his body. Ingram dispatched a friend as bagman for the second installment of $200,000, also delivered at the New York hotel. The friend was advised by Ingram about what to expect, and this transfer went smoothly until it was handed to a pro-Brewer legislator from Elba who hid it in his house. Trouble began when his wife opened her refrigerator and found 2,000 hundred dollar bills stacked in the vegetable keeper. The last payment was delivered in Los Angeles. All went well this time until the Alabamian panicked when he realized the full implications for his family of a possible fatal plane crash and the discovery of $100,000 in cash found on the corpse of a state employee. He retreated to the men’s room, lowered his pants, and pinned a note to his underwear explaining the purpose of a briefcase full of untaxed money. CREEP’s money totaled one-third of Brewer’s budget and assured him an early advantage. But a minor candidate, Dothan millionaire and wounded World War II veteran Charles Woods, siphoned enough votes away from Brewer to throw the election into a runoff. With Wallace trailing and in danger of defeat, he authorized the dirtiest campaign in Alabama political history. Wallace advertisements contrasted the ¤rst-round primary vote in black and white precincts and warned that the “bloc vote” went to Brewer. Radio ads warned white men that Brewer’s support of black state troopers raised the specter of their wives being stopped late at night, alone on rural roads, by black policemen (with the clear implication that rape would probably follow). Women for Wallace called nursing homes saying that Mrs. Brewer was coming. But after much bustling preparation, no one showed up or offered explanations. One scurrilous unsigned circular accused Brewer



of being homosexual, his wife of being an alcoholic, and his daughter of having sex with black men. Alabamians rewarded Wallace with a narrow 560,000 to 526,000 victory. Ten counties that Brewer carried in the ¤rst vote were lost weeks later. Once again able to shake down Alabama businessmen for contributions, Wallace prepared for the 1972 presidential race. But President Nixon had found another way to neutralize Wallace. A federal investigation of corruption in the Wallace administration had struck pay dirt in the form of Seymour Trammell. Through Nixon’s intermediary, postmaster general and Montgomery businessman Winton “Red” Blount, Trammell agreed to provide evidence against Gerald Wallace. The IRS and the Justice Department closed in for the apparent kill, but then suddenly dropped the case. What apparently occurred was a typical Nixonian maneuver. If George would agree to run only in the 1972 Democratic primaries (where he would undoubtedly divide the party) and forgo another third-party effort (where he would siphon votes away from Nixon), the Justice Department would drop charges against Gerald. With agreement reached, the hapless Trammell went to federal prison while Gerald Wallace remained a ¤nancial broker for his brother. Wallace played havoc within the Democratic Party in 1972. Running in party primaries, he won 22 percent of the vote in Wisconsin, 21 percent in Pennsylvania, 41 percent in Indiana, 42 percent in Florida, and swept North Carolina and Tennessee. The day after Arthur Bremer’s attempt to assassinate him in Maryland, Wallace won 39 percent of the Democratic vote in that state and 51 percent in Michigan. In all Democratic primaries to that time, Wallace had won 3.3 million votes, 700,000 more than Humphrey and 1 million more than eventual nominee George McGovern. Rumors even circulated (denied by him) that Humphrey had offered Wallace the vice presidential slot on the Democratic ticket. Ever paranoid where Wallace was concerned, President Nixon ordered Charles Colson and E. Howard Hunt to plant pro-McGovern literature in Bremer’s apartment in order to make the assassination attempt appear to be part of a liberal conspiracy. They tried to comply with the president’s instructions, but aggressive FBI agents had already secured Bremer’s apartment, triggering a burst of profanity from Nixon. The chastened paraplegic governor began to soften after 1972, appoint-


98 CHAPTER TWO

ing blacks to of¤ce and moderating his racist rhetoric. Whether because of his own suffering or the registration of massive numbers of black voters will never be known. But their increasing willingness to vote for him was consistent with black Christianitys emphasis on grace rather than revenge. Though Wallace brie®y tested the presidential waters again in 1976, his physical disability and defeat in Floridas primary ended his presidential aspirations. After a tearful apology to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1982, Wallace won his fourth term as governor due to black support and appointed 160 blacks to state jobs. George Wallaces legacy is complex. He presided over Alabama during rapid economic growth and took credit for it. Over®owing state coffers allowed him to create a far-®ung system of 14 new community colleges and 15 additional trade schools (which also became important sources of Wallace patronage). He built state highways and expanded the interstate system. He increased education funding tremendously and provided free textbooks to public schoolchildren. He added medical clinics and nursing homes for the poor and elderly. Nationally Wallace set in motion changes that rearranged American politics. His national success put a huge blue-collar constituency in play as it pulled away from liberal Democratic candidates. Attracted initially to Wallace, it later gravitated to Jimmy Carter (whose candidacy was enormously aided by Wallaces earlier races, which had proven that southern candidates could now overcome their southernness or even use it to advantage in other regions). Many of these same voters would later become Reagan Democrats or switch to the Republican Party outright. By the 1990s both parties sounded more like Wallace than Adlai Stevenson or Dwight Eisenhower, respective party spokesmen from the pre-Wallace era. One biographer called Wallace the most in®uential loser in American political history. America had shifted decidedly right, and George Wallace bears no small credit (or blame) for that shift. And he emerged as a national leader when other segregationist governors did not partly because of Alabamas unique political culture (the highest rate of union members in the Deep South; the most industrial southern city; a strong history of antiCommunism, populism, and resentment of Big Mules and wealthy corporations; a male-dominated culture reinforced by sports, military enthusi-



asm, and evangelical churches that proclaimed the need for women to be submissive). Wallace scored two to one male over female voters nationally. Within Alabama, Wallace dammed up and diverted some currents while accelerating others. The demise of the poll tax, massive registration of new black and working-class white voters, and reapportionment could have revitalized state politics. The 1961 legislative battle over reapportionment split the planter–Big Mule alliance. Black registration smashed the friendsand-neighbors theory of state politics. When conservative north Alabama Republican Jim Martin ran against south Alabama liberal Sen. Lister Hill in 1962, 14 of his top 17 counties were in south Alabama and 12 of 17 top Hill counties were in north Alabama. The 1970 contest between Wallace and Brewer revealed the same pattern. Brewer, who came from Decatur in the Tennessee Valley, lost many adjacent white counties, his natural friends-and-neighbors allies. And Wallace, who came from Barbour, a key Black Belt county, lost most of the region where black voting majorities now ruled. Conservative whites bent on leaving the liberal Democratic Party did not have to vote Republican. They could tarry awhile with George Wallace, suspended between parties. All these changes could have shifted Alabama toward a new kind of politics, as similar changes did in other southern states. Instead Wallacism froze political change in an arctic blast of racism. In Alabama, everything hinged on Wallace and whether one opposed or supported him. That delayed emergence of a two-party system and New South style modernization. For decades to come the litmus test for all Alabama political candidates would be de¤ned by Wallace’s standard: where did a candidate stand on race? Carl Elliott, himself an early victim of Wallace’s racial politics, wrote Albert Brewer an insightful letter of condolence after Wallace’s 1970 primary victory: Today has been a day of vicarious misery for me. . . . I dreamed of building a “New Alabama”. . . . We both lost, but I hope it has not destroyed your political career, as it did mine. I felt for you, as I saw the master of hate and racism unleash his vicious campaign against you.


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I love Alabama. . . . Alabamians so much need a leader to appeal to their better, instead of their baser, instincts. You did that, and I salute you for it. My mother spent a long life trying to teach me that love and decency will prevail. I’m sure she must have been right for the long haul. However, you and I both have earned the right to know that for the short pull, race-hate is very strong.44 Wallace inherited a state with many problems. When he died on September 13, 1998, most of the problems remained unsolved. With the end of the Wallace era, Alabama voters seemed determined to move in a different direction. But which direction seemed uncertain. Increasingly well-educated voters in north Alabama, augmented by new arrivals from beyond the state’s borders, looked for a progressive leader without regard to party af¤liation. Voters seemed to be seeking an outsider, unconnected to the old politics. Fob James, former Auburn University football player and successful industrialist with no prior political experience, rode a yellow school bus across the state in 1978, promising a new kind of politics. In his ¤rst term (1979–83) as a Democrat, James promised a new constitution and school reform, and resisted ALFA’s special interest tax legislation. In his second term (1995–99) as a Republican, he seemed to spend as much time courting Zionist leaders and extolling Messianic fundamentalist religion as recruiting new business for the state. (A political writer satirized one of James’s trips to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a meeting between “our yahoo and their Netanyahu.”) James changed positions as often as he did underwear, and even Republicans began to refer to him as the “Dr. Pepper” governor (because he appeared anew at 10, 2, and 4 o’clock each day, just like the advertising logo of the thirst-quenching popular soft drink). Promising a new outsider perspective, James in fact was one of the most inept governors in memory. He presented the anomaly of a politician who wanted to be governor but hated conventional politics. When Democrats self-destructed during a bitter 1986 primary, a trio of aspiring Wallace successors opened the door to the unlikely Guy Hunt. A longtime party functionary with virtually no quali¤cations for the of¤ce, Hunt won the nomination by default because no state Republican leader



cared to be the sacri¤cial lamb offered up to what they believed would be the inevitable Democratic winner. In the Democratic primary Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley battled ethics charges and a sex scandal to a second-place ¤nish to newcomer Charlie Graddick, then received the nomination from a federal court that ruled Republicans had crossed over into the Democratic runoff to elect Graddick. Hunt smashed Baxley in the ensuing November general election, which proved a critical juncture in the developing Republican majority. The novice Hunt took seriously the advice of business advisers who urged him to appoint a committee to study tax reform and other state problems. This blue-ribbon committee charted a path of progressive change, though nothing came of it. Blessed with low expectations, Hunt overachieved. Though he did little, voters hadnt expected much to begin with, and happily reelected him to a second term in 1990 over AEA executive secretary Paul Hubbert. Hubbert also ran an outsider campaign, promising reform and mobilizing his extensive teacher network. But business people tarred him as a union boss and poured money into Hunts uninspiring but successful campaign. When Hunts ethics problems forced him from of¤ce, Lt. Gov. James E. Little Jim Folsom succeeded to the of¤ce. Hitching his wagon to an idealistic education reform campaign hatched by A+, Leadership Alabama, and the progressive north Alabama business community, Folsom was well funded and seemed to be poised for victory on a New South platform of tax, constitutional, and education reform, plus acquisition of a MercedesBenz auto plant. But his campaign stalled due to a trip he had taken to the Cayman Islands on a plane provided by gambling guru Milton McGregor. This fed growing ethics concerns about his administration, and Folsom lost to Fob James by some 10,000 votes out of 1.2 million cast. James, in turn, was easy pickings for Don Siegelman, who had lusted for the governorship since his graduation from the University of Alabamas political machine. A McGovern Democrat in his early years, he drifted left and right with the political winds. Hitching his 1998 fate to a state lottery for education, he misinterpreted massive voter rejection of James as a mandate for his lottery. But lack of details for running the lottery left many voters unconvinced that the state could escape its negative consequences. And many people who told pollsters they favored the lottery either changed their minds or did not vote. Rebuffed on the lottery and crippled by corrup-


102 CHAPTER TWO

tion within his administration, Siegelman seemed unwilling to take other risks. He did appoint the centurys most diverse cabinet (including a distinguished list of blacks and women), achieve a successful record of industrial recruitment, and piece together temporary solutions to cascading ¤nancial crises; nonetheless, as the century ended many state problems were actually getting worse. While the comet of George Wallace raced across Alabamas political skies, Republicans could do little more than gaze in sullen amazement. When they challenged him directly, he crushed them. If progressive Democrats made a pilgrimage to Montgomery to beg the governors indulgence and blessing, he baptized them Alabama Democrats, offered his endorsement, and they swept aside little-known and inexperienced Republican challengers. But as Wallaces light dimmed in the distant ¤rmament, political changes began to shift Alabama politics in a more natural fashion. Factors propelling the GOP to victory in other states began to apply to Alabama as well: suburbanization; Sunbelt prosperity and the growth of the middle class; demise of older, traditional, mainly rural Democratic voters; politicization of white evangelicals, reaction to liberal excesses, the youth counterculture, and anti-Vietnam activism; leftward drift of the national Democratic Party; white ®ight segregationists who left the Democratic Party as its base became more heavily African American. Southern Democrats absorbed the initial blow of white reaction to the civil rights movement, losing presidential and congressional elections but holding most gubernatorial, state, and local of¤ces through an effective biracial coalition. But by the early 1990s, demographic trends ¤nally made substantial inroads in down-ticket of¤ces (those below presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial levels). GOP legislative alliances with blacks to reapportion state legislatures also resulted in the election of black Democrats and more white Republicans. Many aspects of Alabama culture favored the GOP. A 2002 poll revealed that 56 percent of Alabama adults considered themselves conservatives (even among self-described Democrats, nearly half so designated themselves). A 1996 national poll ranked Alabama voters the ¤fth most conservative of any state. The 1994 Republican off-year congressional sweep drove conservative ideology deep into local Alabama politics. The GOP unseated



Democrats for chief justice of the state supreme court and for midlevel judges on the court of appeals. Shortly after the election, 10 Birmingham judges switched to the GOP in the most massive defection from one party to another outside the state of Texas. In Alabama 23 defectors included junior U.S. senator Richard E. Shelby, who helped swell the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate. Numerous rural counties also elected their ¤rst GOP majority to commissions or as sheriffs, circuit judges, and tax assessors. This broadened base would provide the party an expanding stream of energetic young candidates for higher of¤ce. By 1998 more votes in the Republican primary came from rural areas than from the ¤ve major urban counties that had dominated the modern GOP in the state. In both urban and rural races Republicans tarred their opponents as liberals if they supported their national party and out of step if they did not. A 1990 poll found that two-thirds of Democratic state legislators often disagreed with the policies of their national leadership whereas all Republicans exactly or usually agreed with their national leaders. Given such attitudes, changing election statistics came as no surprise. In 1940 only 14 percent of Alabama voters cast Republican ballots in the presidential election. In 1952 that ¤gure climbed to 35 percent; in 1960, to 42 percent; in 1964, to 70 percent. In 1992 George Bush carried Alabama against Bill Clinton, 48 to 41 percent. And in 1996 for the ¤rst time more Republicans than Democrats voted a straight party ticket (the contemptuous designation “yellow dog” Republican began to circulate among sullen Democrats, suggesting that many state voters were so blindly Republican they would vote for a “yellow dog” were one on the ticket). The GOP sweep of every statewide race that year was due also to a massive turnout of white, middle-class voters in the Birmingham suburbs. The 1998 election cycle demonstrated that the drift to the GOP was not irreversible, at least in the short run. Shackled to Fob James, Republicans gave up much hard-won ground. A large turnout (57 percent of eligible voters) swept James out of of¤ce and came within 10,000 to 15,000 votes of giving Democrats a clean sweep of major state of¤ces. As it was, Democrats split these of¤ces. Part of the GOP’s problem was defection from its middle-class, well-educated core suburban constituency concerned about the quality of education, modernization, and the state’s dreadful national and international image. (James had reinstituted chain gangs, questioned


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the application to Alabama of sections of the U.S. Constitution, refused some federal education funds, challenged the principle of judicial review, and vowed to defy federal courts on matters such as school prayer and posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings.) Successful Democrats also were more likely to extol family and religious values and identify with the conservative “blue dog” or “New Democrats” wing of the party. But the GOP seemed to have recovered in the ¤nal election of the century. George W. Bush swamped Al Gore, 57 to 41 percent, and his coattails proved suf¤ciently long to carry the statewide ticket to a near sweep as well. Exit polls revealed that nearly a quarter of Alabama voters identi¤ed with the religious right (where Bush beat Gore 78 to 20 percent), that only 26 percent of whites voted Democratic (in rural counties that total declined to one-¤fth), and that 91 percent of blacks voted Democratic (a quarter of the state’s voters were black—almost exactly the same percentage of residents—and they provided Gore with more than half his total vote). Surprisingly, 23 percent of Alabamians considered themselves “strong Democrats” in a 2002 poll, compared to only 18 percent in the rest of the nation. As the century ended certain patterns appeared clear. Racial and ideological polarization remained a primary political reality, not in the old-time sense of Wallace’s racial rhetoric about segregation, busing, and civil rights, but in new code words and attitudes about racial pro¤ling, af¤rmative action, social welfare, and tax reform. The new Alabama Democratic Party strategy—turn out the black vote and win one-third of the white vote— was in deep trouble. Democrats could reach that benchmark in north Alabama, but not in the south, demonstrating that class- and race-based sectionalism continued into the new century. Racial polarization was obvious in urban politics as well as rural. By 1994 only two Democrats remained in Mobile County’s legislative delegation, and one of them soon switched parties. In Jefferson County, nine white Republicans represented the county along with eight black Democrats and a single white Democrat. A black soon replaced the lone white Democrat. Other evidence of polarization included 2002 polling data indicating that only a quarter of Alabamians identi¤ed themselves as philosophically “middle of the road” compared to onethird who did so nationally. On the other hand, increasing black registration carved out critical space for African Americans within the increasingly minority Democratic Party.



When the Voting Rights Act went into effect in 1966, slightly more than 100,000 blacks were registered. Two years later that ¤gure had more than doubled to 250,000. By 1969 Alabama had more elected black of¤cials than any other southern state (67). In 1979 Richard Arrington—a college teacher with a Ph.D. in biology—was elected to the ¤rst of ¤ve terms as mayor of the state’s largest city. White Democrats increasingly understood that without black support they had no hope of winning a primary much less a general election. This black power and the decline of overt racism led to internal divisions within black political ranks. As long as racist white politicians such as Wallace stormed across the state, they imposed unity on black voters. But the decline of overt racism opened con®icts between ambitious black politicians. In 1990 Joe Reed’s Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) endorsed his boss, Paul Hubbert, for governor in the Democratic primary. But the New South Coalition backed Don Siegelman (Alabama New South Coalition had split from ADC in 1984 over whether to endorse Jesse Jackson or Walter Mondale for president). In Birmingham, the Progressive Democratic Council backed Hubbert; Arrington’s Jefferson County Citizens Coalition endorsed Siegelman. In 1998 New South Coalition even endorsed a candidate in the Republican gubernatorial runoff election, though the endorsement of a black group seemed to do Winton Blount III, the candidate it endorsed, more harm than good among white Republican voters. White hostility enforced continued loyalty on black voters. Increasing Republicanism enforced similar discipline on Democrats. As late as the mid 1980s Democratic legislators had no functioning caucus. Because the major split in the legislature for a generation had been among pro- and antiWallace Democrats, a caucus would have provided the venue for a backalley cat ¤ght, not a forum to determine consensus policy or assure uni¤ed support. The infusion of large numbers of Republicans changed all that, most obviously in the 1999 organizing session of the state senate, where a near-solid phalanx of Democrats voted to strip the Republican lieutenant governor of most of his powers as presiding of¤cer. Though some conservative Democrats sided with the Republican minority, the affair demonstrated how much party politics had changed in the decade and a half since Wallace left of¤ce. Tragically, positive and effective leadership came from none of its politi-


106 CHA P T ER T WO

cal elites. Bothered by self-serving desire for power, by racial loyalties or religious agenda, by quixotic campaigns to restore a simpler time or place, politicians offered simplistic solutions for complex problems or denied the problems altogether. Frustrated Republican representative William Slaughter spoke for many Alabamians when he explained why he resigned his legislative seat: “We haven’t had in my lifetime the dynamic and effective leadership that’s truly needed to transform the state, to give people a real sense of their lost opportunities and the vision necessary to make them ready to reclaim their lost opportunities.”45 Increasingly Alabamians seeking that kind of leadership found it not among politicians of either race, ideology, or party. Instead they found it in the progressive business community, among educators, journalists, civic leaders, and especially among women. Any list of most-in®uential state leaders at close-of-century would probably have included David G. Bronner—a profane, cigar-smoking, straight-talking Catholic native of Iowa educated in Minnesota, and for all those reasons wholly unelectable—as the state’s boldest visionary. Frustrated business leaders ®ocked into Leadership Alabama and similar local leadership programs to discuss real-life Alabama policy issues. But changing a state’s political culture from the top down was a long road to travel. And as the century ended the destination was nowhere in sight.


3 Selling Alabama The Economy

Thousands upon thousands of young children and young women stand anxiously idle for want of opportunity. It is astonishing how readily these little folk learn to . . . yarn, to spin, to weave . . . , to perform the multifarious duties which go to make up the daily routine of a well ordered mill. . . . [S]trikes are unknown among these really worthy people, who ¤ll their appropriate squares in the great chessboard of life, dutifully and gladsomely, as good citizens. —Late 19th-Century Alabama Industrial Promotional Pamphlet

A

century after Alabama put its children and young women on the auction block of economic development, an eerily similar advertisement appeared in Bobbin Magazine. The setting for the August 1991 ad was different, but the sentiment was identical: “Rosa Martinez produces apparel for U.S. markets on her sewing machine in El Salvador. You can hire her for 33 cents an hour . . . Rosa is more than just colorful. She and her coworkers are known for their industriousness, reliability, and quick learning. They make El Salvador one of the best buys.” Rosa Martinez was not only industrious, reliable, and quick learning. She was also economically desperate and eager to take the job of an Alabama textile worker. In that way, she was one in spirit with hundreds of thousands of Alabama residents in 1900. Deposed from the land by taxes they could not pay, poor health, cyclical demands for cotton, and a hundred other calamities both natural and man-made, they sought alternative ways of putting food on the table and shelter over their heads. Entrepreneurs tried to help them ¤nd alternatives. Usually explaining


108 CHA P T ER T H R E E

their concern as a result of Christian compassion or interest in the general welfare of the state, they nonetheless were willing to accept whatever pro¤ts came their way as a result of such philanthropy and public spiritedness. But their materialism was not much different from the poor folk they employed. Economic historians have made good sense out of this struggle to get ahead.1 They describe a backward economy where a few progressive business people prospered. Sometimes they prospered because they were lucky. Other times they had the advantage of controlling natural resources or they pro¤ted from superior education. They convinced themselves (and tried to convince others) that their success resulted from their superior moral qualities, work ethic, willingness to take risks, or perseverance in the face of adversity. They dismissed less-successful aspirants as lazy, inept, ignorant, or morally undeserving. The less successful defended themselves by attributing the success of their detractors to materialism, underhanded methods, or violations of traditional spiritual, moral, and cultural values. To them, modernization became the sin and not the salvation. Economic Patterns These contrasting philosophies easily settle into regional stereotypes with profound economic implications. Modernizers consider a region that remains agrarian, rural, and poor when other regions are becoming industrial, urban, and prosperous, to be backward, resistant to innovation and new technology. They believe such a region fears change, suspects newcomers and outsiders; its people are lazy, fatalistic, satis¤ed with low expectations and even lower incomes. And the people negatively stereotyped in these ways often regard their agrarian Eden as a happy exception to materialistic, corrupt, anxious, fast-paced, hypersophisticated, dangerously pluralistic, prosperous urban areas that show no respect for family and community traditions. During much of the 20th century, negative stereotypes characterized most of the South. From the ¤rst estimates of per capita income in 1880 to the Second World War, southerners averaged only about half the U.S. aver-


T H E E C ONOM Y 109

age. And the regional economy was disproportionately agricultural, extractive, low wage, and low skill. Meanwhile, a region stretching from southern New England through New York, Pennsylvania, and across the industrial Midwest to the Mississippi River became the American manufacturing belt. This region generated between three-quarters and two-thirds of American manufacturing and patent activity during the ¤rst half of the century. Outside this belt, manufacturing, industrial technology, and innovation lagged behind. Inside the belt, dense urban clusters of skilled workers and entrepreneurs developed machinery, factories, and technology, drawing natural resources from the rural hinterland. The South started late but actually outpaced the national rate of industrial expansion between 1880 and the 1970s. Alabama’s success at developing lumber and textile mills, coal mines, iron and steel furnaces that constituted the core of America’s ¤rst industrial revolution set the state apart from its less fortunate southern neighbors. And Birmingham became the only southern city to operate like a manufacturing belt metropolis, generating industrial and entrepreneurial skills and innovation while drawing resources from its hinterland. Iron and steel depended on local resources and an export market, both of which favored development of Alabama’s strategically located Magic City. Even as the state’s premier city ®ourished, it bumped up against limitations: disparity in rail freight rates; outside ownership; an unskilled labor force; class and race hostility. Alabama also became one of the four leading textile states. But the sector of that industry that relocated to the South from New England was the least pro¤table, used the least skilled labor, and thrived on a family wage system that required women and children to work in order to provide families a bare living. After the Second World War many advantages of the manufacturing belt began to disappear. Labor and entrepreneurial skills became widespread. Standardized products and mass markets gave advantages to bulk producers, and branch plants located in a variety of places, especially in the South. Industrial concentration in the manufacturing belt strained the available labor force, exhausted local raw materials, raised land costs, and stretched



power sources. A robust environmental movement criticized the damage done to the environment and questioned the tradeoffs between good manufacturing jobs and declining quality of life. In such a context, the South’s relative underdevelopment became an asset rather than a liability. Progress toward modernization was oftentimes halting as America’s ¤rst industrial revolution gave way to the second. The South and Alabama in particular had established its ability to recruit smokestack industry and manufacturing. But just when the region triumphed within this system, America’s economy entered the postindustrial era. Alabama faced formidable barriers in attracting high-tech industry and the highly mechanized, roboticsoperated plants of the new economy. The collapse of racial segregation also spurred what was widely referred to as “Sunbelt” growth by making the South less resistant to outsiders, more receptive to different kinds of people, more culturally and religiously tolerant, and more receptive to change and modernization even at the expense of altering revered traditions. Changing American politics spurred economic alterations as well. The manufacturing belt, with its skilled workers (many of whom belonged to unions), was the backbone of the New Deal and the Democratic Party. The new economy was less inclined to pit owner against worker. The demand for a highly skilled labor force required a new, nonconfrontational, collaborative approach by management and labor quite different from the hierarchical pattern characteristic of the South’s old economy and thus was less likely to foment sharp class differences. Both workers and managers were more likely to vote Republican (especially if they were white males). As a result of Sunbelt prosperity, many southern states fully entered the economic mainstream. Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas boasted per capita incomes at or above the national average (in 1940, they had ranked at only half that average). A second tier of states (Georgia and South Carolina) stood poised on the threshold of income parity. Unfortunately, a third tier (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas) lagged behind. These bottom-tier states certainly made progress from the dreadful days of the Great Depression, when Alabama’s per capita income stood at only 48 percent of the national average. By 1970 aggressive industrial recruiting and vigorous local entrepreneurship had raised Alabama’s ranking to



73 percent of the U.S. average, and by 1990 the ¤gure had reached 80 percent. But there the ranking stagnated, changing little by end-of-century. There were two ways to report such statistics. Incumbent Alabama politicians, state agencies, and economic developers routinely reported one year’s statistics compared to earlier Alabama numbers. Such results almost invariably depicted a state on the move, making progress, attracting new businesses, and creating new jobs. So politically important were such numbers that the Alabama Development Of¤ce (ADO) typically reported the number of new jobs intended to be created by an industry even before the jobs actually existed. Nor did the agencies subtract the number of jobs lost from the number created in order to provide an accurate count. By ADO measurements, Alabama was always about to soar into stratospheric prosperity. Unlike Alabama politicians, economists and historians favor comparative statistics in order to measure a state against national norms and peer state performance. By that standard, Alabama lagged behind national standards and that of neighboring states throughout most of the century. The per capita income of Alabama citizens ranked 45th of 48 states in 1930, 46th in 1940, 46th in 1950, 47th in 1960, 47th (of 50 states) in 1970, 47th in 1980, 44th in 1990, and 44th in 2000. Combining such broad categories of economic growth as per capita income, personal income, population growth, unemployment, total sales, and gross state revenue, Alabama ranked 7th among 10 southern states between 1945 and 1985. Only Louisiana and Mississippi experienced slower population growth during the ¤nal 15 years of the century. Even during boom times such as the 1990s Alabama underperformed regional and national standards. For instance, the ¤rst quarter of 1998 saw the state’s jobless rate decline to only 3.8 percent. But the number of people employed actually shrank by 32,000 as people retired or left the state for better jobs elsewhere. And despite a booming national economy, Alabama was one of only 8 states whose jobless rate actually increased in 1999. Whereas personal income in the state increased by a healthy 4.7 percent in 1997, the U.S. rate grew by 5.7 percent, both Georgia and North Carolina gained 6.6 percent, and even Mississippi surpassed Alabama with a 4.8 percent growth. In 2000 Alabama’s income growth trailed in 50th place. And between 1998 and 2000 Alabama was one of only 3 states to report an ac-



tual decline in median household income. Among southeastern states, Alabama’s percent of job growth ranked last in 1996–97, her personal per capita income second from bottom, her 1990–95 population growth 3rd lowest. Within the state, prosperity was unevenly spread. Pockets of wealth were concentrated in Huntsville and in Birmingham’s suburbs, in Baldwin County and Auburn, while vast sweeps of poverty prevailed across the hill country and south-central Alabama. Of the state’s 20 wealthiest cities, 14 were Birmingham suburbs.2 As a result of such underperformance, the 1983 Almanac of Politics summarized that “people are not starving in Alabama . . . but this remains a low-skill, mostly low-wage state which is having trouble competing with those neighbors traditionally more friendly to business.” Two years later the same journal mused that the “Sun Belt seems to have passed Alabama by.” The 1987 Almanac was even more negative: “Something is seriously wrong in Alabama. While most southern states are bustling economically and bursting with pride over their education reforms and their quality of life, Alabama senses that it is slipping farther behind. When other southern states are producing national leaders and presidential candidates for both parties, Alabama is conspicuous for having on the average the lowest quality of politicians of any state in the union.”3 Entrepreneurship, Alabama Style These problems did not occur overnight. They were a century in the making. And they were deeply embedded in the state’s economic history. When Alabama leaders decided to industrialize, they did so with a vengeance. Although some state business leaders ¤t the romantic American ideal of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, many started life with signi¤cant advantages. One careful study of 186 Alabama entrepreneurs on the front edge of the 20th century discovered that many had descended from planters, a quarter had fathers who were businessmen, another quarter grew up in professional families, nearly 40 percent had attended college, and nearly 80 percent were church members (29 percent were Episcopalians, followed by Methodists, 19 percent, and Baptists, 10 percent). Predictably in a state rooted in ruralism and agriculture, most of the 186



entrepreneurs came from out of state (36 percent from other southern states, 8 percent from states outside the south, and 14 percent from other countries, mainly Great Britain, Germany, and Austria). Many of the most important technological innovators were outsiders. One of the best examples was Erskine Ramsay, a native of Dunfermline, Scotland, Andrew Carnegie’s hometown. Ramsay’s father was a mining engineer, a career that Erskine also followed. As chief engineer for Birmingham’s Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI), Ramsay introduced a new coal washing process and other technological innovations. He also lectured frequently at the Coal Mining Institute of America. Branching into banking and managing his own coal companies, Ramsay became a millionaire in his 40s. Sharing his wealth with the state, his philanthropies included an engineering building at Auburn University, scholarships at the University of Alabama, a building for the University of Montevallo, and generous contributions to Birmingham-Southern College and Samford University. Ramsay served as president of Birmingham’s Board of Education for two decades and was voted the city’s outstanding citizen in 1926. Ramsay began a pattern that others followed. Harry Hargreaves, who installed the ¤rst hot blast furnace at Sloss Iron, was born in Switzerland and learned iron-making in Liverpool, England. Llewellyn Johns, chief engineer at Pratt Coal and Iron, left Glamorganshire, Wales, for the Pennsylvania coal mines, then came to Alabama. Although the attitudes of many Alabama entrepreneurs were rooted in racism and paternalism, they were not necessarily slow to adopt new technology or compete successfully in important economic niches. Birmingham’s Sloss-Shef¤eld Steel and Iron Company introduced its own technological changes, purchased the most modern equipment, relied heavily on both Richmond and New York capital, and prospered until the iron industry collapsed in the 1960s. More traditional entrepreneurs also performed well. Braxton Bragg Comer descended from a planter family in Barbour County. He established a mercantile business, built a gristmill, and acquired 30,000 acres of prime cotton land. In 1885 he left the Black Belt for the bustling new industrial town of Anniston where he became a wholesale merchant, miller, and cotton broker. He soon moved to Birmingham where he continued his milling operations, but also organized Avondale Mills in 1897 and City National



Bank. Under excellent family leadership, Avondale grew into the state’s largest textile empire. Other entrepreneurs had more complex family histories. Henry Lehman left Germany in 1844 for New York, part of the vast Jewish migration of the mid-19th century. A year later he moved to Montgomery, where he opened a grocery and dry goods store and brought his two brothers to join him. After one of the brothers served in Confederate service, the family entered the cotton brokerage business. Their efforts led to formation of the New York Cotton Exchange, and the Lehmans opened an of¤ce in Manhattan. In 1912 Lehman Brothers moved operations to New York City, where the family furnished a U.S. senator, chief justice of the state supreme court, and lieutenant governor. As a family-controlled investment bank until 1969, the company became one of Wall Street’s most successful. Lehman Brothers returned to its Montgomery roots in 1999 by purchasing the city’s Blount International Corporation. Although some chief executive of¤cers (CEOs) such as TCI’s George Gordon Crawford or American Cast Iron Pipe’s John J. Eagan introduced a gentler form of labor-friendly management called “welfare capitalism,” most entrepreneurs sought to maximize short-term pro¤ts by wasteful exploitation of natural and human resources. And even Crawford initially worked large numbers of convict laborers in his coal mines. Whether from Christian idealism, as seems the case with Eagan, or attempts to keep out labor unions and reduce worker turnover and absenteeism, more likely the source of Crawford’s policies, welfare capitalism substantially improved conditions for workers. But the typical workplace in early 20th-century Alabama bore little resemblance to the enlightened management of TCI or ACIPCO (American Cast Iron Pipe Company). Workers were the enemy to be ruthlessly exploited and, when they forgot their proper station in life, to be brutally repressed. The Old Economy Alabama’s successful recruitment of manufacturing plants beginning at the end of the 19th century gained momentum early in the new century. Competing primarily for low-wage, low-skill plants and often importing technology and management from out of state (Crawford and Eagan were



Georgia natives; Crawford was educated at Georgia Tech and in Germany), entrepreneurs focused on extractive industries such as textiles, mining, lumber, and iron and steel making. Laborers needed few skills, received low wages, and possessed little bargaining power. Company towns might be better than life on tenant farms, but management control of mill villages through ownership of commissaries, school buildings, recreation programs, and even church buildings proved suffocating to many residents. If workers became “uppity” or joined unions, if they drank or fought too much, they were simply ¤red and their families evicted. Managers, often working for absentee owners who might live in Pittsburgh, New York, or Massachusetts, paid attention to production and sales ¤gures, not worker health or welfare. Uneducated workers were often powerless workers as well, and some early century CEOs worried openly that too much education might spoil the “tractable” labor force. Most of these workers came to town from the country where Alabama agriculture languished. Although all rural Alabama suffered declines, the south-central Black Belt experienced the most extreme dip. The economy of the region was altered twice, ¤rst by the New South movement (1880– 1930) and then by the rise of the Sunbelt. The economic modernization of agriculture took two routes, mechanization and consolidation, or decline and demise. The number of plantations in the state declined from 7,287 in 1910 to 1,801 in 1940, a 75 percent drop (only Texas and Florida experienced greater declines). This pattern resulted primarily from absentee landlords who increasingly lived in more prosperous towns. The boll weevil’s invasion of Alabama in 1911 accelerated both consolidation and decline. So did labor migration. Rural Alabama was particularly decimated by the exodus of blacks. During this ¤rst phase of “modernization,” Alabama agriculture was characterized by substantial demand, farm tenancy, and cotton monoculture. In 1911 Alabama farmers planted 3.8 million acres of cotton; in 1983, they harvested cotton on only 215,000 acres. In 1919 the state’s farmers harvested 719,000 bales of cotton to rank eighth among all states; in 1921 the boll weevil cut cotton production by 32 percent, but Alabama still ranked seventh among all states. Despite multiple problems, cotton remained king of Alabama’s rural domain, increasing its grip between 1900 and 1910. Cereal crops actually declined from 35 percent of the state’s farmland to



29 percent. And cotton accounted for more than half the value of all crops in 1909. Even after cotton prices collapsed in 1920, the acreage devoted to the crop increased from 2.6 million acres to 3.6 million in 1930. In 1920 1.34 million of Alabama’s 2.35 million people lived on farms, a total that had changed little by 1940 (though the state’s population grew to 2.8 million). Agriculture prospered during many of these years due to the Hatch Act (1887, when Congress created agricultural experiment stations at land grant universities), the Smith-Lever Act (1914, when Congress funded the Cooperative Extension Service), and widespread nostalgia for America’s agrarian roots, which translated into strong political support of agriculture, especially “family farms.” Even if Alabama did boast of industrial progress, its heartbeat remained down on the farm. Ministers, politicians, and even many businessmen extolled rural virtues. Of Alabama’s 203 towns in 1900, 141 contained fewer than 1,000 people and relied mainly on farmers for their clientele. Poor roads and primitive mail service increased the sense of rural isolation. All this praise for ruralism could not obscure substantial problems. Cyclical demand for farm produce often drove prices below production cost (as in the 1890s and 1920s). Alabama agriculture made little use of new technology. The 1900 census revealed that the average state farmer had invested only $39 in machinery and implements (compared to $44 in Georgia, $170 in Kansas, and $253 in Iowa). Worst of all, more and more farmers tumbled down the agricultural ladder into tenancy. The origins of sharecropping and tenancy are rife with historical polemic. Whether the result of Marxist-style oppression by planters or national market arrangements, tenancy ®ourished after the Civil War. Lack of technology, banks, and capital, a severe labor shortage after slavery ended, a huge supply of former slaves and poor whites, and lack of alternative industrial jobs all edged the agricultural economy into the tenancy system. Tenancy emerged not so much from struggle between contending races and classes or from forced imposition as from national market decisions by poor people seeking land and land owners seeking labor. Yet neither poor whites nor newly enfranchised freedmen recommended the system as superior to cash rental or private ownership, both of which increased their status and personal freedom from supervision.



Whatever its origins, tenancy gained traction quickly. Even among whites, tenancy rates exploded. In 1920 44 percent of white farmers did not own the land they cultivated; by 1925 the percentage had increased to 48 percent; by 1930 it rose to 54 percent; and in 1935 white tenancy peaked at 55 percent. Even among sharecroppers, the bottom rung of farm tenants, whites exceeded blacks in 1930. Combined tenancy ¤gures for white and black farmers reached 65 percent in 1930. Alabama’s tenancy rate consistently exceeded the southern average, and in 1930 only South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana had higher rates. By 1930 land owners operated only 62,000 of Alabama’s 207,000 cotton farms. Tenants farmed the rest. The stories of Alabama’s most typical people are as diverse as their race, gender, location, and identity. White sharecropper Massie Miller arrived in Lamar County from Mississippi in November 1927. Much of his diary consists of brief entries describing his uprooting. Always seeking a nicer house, better land, or a fairer landlord, he moved his family in November 1928, December 1929, February 1930, December 1930, January 1931, January 1932, November 1932, January 1934, January 1935, December 1935, December 1936, January 1939—on average more than once a year for 11 years. Sharecroppers joked that all they had to do when moving was “whistle up the dog and spit in the ¤re.” The Millers supplemented both diet and income by killing, eating, and selling rabbits, by trapping ¤sh, and by gathering poke salad (a weed from the yard). Father and sons earned extra income by taking odd jobs at a sawmill when not engaged in raising cotton. They cut living expenses by using home remedies from the Farmers’ Almanac. Bay leaves simmered down in pure lard relieved burns, and scalded chestnuts cured sores. Blood root beaten ¤ne and steeped in apple vinegar was effective on itches. A tea made from hickory bark, “life everlasting,” and peach tree leaves cured colds. Myrtle Terry was born in Lamar County, the same place where Massie Miller carved out an existence. She married Ben Lawrence when both were 13, became a mother at 14, and lived most of her life as a sharecropper. With only a few weeks of formal schooling, she obtained her “education” chopping and hoeing cotton. Unattracted by housekeeping, she thrived on picking cotton and set the pace for male pickers. She spaced the birth of two winter-born daughters named Icy Jewel and Snow around her cotton pick-



ing, missing only one season between 1899 and 1937. Although she read fortunes from coffee grounds and “witched water” (located springs and aquifers with a forked willow stick), she was baptized a Methodist and later became a devoted member of Taylor Springs Baptist Church. During the 1930s a Baptist minister persuaded Lawrence to join the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) after their landlord evicted them, and she almost immediately became one of the union’s best organizers. STFU meetings followed the pattern of an evangelical revival, with ¤ery sermons, exhortations, hymns, and testimonials. Many rural ministers simply folded their congregations into the union, which welcomed women to positions of leadership. Having been brought up to treat blacks as she did whites, Lawrence was especially effective organizing black women. Articulate despite her illiteracy, Lawrence became the star of the 1937 National Sharecroppers’ Week in New York City. Her rotten teeth, a byproduct of pellagra, and her ever-present “spit can” decorated with bright pink paper, embarrassed some black STFU organizers. The union’s cofounder, H. L. Mitchell (whose wife was also from Alabama), regretted that Lawrence con¤rmed the Tobacco Road stereotypes of southern white tenants. He also resented her as a symbol of the metamorphosis of his union (from white, male, intellectual, and socialist to biracial, female, sharecropper, evangelical and Pentecostal). But even Mitchell conceded that she was the best white STFU woman organizer, so he held his peace. Lawrence ¤nally ful¤lled her lifelong dream by buying a small farm in 1939, only to discover the era of small family farms was ending. During the Second World War she joined the trek from farm to city, moving to Tampa, Florida, where she took her aggressive self-con¤dence into a shipyard job. Agriculture was by no means the exclusive domain of sharecroppers such as Miller and Lawrence. Power remained in the hands of large producers who, if anything, consolidated their power thanks to the disfranchisement provisions of the 1901 constitution. Though sharecroppers such as the Millers and Lawrences made herculean efforts to pay their poll tax and vote, few tenants believed their salvation would come from the ballot box. And the political emasculation of the many strengthened the political power of the few. After the American Farm Bureau Federation was organized in 1919, Luther N. Duncan, director of the state’s newly organized Alabama Cooperative Extension Services (ACES), took the lead in organizing. By



the end of 1922 Farm Bureau chapters existed in 36 of 67 counties and enrolled some 20,000 members. All 67 counties had been organized by 1930. County agents hired by Auburn University essentially became Farm Bureau organizers, concentrating on owners of large and midsize white farms, even collecting dues for the bureau. Although Duncan initially promoted the Farm Bureau as a “clean, non-partisan, non-political business organization,” it did not remain that way long.4 In fact, it steered through the legislature an impressive package of laws designed to favor farmers. Alabama Farm Bureau soon became synonymous with the name of Edward A. O’Neal III. A well-educated native of Florence (Lauderdale County) in the Tennessee Valley, O’Neal descended from a family of wealthy planters, lawyers, and politicians (both his father and grandfather served as governors of Alabama). Serving eight years as head of the Alabama Farm Bureau, O’Neal was elected president of the national organization in 1931. During the following decade he played a major role in shaping federal agricultural policy, exerted conservative in®uence within the Department of Agriculture, and blunted New Deal reforms whenever he could. He waged constant war with fellow Alabamians who were active New Dealers such as Aubrey Williams, Clifford Durr, Hugo Black, and Lister Hill. In fact, his anti–New Deal activism and widespread farmer belief that Alabama’s Farm Bureau had become a powerful and conservative political machine caused a number of county bureaus to withdraw from the organization. As important as cotton remained, other products of the soil attracted more interest. Forest products employed twice as many workers as any other Alabama industry in 1909. Twenty years later, the state contained 1,141 lumber mills employing nearly 26,000. Most mills were small and locally owned. Planing mills averaged only 14 laborers; sawmills and turpentine mills, some 20 to 30 employees. The industry was typical of Alabama’s ¤rstphase industrialization: it was extractive and wasteful, exploited largely illiterate poor workers, paid barely a living wage, and isolated workers in company-run towns. The early 20th-century industry was centered in the longleaf pine belt stretching from the Savannah River in Georgia across West Florida and South Alabama into southern Mississippi. By 1913 424 miles of logging railroads crisscrossed south Alabama. The industry’s primary resource, the longleaf pine, had a long taproot that allowed it to ®ourish in the barren, sandy soil of the Wiregrass. Occa-



sional ¤res actually assisted forests by burning competing vegetation and providing a clear ®oor for germination of new trees. Tall, straight, with few limbs and a solid resin heart that resisted decay, the longleaf pine was a lumberman’s delight. From 1899 until the 1960s (with the single exception of 1931), the South’s pine trees dominated American lumber production, and Alabama established itself as the South’s leading lumber-producing state. Introduction of the crosscut saw in the 1890s tripled production. Companies established mobile lumber camps (sometimes mounted on narrow-gauge railroad cars that workers christened “Shaking Jacobs” for their vibration) that followed the disappearing forests. Eight-wheeled carts or two-wheeled carts known as caralogs pulled by oxen or mules hauled the 40- to 60-foot trees to rivers or railheads where they were ®oated to Mobile or shipped inland to sawmills. Most workers were like Massie Miller, farmers who earned extra money logging during their off season. Few laborers disputed their bosses’ prerogatives until the Knights of Labor arrived just before the 20th century. From that time forward workers periodically tried to organize, but racial differences between skilled white workers and mainly unskilled blacks as well as belligerent hostility from owners generally blocked unionization. Fairly typical of lumber mill towns was Chapman in Butler County. W. T. Smith of Birmingham bought the mill from its founder in 1891. His 3 sawmills, veneer mill, box factory, and 2 barrel factories were located in a company town. Chapman contained 44 houses, which the company distinguished as “two dollar houses, one dollar houses, and ¤fty cent shacks.” W. T. Smith employees typically paid half their daily wage of 80 cents for rent and received the rest in credit at the company store. Indeed, pay checks read “Good only in merchandise at Store of W. T. Smith Lumber Co., Chapman, Alabama,” where commissary prices were signi¤cantly higher than in nearby stores.5 Lumbering was a dangerous occupation, and employers assumed no liability for accidents until a workmen’s compensation law passed the legislature in 1920 at the urging of Gov. Thomas Kilby. One W. T. Smith employee claimed that hardly a week passed without a death from the whirling saws or falling trees. Kaul Lumber Company in North Alabama recorded 124 accidents in 1913 and 150 the following year. Abuses of con-



vict labor and cases of peonage involving European immigrants surfaced from time to time as well. In 1905 W. T. Smith sold his holdings to James G. McGowin, who had been company treasurer. The McGowin family came to Chapman from Mobile. After this purchase, the McGowins ruled Chapman as selfdescribed benevolent dictators. The family provided the mayor in elections where fewer than 20 voters bothered to cast ballots. James McGowin began to pay salaries in cash to the considerable relief of his workers. But when the CIO waged a long and bitter strike in the 1950s, the family demonstrated that a feudal relationship to workers could quickly turn from paternalism to harsh and punitive action. By the time of James McGowin’s death in 1934, he owned 140,000 acres of land and had provided his sons the ¤nest educations (Earl won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford after his graduation from the University, then served a distinguished career in the Alabama legislature). The sons began selective cutting and forest replanting in 1935, and their timber company became one of the earliest to implement modern, ecologically sound timber practices. The McGowins, plus other timber families such as the McMillans, who also lived in Chapman, were Universalists and treated the town to an unusual mix of enlightened intellectual life and paternalistic business practices. A bit to the southeast of Chapman, the little town of Brewton became Alabama’s alternative lumber center. Most of the capital came from local sources in Escambia County, and pro¤ts remained there as well. Northern capital funded only one 19th-century Brewton lumber company, and even it had come under local ownership by 1900. By that year 90 percent of Escambia County’s manufacturing capital was invested in lumber operations, and the county accounted for nearly a 10th of total capital invested in the industry statewide. The county’s full-time farmers had outnumbered its full-time timbermen 3 to 1 in 1880. Lumbermen had a 2 to 1 advantage by 1910. The number of companies operating in the county stood at 11 in 1880, 45 in 1890, and continued to increase into the next century as the transition from subsistence agriculture to lumber production gained force. The industrial giant in Escambia County was T. R. Miller. When he died in 1914, he owned 28,000 acres and had already begun to replant cutover land.



For common labor, industry conditions were often wretched. Unskilled, low paid, often abused, and almost inevitably patronized, they took out their frustrations by joining the Knights of Labor, which began organizing Escambia timber workers in 1899. By the beginning of the new century, 600 members of the Knights lived in Brewton alone. Though racially integrated at the district level, workers belonged to segregated locals. The union peaked in 1900 when it elected one of its members, J. H. Henley, to the state legislature. That year the union also produced its own newspaper, the Laborer’s Banner. Two years later, unionists elected a black man district master workman, which opened the union to charges of race mixing, an allegation that antiunion businessmen were only too willing to encourage. The result was rapid decline and virtual collapse of the union by 1902. T. R. Miller compensated by giving workers a new straw hat for cutting a record 7,460 pieces of timber in April of that year. If the timber industry was the quintessential outdoor version of Alabama’s ¤rst industrial revolution, the textile industry was the ultimate indoor rendering. In numerous ways the two industries operated in similar fashion. Many owners had been substantial planters or businessmen. Most were local. Both relied on extractive local resources. Company-owned towns, with company-owned churches and company-owned houses and company-owned commissaries, surrounded the factory. Workers came from isolated farms, possessed few skills, little education, and little bargaining power. They earned wages so low that entire families, including children below the age of 16, had to work. Bosses viewed mills as private domains to be run as they saw ¤t. In at least four ways the cotton mills were quite different. Most capital came from outside the state. Units were large. Most of the workers were women and children. And work on the actual mill ®oor was virtually all white. Trusting black males among so many white children and females would have violated a revered racial taboo. Businessmen might consider such an integrated labor force for sake of pro¤t. White workers maintained enough control of their own destiny to reject such violations of their racial folk ways. Alabama’s textile industry was well established by 1900. In fact, Alabama experienced the highest percentage increase in textile capacity of any state during the ¤nal decade of the 19th century, and in 1900, ranked fourth



among southern textile states with 400,000 spindles. Many factors led to this boom: the use of steam power; the state’s expanding railroad system; legislative repeal of model child labor laws in 1894; and a 10-year exemption of new mills from taxation. Entrepreneurship changed as well. Whereas planters had owned most antebellum Alabama cotton mills, they owned only about one-sixth of postwar stock. Of the 200 or so major local investors in Alabama mills between 1865 and 1900, only 10 percent came from planters. In upper Alabama, most capital came from the North. In lower Alabama, local bankers, real estate developers, lawyers, and merchants put up most of the money. On balance, northern sources accounted for 52 percent of the industry’s capital between 1880 and 1895; southerners, 48 percent. The addition of 21 mills and nearly $8 million in capital between 1895 and 1900 purchased modern equipment and injected signi¤cant numbers of northern owners. In 1894 Howard G. Nichols of Haverhill, Massachusetts, came to Alabama City at the foot of Lookout Mountain seeking a site to build a mill. Educated at Harvard and the son of a cotton manufacturer, Nichols fell in love with the beauty of the place and announced his decision to construct Dwight Manufacturing Company. As paternalistic toward workers as any native son, the devout Episcopal layman had each cottage built in a different style and painted a distinctive color. He allowed no saloons or concealed weapons, and built what was allegedly Alabama’s ¤rst public library, a church, bowling alley, bandstand, and baseball ¤eld. Elected mayor of Alabama City, he was apparently highly regarded by his poor white workers. North of Alabama City a fellow Bay Stater, Arthur H. Lowe of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, built Huntsville’s sixth mill in 1900. As president of the New England Manufacturing Association, Lowe recognized a good manufacturing environment when he saw one. His $300,000 investment constructed four brick buildings housing 10,000 spindles and employing 700. A year later, W. H. Rowe Jr. of Troy, New York, followed Lowe to Huntsville where he built Rowe Knitting Company. Merrimack Mill, built in 1899, relocated from Lowell, Massachusetts, bringing grandiose plans for a facility that would house 200,000 spindles, three times the size of any other mill in the South, and employing 20,000 people. By 1904 11 mills ringed the city, employing some 8,000 workers. Local boosters proclaimed



their city the South’s largest cotton spinning center. By 1916 the city’s mills consumed 60,000 bales of cotton and shipped 30 million pounds of textiles each year. The north Alabama textile industry thrived in Huntsville, Gadsden– Alabama City, Anniston, and Birmingham. But central Alabama (especially Lee and Chambers Counties) made its own claim to a share of the new mills. Opelika in Lee County became home to several mills, and West Point Manufacturing built mills in Lanett, Shawmutt, Langdale, Fairfax, and River View, creating one of the six largest textile manufacturing centers in the United States by the mid-1930s. LaFayette Lanier and his brother from Chambers County began their textile empire with a paternalistic emphasis that characterized the more enlightened leaders of the industry. They supplemented county school appropriations in order to establish a nine-month school term free to elementary students. They operated free kindergartens in each mill village. They provided life insurance, free vacations, swimming pools, recreation centers, and bath houses. Up the road in Alexander City, Benjamin Russell used his University of Virginia law degree as an entry into the corporate world. He began a bank in 1900 and that same year bought a knitting mill, which he moved to Alexander City. A dam across the Tallapoosa River provided electrical power, the acquisition of additional mills expanded capacity, and production of athletic wear tapped an expanding American market. The prominence of towns such as Alexander City was no accident. Each of Alabama’s 9 largest urban areas had at least one cotton mill by 1900, and half the 32 towns with a population of more than 2,000 boasted one. Only four mills were located in communities smaller than 1,500, and only two chose a rural area. But the mills usually located just outside city limits in order to avoid taxes and assure owners greater control over mill village residents. The strategy worked quite well. By 1925 Alabama had become the South’s fourth leading manufacturing state (behind the Carolinas and Georgia) with nearly 67,000 wage earners. Of them, 23,500 worked in textiles. By the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, Alabama’s 83 textile mills employed nearly 28,000. Whereas the state’s mills had consumed only 5 percent of the nation’s cotton in 1914, they doubled that ¤gure by 1929,



when the industry peaked in the state, ranking ¤rst in total value of manufactured products throughout the decade and a half. Industrial leaders convinced themselves that their enterprises were as much religious and philanthropic as commercial. Avondale Mills founder B. B. Comer called his venture “a civic enterprise at the request of the Chamber of Commerce to help give employment to those badly in need of it in the young and struggling city of Birmingham.” A 1901 promotional tract published by Huntsville’s Chamber of Commerce rhapsodized over the intersection of benign nature and commerce: “Here you will not be burned by the summer sun. . . . No hot winds will rack your nerves nor ague shake your frame. Neither will you be chilled to the marrow by the icy blasts of winter, for it scarcely ever freezes. . . . The man of eighty in the saddle is a common sight. . . . The ladies will forget their trouble and dyspepsia, and bloom with a complexion rivaling the ladies of Alabama, who are unequaled in the world for beauty.” And the city’s Mercury Centennial proclaimed that “the mill villages of this industrial community have done as much if not more than any other similar communities in any part of the world in uplift work and we can point with merited pride to the modern schools of the mill village.” Any person of proper age could ¤nd work “at good wages in buildings that are kept in perfectly sanitary condition . . . and at a character of work that is interesting and not laborious; where there is plenty of room at the top for those who are energetic, industrious and ambitious.”6 For the nameless thousands of poor whites who ran the shuttles, spun the cotton, and tended the machines, mill work was often laborious and seldom interesting. Nor was there much room at the top, at least not for people like them. A representative sample of Alabama mills between 1885 and 1895 revealed that the number of boys under 18 increased by 81 percent, the number of girls below age 18 by 158 percent. A quarter of Alabama’s cotton mill operatives in 1900 had not yet reached their 16th birthday. Ten years later, Alabama mills employed 1,000 children between the ages of 10 and 13. Nor was the life of such children easy. In Huntsville in 1902, a typical shift began at 5:45 in the morning and ended at 6:15 in the evening, a 129hour day. Rent for a house in the mill village amounted to only a dollar per room per month, but in 1895 Alabama’s women spinners earned an average



of only $2.38 a week. Even in the boom year of 1927, the average southern textile worker made only $12.25 a week, less than half what a Massachusetts worker earned for the same job. By that year, North Carolina and Georgia had established 60 hour limits on the work week, and South Carolina had reduced it to 55 hours. Massachusetts limited textile operatives to a 48-hour week. Alabama had no limit at all. These economic conditions explain why so many Massachusetts mills came to Alabama. They also explain why so many Alabama workers grumbled about their jobs on the eve of the Great Depression. Mrs. L. A. House was not one to grumble. She had a typical Calvinistic Baptist philosophy of life. What she could not control she accepted as the work of a divine and compassionate Providence. In 1899 at age 14, she married (“married real young. Been married all my life,” she reminisced in an oral history). She and her husband bought a small farm in Shelby County and settled down to raise their ¤ve children born over the following decade. But before they could pay off the farm, he developed mouth cancer, medical bills accumulated, and they had to sell their farm to pay for his treatment. After her husband died, Mrs. House became a tenant farmer, depending on help from her brother and eldest son, who was only nine. After three years of futile effort, she moved into Sylacauga where she found work at Avondale Mills. The work was arduous and boring, but she also remembered that it was “easier than digging.” Although Mignon mill village afforded House a more social environment and a nice house, there was much about it she did not like. The Methodist denomination of her youth was dominated in the mill village by the Comer family and mill superintendents. She felt uncomfortable there and unwanted. So she switched af¤liation and raised her children in Mignon Baptist Church, whose membership consisted of “lint heads” like herself. Though she referred to herself by that term, she ®ared when middle-class Sylacauga children mocked her grandson as a “cotton head,” ¤ring back a pointed rejoinder: “If it wasn’t for the ‘cotton heads’ you wouldn’t have nothing to eat in Sylacauga.” She learned to live on company scrip (which she called “goo-ga-loo”), redeemable at full face value only at the company commissary. She recalled her boss, Donald Comer, as a kind and caring man. On one occasion, she remembered running old cotton on a frame. Each time she tried to tie a knot, the strand broke. When a man “dressed very ordinary, just cool and common” inquired what was



wrong, she blurted out in frustration: “It’s just rotten, only kind the Comers will buy.”7 He laughed heartily and walked on. A horri¤ed fellow worker who had overheard the exchange informed House that the curious stranger was Donald Comer who owned the mill. Mrs. House spent the rest of the day expecting to be ¤red. She was not, and she remembered Comer as a fair-minded owner who extended to a young widow from the country the opportunity for a decent job and a steady wage. She reciprocated with loyalty and devotion. The fearful day Mrs. House spent expecting to be ¤red re®ected the vulnerability of workers and how capricious bosses could in fact control their lives. Comer gave Mrs. House’s ministerial son-in-law a work scholarship to Howard College, but her son left the mill in the 1930s when of¤cials blacklisted him for trying to join a union. Fear for job was one thing. Fear for life was quite another. And that was the ominous backdrop in the life of every coal miner. Coal mining was exclusively a job con¤ned to Appalachian Alabama, and initially the labor force was mainly white. But by 1900 some 8,700 blacks mined coal beside 6,000 native-born whites and 1,600 white immigrants (most from Wales and Scotland). Like textile workers, they lived mainly in company camps, though more isolated from adjacent towns. In 1922–23 66 percent of Alabama miners lived in company-owned dwellings. Only 4 percent of their houses had running water, and none contained bathtubs, showers, or ®ush toilets. Unlike textile workers, all miners were males, and most were young (in 1921, 57 percent were between the ages of 20 and 45, and many others were children below the age of 18). Like tenant farmers, miners moved often looking for a better life or ®eeing the dangerous occupation. TCI had to recruit 2,000 miners a year to maintain its 11,000-man labor force. As in tenancy, lumbering, and textiles, many miners were illiterate (36 percent in 1890, 14 percent in 1920). Until 1927 convicts were used extensively, adding to the inherent danger for inexperienced miners who often ignored elementary safety precautions. Work was seasonal, often heaviest in the winter when coal was used for heating and when mining jobs supplemented subsistence agriculture. Pay was by the ton; in 1914–15, a skilled miner could load between 5 and 10 tons of coal a day for approximately 29 cents a ton. Alabama’s median annual mining wage in 1921 was $930 compared to $1,420 nationally.



The setting for mining, the Appalachian mountains, was not a hospitable environment. The region had the nation’s highest birth rates and the highest infant mortality rates; only 2 million of the region’s 130 to 140 million people had health insurance during the Great Depression. And coal mining was America’s most hazardous basic industry, with explosions, slate falls, and accidents killing an average of 1,000 men per year even before scientists discovered the prolonged danger of black lung disease. Of the 34 worst mine disasters in the U.S. since 1900, 4 were in Alabama (at Virginia City, where 112 died in a 1905 explosion; at Palos, where 90 were killed in 1910; at Banner Mine, where 132 died in 1911; and at Dolomite, where 90 were killed in 1922). Between 1905 and 1925, more than 700 Alabama coal miners perished in major explosions alone. Many more died from slate falls, runaway coal cars, electrical accidents, or smaller explosions. Yet the prevailing religious fatalism and poverty of the region drove more and more men into the pits. The estimated 16,000 miners in 1900 peaked at more than 27,000 in 1927. Together with Birmingham iron ore miners, the number of miners reached 36,000 in 1920. During the years from 1914 to 1923, Alabama coal miners produced 3.4 percent of the nation’s coal; from 1923 to 1930, they increased their share to 3.7. John Gioiello was one of the thousands of immigrants who mined coal. Born in Torino, Italy, in 1898, he attended only elementary school and spoke no English when he arrived in America in 1921. An orphan, he had worked as a farm laborer in his native country. He had relatives in Alabama, and they invited him to come south. Beginning at age 23 in 1921, when many striking black and white miners were forced to leave the state, “Big John” Gioiello mined coal for 29 years. Fortunately, his crew included half a dozen other Italian miners who spoke enough English to help him understand instructions. He began working a nine-hour day, though work became increasingly sporadic as the Depression set in. The mines that Gioiello and his fellows worked were mainly “captive” mines owned by one of the large iron and steel companies, with TCI accounting for nearly half the total. George Crawford, CEO of TCI from 1907 to 1930, instituted an extensive welfare program in his coal camps, but most miners were not so lucky. And some entrepreneurs, notably Charles DeBardeleben, ran their mines like private ¤efdoms.



Coal and iron ore mining constituted two legs of Alabama’s most important manufacturing industry, iron and steel. Although production brie®y dipped early in the century, U.S. Steel’s purchase of TCI in 1907 and the infusion of new capital, technology, and leadership prompted a rebound. Alabama’s proportion of iron ore mined held steady at about 9 percent for the ¤rst three decades of the century; its share of national steel production increased from a little over 1 percent to more than 3 percent, and it also outpaced national growth in production of pig iron (in 1926 Alabama poured 87 percent of the South’s pig iron). During that time Alabama accounted for more than 7 percent of the nation’s supply. By the 1920s Anniston’s 10 plants were the largest producer of cast-iron pipe and ¤ttings in the world, shipping its product to every country. By 1917 steel ranked second in product value among all Alabama industries, pig iron ranked third, and coal fourth. The iron and steel industry was primarily urban and centered in the Birmingham district, which included Bessemer, Anniston, and Gadsden. As with coal mining, the labor force was almost exclusively male, with nearly equal numbers of black and white workers and a hefty immigrant minority, particularly Italian. Although the industry employed some skilled workers, most employees were unskilled, many were illiterate, and companies often paid less than two dollars a day at the beginning of the century. Low pay, poor health, lack of industrial work discipline, and low morale created major problems for management. When U.S. Steel sent George Crawford to straighten out TCI in 1907, the annual turnover rate for labor was an astounding 400 percent. Crawford met these problems head-on by introducing perhaps the most extensive system of welfare capitalism to be found in any southern manufacturing industry. Crawford hired Dr. Lloyd Noland, who introduced a comprehensive system of family medical care and health insurance. Crawford hired some of the state’s best-trained social workers and teachers for TCI’s mining camps. His innovations reduced the annual turnover rate to 5 percent by 1930, doubled average job attendance, and improved the standard of living for company employees to well above the state average for industrial workers. Despite being the local agent of an absentee landlord, Crawford assumed leadership of both regional and state economic development. He urged the creation of state docks at Mobile, reducing docking costs below that of New



Orleans. In fact, when the state docks opened in 1928, Mobile afforded the cheapest coaling seaport in the world. Total harbor business increased from 2.6 million tons in 1923 to 4.3 million in 1928. After Ollinger and Bruce launched the city’s initial ®oating dry dock in 1904, Mobile also rapidly expanded its shipbuilding and ship repair industry. Fishing ®eets, fruit and lumber export companies, paper companies, and ALCOA metals expanded the city’s economic base. And TCI was Mobile’s largest shipper. Crawford also inspired Birmingham’s ¤rst industrial development board and helped bring Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plants to Alabama. Crawford’s leading competitor in the evolving world of welfare capitalism was John Eagan. Eagan was a serious student of the Bible, a longtime Sunday school superintendent at Atlanta’s Central Presbyterian Church, one of the founders of Berry School for mountain children, and a leader of Georgia’s interracial movement. He was also a successful businessman who sold a tobacco business because of moral scruples about the damage done by the product and sold his coal mines when he discovered the appalling conditions of miners. In 1905 Eagan established American Cast Iron Pipe Company (ACIPCO) in Birmingham. Operating the company according to the precepts of the golden rule, he provided his workers medical service, group insurance, pensions, funeral expenses, emergency loans, a cooperative store, a restaurant, gardens, a savings bank, excellent housing, athletic teams, and other bene¤ts. In 1920 he became interested in English patterns of cooperative labor-management relations that were designed to reduce con®ict. He established a 5-member board of management and two 12-member boards of operatives, one for whites and another for blacks. Together the boards set company policy for the 700 black and 300 white employees. Business friends warned him the plan would not work, and company president James McWane resigned in protest. But Eagan persisted, establishing a trust fund managed by the mixed boards. All dividends earned by the company were invested to ensure job stability during economic downturns. He began pro¤t-sharing and unemployment plans and in 1923 changed his will to leave all common stock to the boards of operatives and managers. He also hired expert managers and stayed abreast of modern technology. Eagan’s experiment in industrial democracy made news across the country, resulting in stories in the New York World, the San



Diego Union, and elsewhere. When he died in 1924, he was beloved by his workers. ACIPCO remained a pro¤table company run on behalf of its operatives and managers and in the 1980s was the largest U.S. pipe shop under a single roof and the second largest in the world. That Birmingham was the unof¤cial capital of Alabama’s ¤rst industrial revolution is no surprise. As one of the few major southern cities without an antebellum past, the Magic City seemed on the way to ful¤lling the implications in its nickname. In 1910 its population was only 38,000; but the Greater Birmingham Plan annexation of that year created a city of nearly 180,000 by 1920, only 12,000 smaller than Atlanta. In the early 1920s Birmingham claimed the South’s largest and tallest skyscrapers. The city’s 788 factories employed more than 100,000 industrial workers in 1924, making it the region’s premier industrial urban area. Its population had climbed to 260,000 in 1930, within 10,000 of Atlanta. But Birmingham’s population was different, containing the highest percentage of black residents (38 percent) of any major American city. And too-rapid urban growth had created problems of poor housing, high crime, pollution, and traf¤c congestion (the city claimed 43,000 private automobiles in 1926, a 365 percent increase over ¤ve years earlier). The ¤rst three decades of the century set the patterns for Birmingham’s future: absentee ownership; business control of city politics; disruptive economic cycles; a central core city surrounded by uncooperative suburbs. Although the 1907 purchase of TCI by U.S. Steel was the most important symbolic acquisition, it was only one incident in Birmingham’s long history of economic colonialism. U.S. Steel soon clamped the infamous “Pittsburgh plus” freight rates on TCI steel, claiming that its southern subsidiary had higher production costs. After the Federal Trade Commission found that the local cost of producing steel was actually lower than in Pittsburgh, the company simply imposed an arbitrary ¤ve dollar per ton price differential on steel produced in Birmingham. U.S. Steel also became the largest land owner in Jefferson County. U.S. Pipe and Foundry, another outside corporation, followed in second place. That started a pattern, and by 1990 only 1 of the 10 largest private landowners in Jefferson County was headquartered in Alabama (7 of the 10 were national paper companies). Many CEO’s came down from Pittsburgh or other northern cities to run



Birmingham companies. One was so uninterested in his new home that he did not even bother to open an account in a local bank, paying his bills with checks drawn on his Atlanta bank. Outsider hegemony over the city also created a certain arrogance. City leaders deferred to leading corporations, especially TCI. As the city’s leading landowner, employer, and industrial gem, TCI executives exercised disproportionate in®uence over municipal decisions. According to local lore (later disputed by some historians), TCI blocked new industrial acquisitions that might result in heightened competition for labor, higher wages, or more unionized jobs. The city’s manufacturing base and post–Civil War origins also assured businessmen leadership of social affairs. Civic duty, philanthropy, and cultural amenities often drifted into the background. Of 296 Birmingham leaders selected in 1920, 200 were businessmen. The organizations providing city leadership included the Chamber of Commerce, Business Men’s League, Merchant’s and Manufacturer’s Association, and the Civitan Club (the national organization was founded in Birmingham in 1917). Because so many of these entrepreneurs were newcomers to a city without a traditional elite, Birmingham offered a more ®uid social structure than Mobile or Montgomery. One part of Birmingham’s magic was the ease with which accomplishment rather than birth opened doors into the most elite society. James Bowron Jr., born an Englishman of Quaker ancestry, became secretary-treasurer of TCI by dint of personal accomplishment. One attraction the city held for him was its openness to a new kind of elite: “I found on coming to Birmingham that to be in the iron trade was to be respectable. To be an of¤cer of an iron-making corporation was to have an entree to the best society, but to be the chief residential of¤cer of the largest corporation was to carry the key to the kingdom of heaven.”8 Bowron’s comments, of course, describe only one dimension of urban society. Like most new, raw, industrial cities that grew too fast, Birmingham had another side. Early in the century, Birmingham with 100,000 people had a homicide rate higher than Great Britain with 40 million. Saloons and prostitution ®ourished. Ethel M. Armes, the ¤rst major historian of the city’s iron and steel industry, described Birmingham in a 1912 essay in Survey Magazine as a mirror of the city’s industrial plants, “utterly jagged and uneven, raw in spots, ‘picayunish,’ and provincial-get rich-quick.”9



Although businessmen generally dominated the city’s politics, labor activism guaranteed close contests. Strong unions regularly elected city commissioners and even U.S. congressmen. Had white unionists been more welcoming of their black compatriots, they could have swamped the business elite even with its allied city newspapers. Two strong union papers contested the journalistic landscape. Many ministers and female reformers endorsed unionism, and even journalist Ethel Armes, who wrote The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama under aegis of the Chamber of Commerce, believed unionism was the best way for workers to improve their situation. By the 1930s business domination of city government and the police force proved critical. When trade unionists, Communists, socialists, and local iconoclasts began protesting and organizing, security forces for TCI and the city police conducted a reign of terror similar to Ku Klux Klan outrages of the 1920s and 1960s. But this time the victims were not exclusively blacks or Catholics; they included well-born Jewish intellectuals, local white union leaders, and any other freethinker who dared challenge the economic status quo. So tightly was this violence connected to the city’s economic and political elites that one historian termed it “establishment violence.” Although suburban consolidation worked well in 1910, it was not destined to be successful again during the century. Wealthy suburbs such as Homewood and Mountain Brook to the south and independent communities to the east, west, and north (Trussville, Pinson, Center Point, Gardendale, Fultondale, Bessemer) refused to join the city, frightened by its class and racial divisions, mercurial politics, crime and social dislocation, and most of all by its large black population. Instead of growing concentrically, radiating out from a central core like most cities, Birmingham-area mills and mines spawned their own towns whose residents shared more with each other than with the Magic City. Ultimately a ring of hostile towns surrounded and strangled the core city, with enormous implications for the future. The Apex of the Old Order If there is a single pivotal time in the economy of 20th-century Alabama, it occurred between 1929 and 1945. The Great Depression and the Second World War were more traumatic events than any single generation should



have to bear. One event ripped apart the old order. The other helped construct a new one. The Depression actually struck different sectors of the economy at different times. Agriculture absorbed the blow ¤rst in the early 1920s and experienced a two-decade long slide. Some manufacturing industries peaked in 1925, others in 1928 or even 1929. The advent of the New Deal in March 1933 set in motion policies that would fundamentally alter Alabama’s economy. Some effects were purposeful and planned. The Tennessee Valley Authority constructed a series of dams along the Tennessee River that ®ooded ancestral land but also provided cheap hydroelectric power, spurred industrialization, and created thousands of new jobs. Rural electri¤cation transformed Alabama’s hinterland. Make-work jobs in the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and numerous other agencies preserved dignity and afforded a modest income. The Social Security Act created a safety net for working-class people as well as for the poor and disabled. The Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration provided tenant farmers a new start in life. The Agricultural Adjustment Act attacked the problems of overproduction and low market prices. The National Recovery Act (NRA) and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) imposed minimum-wage and maximum-hour legislation as well as assuring workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for better treatment. Other effects were accidental or coincidental. Efforts at recovery and reform involved unintended consequences. By reducing differentials in pay between northern and southern textile workers, the NRA stripped southern mills of their pricing advantage and made it harder for states such as Alabama to recruit New England mills. National industries with branches in Alabama were forced by their own unions and the federal government to allow southern workers the same rights labor received in the North. Liberal and labor groups found the national press and federal agencies willing to investigate and publicize violations of human rights. Although the New Deal seldom pressed the issue, it of¤cially demanded that blacks be hired in TVA projects at a rate roughly equivalent to their share of the population. As a result, blacks tended to vote more for New Deal Democrats while white businessmen began to desert the party of their fathers as



it became more liberal and prolabor. As NIRA codes brought southern workers more in line with national wages, the South’s economy became less distinctively regional and more integrated into the economic mainstream. President Roosevelt’s National Emergency Council called the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” and the administration’s Report on Economic Conditions of the South re®ected the thinking of liberal economists. The federal presence in the South became much more intrusive. No sector of the South’s economy felt the winds of change more profoundly than agriculture. By 1935 Alabama contained 176,000 tenant farm families, up from 148,000 in 1920. When the price of cotton slumped to 4.6 cents a pound in 1932, it was the lowest price for the commodity since 1894. Although declining crop prices affected all farmers, tenants suffered worst. They owed an average of $80 in debts before they even planted 1934 crops, a carryover from earlier years. One study found that 40 percent of tenants had debts to their landlords of at least one year’s standing. Not surprisingly, Harold Hoffsommer, the Auburn rural sociologist who conducted the 1933 study, found that 90 percent of landlords believed sharecropping was a satisfactory labor system, the exact percentage as tenant families who believed they were better off on government relief. Nor were croppers likely to experience much improvement in their lives. Only 9 percent of croppers became owners, almost the same percentage of owners who became croppers. One-third of the croppers were functionally illiterate. Nearly half of landlords opposed government relief, fearing that it would discourage tenants from continuing to work for such low pay. And croppers moved frequently to get away from their landlords, white families every 2.6 years on average, blacks every 5.1 years. Paul Terry and Verner Sims, social scientists at the University of Alabama, conducted an extensive survey of a single community, which they called “Upland Bend” (actually Gorgas in Tuscaloosa County). Their study afforded a revealing snapshot of rural Alabama during the 1930s. The community contained 196 households, 166 of them white, 30 black. Among heads of family, 189 were farmers, 2 were professionals, 1 was a landless widow, and 4 were unemployed. Among farmers, 40 percent were landowners, 60 percent tenants. The average Negro had completed second grade, but 40 percent had never attended school at all. Among whites, the typical male had completed ¤ve grades, females six. Only 10 percent had graduated



from high school and a mere 4 residents had college degrees. The better educated their children were, the more likely they were to leave the community. The major source of income was cotton, though half the farm wives supplemented family income by selling produce, butter, and eggs; boarding teachers; sewing, cooking, washing, quilting, or hiring out to perform farm labor. Community health was relatively poor, with 15 percent of the children malnourished. Only 2 houses had running water, and most were unpainted inside and out. Most homes contained no books other than a Bible, almanac, catalog, songbook, or Sunday school quarterly. Nearly a sixth of the families did not own a clock, watch, or timepiece; they governed their rising, working, and sleeping by the rhythm of agricultural seasons, sun, and moon. They overwhelmingly voted Democratic and liked Franklin Roosevelt. They approved the new state income tax (which none of them earned enough to pay anyway), though some owners groused that “we’re taxed to death now.”10 Sardonically or ironically (it is hard to know what the authors had in mind), Terry and Sims entitled their probing examination of Gorgas They Live on the Land, when in fact inhabitants were rapidly deserting the land. The Great Depression and the New Deal served as a giant whiplash, initially driving hungry, unemployed people away from cities and back to farms. But one of the central unintended consequences of the New Deal had the opposite effect. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) paid farmers subsidies to reduce production of surplus crops. But the intended recipient of federal welfare was uncertain, especially in the South. Was the money meant for tenants who actually produced the crop or owners who provided the land? Though Congress expressed its intent that tenants receive at least some of the federal largesse, conservative bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture, strongly backed by the Farm Bureau, made sure few of the subsidy payments reached tenants. Alabama’s Edward A. O’Neal, himself a cotton planter and head of the national Farm Bureau, and Sen. John H. Bankhead—a lawyer, planter, and member of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee—played major roles in crafting agricultural strategy that favored owners over tenants. Bankhead and Alabama congressman Bob Jones also lent their names to a landmark New Deal agricultural reform, the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act. With the New Deal catching heavy ¤re from the political left



in the 1936 election cycle, Roosevelt appointed a presidential commission to study farm tenancy. He had shown little interest previously in Bankhead’s ideas on the subject, but the commission’s report laid bare the cataclysm that well-to-do southerners had spent a half century ignoring. The rural landscape was a vast sea of desolation. Public health of¤cials reported observing four white women in Macon County trying to breast-feed babies while they survived on a diet of nothing but cornbread and sweet potatoes. An elderly man died of starvation in the same county after eating only raw potatoes. The Auburn University rural sociologist Harrold Hoffsommer wrote a colleague, “I am personally coming to believe that the whole cropper system of cotton farming is nothing more than a certain species of unemployment.”11 By 1936 many landowners who had received AAA checks to cut production had refused to renew contracts with their tenants. They either removed tenant land from production to comply with AAA guidelines, or they used federal money to purchase tractors, allowing owners to farm more of their own land without assistance from tenants. In 1930 Alabama farmers operated fewer than 4,700 tractors. By 1945 they owned nearly 17,000; by 1950, nearly 46,000. Historians estimate that mechanization between 1930 and 1945 displaced between one-¤fth and two-¤fths of all southern tenant farmers. Lorena Hickok, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt dispatched to Alabama by New Deal relief director Harry Hopkins, reported one north Alabama county with 300 displaced tenant farmers, one of whom pleaded with her: “Please buy us a tent, Ma’am. We can’t ¤nd no house.”12 The number of white tenant farmers declined from more than 100,000 in 1935 to 79,000 in 1940. Owners watched indifferently as tenants shifted from their responsibility to public welfare. Nor did extension and home demonstration agents from Auburn express much interest. Lorena Hickok wrote Harry Hopkins that she met “darned few of that crowd who had any interest in people on relief.” They were “too silo-minded,” had a “kind of Chautaugua slant on life,” and spent their time “fooling around with girl’s clubs” that enrolled mainly the daughters of large commercial farmers.13 Agricultural agents were also too involved in state politics to worry with the problems of tenants, who remained disfranchised by the poll tax provision of the 1901 constitution. The 1937 Bankhead-Jones Act spawned by these realities charted a dif-



ferent course. The federal government would furnish loans allowing tenants to purchase their own land and equipment. Originally envisioned as a massive $1 billion restructuring of southern agriculture, congressional conservatives succeeded in limiting funding to $10 million, a mere pittance given the extent of the tenant problem. The legislation also created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to administer the program. Though the FSA, staffed by many of the South’s most idealistic liberals, struggled against long odds to stretch dollars as far as possible, the agency could assist only 44,000 tenant families to purchase land between 1938 and 1946. In its best year, 1941, the FSA funded only 1 of every 22 southern applicants. By the time county extension agents ¤nished screening applicants, only the best of the poorest tenants quali¤ed for loans. Others languished on relief until war production absorbed them into defense industries. Of those helped by the FSA in 1939, Alabama farmers had the lowest average net incomes of any state, $180 annually. Nor was displacement of tenants the only unintended result of New Deal agricultural policy. The number of cotton plantations in Alabama declined precipitously. Although soil erosion, infestation by boll weevils, and federal agricultural policy contributed to this decline, another important factor was lack of supervision by landowners, who increasingly ®ed such communities as Gorgas, bound for more exciting towns and cities where they became absentee landlords. Just as basic manufacturing had fueled the economic boom between 1900 and 1925, it led the decline in the late 1920s. The number of factories and mills fell from more than 2,800 in 1929 to less than half that number four years later. The wood products industry took the hardest hit, with employment in 1931 about half the 1929 levels. Sawmills declined from more than 1,100 to 275 over the same period; 73 of the closed mills laid off more than 8,000 workers, most in southwestern Alabama. Iron and steel followed close behind. Employment dropped by 28 percent between 1929 and 1931. TCI’s operation at Docena employed 1,000 men in the mid-1920s but only 78 by 1933. George Crawford gave up on the district in 1930, leaving TCI to become president of Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh. Coal mining declined in tandem with iron and steel. Peak employment reached 27,000 miners in 1927, then declined to 20,000 in 1932. Even that



¤gure is misleading because those miners who still had jobs in 1933 worked an average of only 145 days that year. Textile mills fared best of all, shedding only 4,300 jobs between 1929 and 1935, then rapidly recovering in 1936–37. By 1940 total textile and apparel employment had risen to 46,000, nearly as much as iron and steel (21,500), lumber (18,500), and coal mining (13,500) combined. Because so many manufacturing plants were located in Birmingham or nearby, that city was particularly hard hit by declines in the manufacturing sector. In June 1932, 25,000 of the city’s 100,000 salaried employees were jobless and another 60,000 worked only part-time. The county poorhouse, designed to accommodate 220, housed more than 500. President Roosevelt aptly called Birmingham the “worst hit town in the country.” One of George Crawford’s social workers, Mary Dolliver, tried to maintain the morale of unemployed miners at Docena but with little success: “All I am doing now is taking care of clothing relief cases and ®our lines, and all the people I deal with have been without work for months, and they are getting to the point where they are without hope. Like the fool I am, I’d spend all my earthly goods on them, but it’s just a drop in the bucket. . . . Tuesday is always a bad day, with a line of discouraging length to listen to one by one—a tale of woe, insuf¤cient clothing and food, sickness. Pellagra is increasing and I wonder what the end will be. . . . If this thing continues, I will have forgotten how to play.”14 TCI miners started referring to commissary credit vouchers as “pity slips.” Employment rates declined for both blacks and whites during the 1930s, one of only three southern states to experience absolute declines for both races; Alabama had the dubious distinction of leading the decline. The state also experienced the highest drop in total nonfarm employment (15 percent between 1930 and 1940). Per capita income fell from $311 in 1929 to $194 in 1935. At the bottom of the economic ladder, many poor blacks and whites resonated to the words of bluesman Lonnie Johnson’s song contrasting conditions before and after the stock market crash: “Hard times don’t worry me, I was broke when it ¤rst started out.” Not all Alabama workers were so fatalistic or resigned. New CIO unions, formed by a split within the American Federation of Labor, sent organizers to Alabama, where they found fertile ground. By 1934 the United Mine Workers had organized virtually all coal miners, despite pitched gun battles



with Charles DeBardeleben’s company security forces. The left-wing Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union organized mainly black iron ore miners at Muscoda, Ishkooda, and Wenonah despite TCI intimidation. But as a southern subsidiary of a Pittsburgh corporation, TCI came under enormous pressure from the new National Labor Relations Board and ¤nally capitulated to the new union. Unionism’s largest failure occurred in the textile industry. Despite government codes assuring minimum wages and maximum hours, southern mill owners found ways around regulations. By adopting the “stretch-out” system (where fewer workers were forced to tend more machines), mills could produce as much fabric with fewer workers. The ¤rst workers to be dismissed tended to be the ones who favored unions. John Dean, an organizer from New York, arrived in Alabama to work with longtime local activists Mollie Dowd, Alice Berry, and Eula McGill. They organized a work stoppage for July 1934 involving 40 of Alabama’s 42 United Textile Workers (UTW) locals. Five thousand angry cotton hands walked off their jobs in Huntsville, followed by workers in towns across north Alabama. Between 16,000 and 23,000 of the state’s 40,000 textile workers ultimately joined the walkout, driving their rattletrap cars in convoys called “®ying squads” from mill to mill in order to persuade (or compel) fellow workers to join the strike. Although the strike was quite effective in north Alabama, unorganized workers in the Chattahoochee Valley were much more cautious, especially as edgy plant managers mounted machine guns on company property and armed guards with ri®es, shotguns, and submachine guns. Organizer Dean was abducted at gunpoint and released in Tennessee, though he returned to Huntsville hours later surrounded by armed bodyguards. The state American Legion commander was indicted for the kidnapping but never brought to trial. Strikers demanded $12 for a 30-hour week, an end to the stretch-out system, reinstatement of workers ¤red for union activities, and recognition of the UTW. In August the national UTW convention adopted Alabama’s demands as the basis for a nationwide strike by apparel workers. When the Labor Day vacation ended on Tuesday September 4, the New York Times calculated that nearly a million American apparel workers had struck from Alabama to Maine. As the southern state with the strongest tradition of militant unionism, it is not surprising that the largest strike to that time in American history should have begun in



Huntsville. But it is a piece of Alabama history curiously forgotten by most of its population. The strike gained support in many north Alabama towns. In Gadsden, 5,000 people marched through town on Labor Day in solidarity with striking workers at Dwight Manufacturing. More than 6,000 marched through the streets of Huntsville. But mills in central and south Alabama remained open, and organizers venturing into that unfriendly terrain risked their health and lives. Strikers in the northern half of the state were evicted from company houses. In Talladega, a pitched street battle resulted in deaths on both sides and arrests of strikers. Without labor solidarity or adequate strike funds and with little demand for their products anyway, the strike ¤zzled in the early fall. Defeated strikers returned to jobs if allowed to do so, though union leaders had a tough time ¤nding work. Many went on relief or left the state. Bitterness remained, siphoned into desperate loyalty for Alabama New Dealers who supported them and equally bitter resentment of their bosses. Those who survived the Great Depression gradually found themselves reabsorbed into a wartime economy. TCI was operating again at full capacity by 1939. And a major expansion brought the payroll to 30,000 two years later. Birmingham went from the “worst hit city” to the “great arsenal of democracy.” Gulf States Steel in Gadsden began operating 3 shifts 24 hours a day. Bechtel-McCone Aircraft (later Hayes Aircraft) located in Birmingham. Alabama Dry Docks and Shipbuilding (ADDSCO) in Mobile went from 1,000 irregularly employed workers to 30,000 employees drawn mainly from displaced tenant farmers across west Florida, south Alabama, and southern Mississippi. The Dupont Alabama Ordinance Works opened in Childersburg, becoming the largest smokeless powder and explosives plant in the south. Cheap TVA power and abundant surplus labor served as a magnet to attract industrial jobs into the Tennessee Valley. Huntsville and Redstone arsenals pumped $70 million into Huntsville’s sagging economy, employing 11,000 at wartime peaks. Altogether, Alabama contained twice as many industrial wage earners in 1942 as in 1939, and many businessmen were convinced that the state was ¤nally poised to ful¤ll its destiny as perhaps America’s (and certainly the South’s) foremost manufacturing state. Unfortunately, it was not the beginning of Alabama’s industrial hegemony but the end of its ¤rst industrial revolution.



The Waning of the Old Economy Agriculture, which had dominated Alabama’s economy since the state’s beginnings, experienced a sharp and seemingly irreversible decline after the Second World War. The new Sunbelt South developing in places like Huntsville left behind a “shadow” South, a topography of despair that stretched across inner cities like Birmingham and Mobile, most of Alabama’s 35 Appalachian counties, and the Black Belt. Among the mainly white hill counties, 21 of 35 lost population during the 1950s, a spiral that continued for the rest of the century in most of them. Every county experienced decline (agricultural employment dropped from 133,000 to 51,500 during the decade, from more than 21 percent of total employment to only 8 percent). Tenancy rates continued to drop. White tenancy declined from nearly 101,000 in 1935 to less than half that in 1950 (though tenants still farmed 41 percent of Alabama’s farms in 1950). By 1974 tenants operated only 8 percent of state farms. In July 1942 Alabama farm laborers earned an average of only $1.35 per day without board while unskilled industrial laborers averaged $3.42, a differential that provided no incentive to remain on farms. Low wages were not the only incentive to abandon the land. Mechanization and declining cotton production added to the migration. The automatic cotton harvester was perfected during the war and began to enter southern cotton ¤elds in large numbers during the 1940s. A mechanical picker could harvest 1,000 pounds per hour, a ¤eld hand only 15–20. Tractors proliferated even faster. Agricultural mechanization cost the South an estimated 2.2 million jobs between 1950 and 1970. Economists estimated that a tractor required at least 40 acres to recoup investment and a cotton harvester 100 acres. Even though Alabama trailed other states in mechanization (as late as 1963, only 37 percent of the state’s cotton was picked by machine), the proportion of Alabama farm income provided by cotton declined from 40 percent in 1950 to only 9 in 1970. As fabrics made from polyester (a spinoff of World War II technology that did not have to be ironed) ®ourished, cotton acreage fell from 3.8 million in 1911 to 215,000 in 1983. With the decline of cotton came consolidation of land ownership. The number of farms dropped from nearly 212,000 in 1950 to only 86,000 in



1972, and the number of citizens engaged in agriculture fell from 280,000 to 100,000. Many remaining farmers operated larger farms (200 acres in 1972 compared to half that in 1950) and produced for a commercial market (in 1950 less than 3 percent of farms sold more than $40,000 worth of products annually compared to 23 percent in 1972). Coupled to changing production patterns in cotton was mechanization of coal mining and lumbering, which cost hundreds of additional jobs. The combined result was a hemorrhaging of people even more severe than the fabled black exodus of 1915 to 1930, when nearly a million African Americans left the South. In the last decade of the 19th century, 71 percent of the nation’s African Americans lived in the rural South; 60 years later only 18 percent did so. And many outnumbered white planters in the Black Belt, now ®ush with agricultural technology thanks to federal support checks, were only too happy to see them go. Nor did conditions stabilize during the last two decades. The 1980s was the worst decade for Alabama farmers since the Great Depression. Total farm acreage devoted to major crops declined by more than 50 percent, and the number of farms dropped to 45,000. Unemployment rates in the Black Belt soared into the midteens in some counties and remained chronically in double digits. Child poverty rates often climbed above 50 percent. Desperate farmers turned to different “crops.” By 1970 two-thirds of Alabama land was covered by forests, and timber was on its way to becoming the state’s major crop. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Auburn University’s innovative ¤sheries program as a means of generating protein for third world nations. But some of the ¤rst areas to take advantage of cat¤sh farming were in third world Alabama. Cat¤sh ponds and processing plants became a major source of income in the Black Belt. Alabama poultry producers vied with Arkansas for national leadership in yet another new “crop,” which became by 1997 the single largest source of agricultural income, dwar¤ng forestry, beef, cotton, peanuts, and cat¤sh. By turn-of-century, continuing population decline in nearly half of Alabama’s counties, together with high rates of rural unemployment and poverty, persuaded the state’s new Commerce Commission to focus not only on obvious statewide issues such as massive educational de¤ciencies but also on the rural people left behind by the new economy. One reason for the decline of Appalachian north Alabama was the crisis



in coal mining. As a result of unionization during the 1930s, miners became some of the highest paid production workers in the nation (ranking third among 155 industries). But higher labor costs proved an incentive for companies to invest heavily in technology, displacing more miners. Coupled with growing environmental concerns about acid rain, a by-product of coalburning power plants, the state’s coal industry began to falter. During the 1980s employment declined from nearly 13,000 to 7,500; 10 years later it had fallen to only 3,000 in 7 underground and 45 surface mines. Total production fell from nearly 30 million tons in 1989–90 to only two-thirds that ¤gure at the end of the century. Although coal mining still generated $1.3 billion in output and wages in 1999, Birmingham’s Drummond Company was spending $1 billion developing mines in Colombia, South America. Alabama’s timber industry lost employees but increased production during the last half of the century. After the Second World War many small producers bought surplus army trucks and a chain saw and headed for the woods. Gradually the Southeast developed a distinctive form of timber production called the wood dealer system. A powerful local of¤cial agreed to furnish paper mills a stipulated number of cords of wood. The wood dealer then contracted with numerous small producers to cut pulp wood and deliver it to the mill. The producer gained status as an independent businessman and received a guaranteed market for his products. The company gained a predictable supply of wood without having to worry about insurance (both personal and auto insurance premiums were high because of the high risk of accidents) or pay fringe bene¤ts. As more national lumber companies began operations in Alabama, farmers converted land from row crops to timber. Forests covered two-thirds of the state’s land by 1971. In 2000 that ¤gure had increased to nearly threefourths, a total second only to Georgia. Guaranteed the lowest property taxes in the nation by successful lobbying from ALFA and the forestry industry, Alabama’s large landowners paid less than a dollar per acre in property taxes in 1989, well below neighboring states, which charged three to four times that amount. (In 2002 a single, healthy 14-foot diameter pine tree was worth roughly $34, the average annual tax on 34 acres of Alabama timberland.) Although the number of sawmills had declined by nine-tenths between 1946 and 1971, the number of mills cutting more than 3 million board feet



annually nearly doubled between 1962 and 1971. Production quadrupled over 1951, making Alabama the largest supplier of pulpwood among southern states. Criticism of the industry centered on out-of-state corporations that established huge timber plantations and several hundred wealthy citizens who together owned one-third of the state’s total land. And the counties where they were concentrated experienced slow economic and population growth. These large landowners controlled more than half the land in eight counties. Another reason for declining rural counties was upheaval in the textile industry. Unlike coal mining or iron and steel, textile mills were scattered across the state, mainly in small towns and rural communities. By the 1980s the industry operated 100 textile mills and 200 to 250 apparel factories, at least one in every Alabama county, employing a peak of more than 112,000. At times following the war, textile mills provided jobs for one of every ¤ve employed persons and generated one of every eight dollars paid in manufacturing wages. Russell Manufacturing Company, headquartered in Alexander City, became the nation’s largest manufacturer of athletic uniforms. Along with Avondale mills, the largest textile employer, they reversed decades of outside ownership. Then a series of events brought the industry crashing down. Many U.S. corporations moved operations overseas where labor costs were signi¤cantly lower. New technology doomed some obsolete Alabama plants. By 1985 only one mill still operated in the former textile capital of Huntsville. The following year, Avondale Mills was sold to a Georgia company. The following decade and a half accelerated the decline. Between 1992 and 2001 the state lost 36,000 jobs in the apparel side of the industry (where fabrics are cut and sewn into clothing) and 1,500 textile jobs (where ¤bers are spun into yarn or made into fabric). After these losses, the combined industry counted only 60,000 employees, about half its peak employment. Even during the economic boom of the 1990s, 47 counties suffered a total decline of 3,800 jobs from May 1997 to May 1998. Each closing had a devastating effect on small towns where the mills had provided primary employment for generations of high school drop outs and low-skill workers. Mills in Geneva, a town of 4,600 in south Alabama, eliminated nearly 1,100 workers in 1999 and 2000. Covington County lost one-¤fth of its manufacturing jobs between 1994 and 1998. The Union



Yarn Mill closed in May 2001 after 95 years of operation in the town, leaving 197 men and women jobless. When Smiley Sams of Jacksonville received his pink slip, he told a story common to thousands of proud fellow workers: “I quit school when I was 16, and Mama said either go back to school or go to work. My Mama worked here. I got nine brothers and sisters, and all but one worked here. I got on September 20, 1974. I don’t know nothing else. I’ve never even ¤lled out an application. This is all I’ve ever done.”15 As with other smokestack industries, iron and steel manufacturing seemed well positioned for a prosperous future after World War II. War production had spiked employment, and Birmingham had strengthened its ranking as the South’s largest metals manufacturer. Jefferson County boasted 43 iron and steel mills in 1947, each employing more than 100 employees, a quarter more than Harris County, Texas (Houston), and nearly twice as many as runners-up Dallas County in Texas and Hamilton County, Tennessee (Chattanooga). Birmingham’s 30,000 production workers nearly doubled Houston’s. And the port of Mobile was the second largest Gulf Coast shipper of steel and iron products (behind New Orleans). The industry was not limited to Jefferson County. About the same number of production workers labored in Gadsden, Anniston, the Tennessee Valley, and elsewhere as worked in imperial Jefferson, for a statewide total of 61,000 (second in the South only to Texas). The industry accounted for one-¤fth of all Alabama manufacturing in 1947. Nor did the industry rest on its laurels. Hugh Bigler introduced new electric steel-making at Birmingham Steel, and TCI opened new coal mines, modernized facilities, and began importing richer Venezuelan iron ore to blend with Red Mountain ores. But the industry could not withstand international market disruption. One reason iron and steel ®ourished in the years after 1945 was pent-up demand for autos and other consumer products, a market that slackened in the 1950s. Another reason was the destruction of German and Japanese steel mills by allied bombing, which eliminated America’s chief foreign competition. When the Marshall Plan began in the late 1940s (a plan dedicated to shoring up European economies with massive U.S. aid in order to resist Soviet expansionism), German steel companies were able to construct new mills and buy the most modern equipment, thus providing them a cost



advantage over aging U.S. facilities. U.S. assistance to Japan on the Asian rim of the USSR created a second formidable rival that would soon compete successfully for market share in world steel and auto markets. By end-ofcentury, cheap imported steel from the Ukraine and Russia further undermined the U.S. industry. One result was the rapid decline of Alabama’s iron and steel industry. The Magic City seemed more ordinary than magic during the decades of the 1950s and ’60s, losing 25,000 steel-related jobs, the cornerstone of the city’s historic economy. And the crisis did not end there. In 1970 manufacturing accounted for nearly 30 percent of Birmingham’s workforce. By 1988 manufacturing provided only 14 percent. Jobs in that sector declined by 19 percent between 1978 and 1988. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s set in motion another round of plant closings. Gulf States Steel in Gadsden threw in the towel after a century’s operation, costing the hardhit town 1,800 jobs. Birmingham Steel tried to sell a division of its operation but found no buyer. Decatur’s state-of-the-art Trico Steel, lured to the state in 1997 by $100 million in state incentives, closed four years later, discharging 319 employees. Even USX Corporation (the new name for TCI) lost money despite massive modernization. Between February 2000 and the same month in 2001, the state’s workforce in primary metal production declined by 9 percent (2,300 jobs). Alabama tied for eighth place among states losing jobs after NAFTA passed Congress in 1994. Ironically in 1989 a UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) economic forecaster had predicted a rosy future for Alabama manufacturing during the last decade of the century based on the state’s low wages, antiunion politics, probusiness attitudes, and state incentives. He was even brash enough to designate the state as the “North Carolina of the 1990s,” an allusion to the high-tech boom and manufacturing resurgence of that state during the 1970s and ’80s. Although no such boom occurred, some of the old players did survive. Though greatly reduced in size, USX Fair¤eld Works ended the century as one of the world’s most ef¤cient steel plants. It produced the same tonnage of steel as in the 1970s despite a workforce of only 2,400 compared to an earlier total of 13,000. ACIPCO also celebrated nearly a century of business in Birmingham as a vibrant if iconoclastically managed company. It regu-



larly made Fortune magazine’s prestigious top 100 places to work. Vulcan Materials, another old-line company, diversi¤ed into chemical production while expanding its core aggregate business (quarried stone products used in road building and heavy construction) into the world leader, with facilities in Mexico as well as across the United States. One consequence of the downsizing of manufacturing was a decline in union membership. In the late 1940s nearly a quarter of Alabama manufacturing workers belonged to a union. By 1989 that percentage had declined to 14.3, in 2000 to 9.6 (although unionism still represented a higher percentage of Alabama workers than in Mississippi or Georgia). Even the 2000 ¤gure was misleading, representing signi¤cant gains in the public sector and equally dramatic losses in manufacturing. Although many businessmen rejoiced at labor’s decline, the result was a drop in per capita wages and resultant purchasing power. Birmingham especially had prospered from high salaries earned by union households, especially among blacks. In 1982 likelihood of a Birmingham company being unionized was 50 percent, the highest of any southeastern city. The decline in union jobs meant workers often moved to lower-wage, nonunion service jobs. By the beginning of the 21st century, the price of economic transition was painfully evident. Alabama ranked among the bottom states in average wages paid. From 1998 to 2000 personal income grew by 5.1, 4.4, and 4.3 percent. Nationally during those same three years growth was 6.5, 5.4, and 6.6. For years, Alabama economic developers had chased low-wage, lowskill, antiunion jobs. They had been largely successful. And the result was one of the nation’s highest poverty rates, underperformance of the economy compared to neighboring states, the slowest growth in wages (along with South Carolina) of any southeastern state, the slowest population growth except for Louisiana, and the accelerating loss of jobs to even lower-wage Caribbean and Latin American countries. Unfortunately, the economic shaking down was not destined to end when the new century dawned. In 2002 Alabama, which had just lost 28,000 manufacturing jobs, still employed 18 percent of its workforce in manufacturing, compared to 13 percent nationally. Rather than experiencing the North Carolinazation of Alabama, the state continued its familiar



historical patterns, trailing sister southern states in nearly every important economic category. Had foreign competition been the state’s only problem, it would have fared better. Unfortunately, at a critical period of economic transition, Alabama suffered a massive, self-in®icted wound. The state’s handling of racial change cost Alabama nearly a generation of economic growth compared to Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas (despite George Wallace’s constant pronouncements to the contrary). In 1950 Birmingham was the nation’s 27th largest city and 3rd in the Southeast only to New Orleans and Atlanta. Atlanta’s population advantage was only some 5,000 (331,314 to 326,037). Between 1950 and 1970 the Magic City’s population declined by 25,000 while Atlanta’s spurted to half a million. At least in population and economic infrastructure, Birmingham had ¤nally lost its century-long struggle to become the Deep South’s premier inland metropolis. Newspapers and magazines featured one exposé after another centered on the state. A poll conducted in 1995 asked 457 ordinary people living outside Alabama what they thought of the state. When asked their ¤rst impressions of Alabama, a quarter of respondents had no answer at all. Of those who did respond, most identi¤ed the state with the South, George Wallace, football, and civil rights. Media and opinion makers were more hostile. Corporate leaders trashed the state for its outrageous court settlements for plaintiffs in high-pro¤le product and liability suits. Chrysler Corporation’s CEO began a speech to the American Bar Association’s 1996 convention, “Let me tell you another joke—a one-word joke: Alabama.”16 An economic consultant living in South Carolina told of¤cials that the state’s worst liability in attracting new industry was Alabama’s backward image. The widely respected Economist magazine, published in London, headlined a 2002 story on reform attempts to revise the state’s antiquated constitution: “Old Alabama won’t leave politely.” The magazine summarized the state’s reputation as a “backward, gun-toting, bible-thumping, redneck place.”17 Though the writer proclaimed that image inaccurate, he did describe the state as “peculiar,” the only southern state never to have elected a progressive, New South governor. The Rating Guide to Life in America’s 50 States ranked Alabama in 1994 the third worst state to live in. In Washington, D.C., “Bama



Day” at local schools was the appointed time to dress down, re®ecting a lack of style. Georgians particularly delighted in jokes at Alabama’s expense: When a Georgian crossed the Chattahoochee river into Alabama, the story went, he set his watch back one hour to Central Standard Time and his mind back a century. When a Georgia legislator proposed a bill to bring back chain gangs like its neighbor to the west, a colleague from Columbus, Georgia, inquired: “Isn’t it true that we should be concerned any time we follow the lead of Alabama?”18 Part of Alabama’s image problem stemmed from its political culture. After a 1995 poll found that 85 percent of Alabamians had a negative view of their state’s political leadership, it should have come as no surprise that outsiders agreed with them. When the Independent in London, England, reviewed Gov. Guy Hunt’s removal from of¤ce for ethics violations, the paper headlined the story: “Alabama spoils image of the new south.”19 In 1996 Republican state senator Charles Davidson announced his candidacy for Congress by offering a biblical defense of slavery, secession, and the Confederate ®ag, igniting an explosion of national criticism. Gov. Fob James, while regularly denying that the state had an image problem, did more than any governor after George Wallace to create one. James reinstituted chain gangs in state prisons, imitated a monkey at a State Board of Education meeting to demonstrate his opposition to textbook treatment of evolution, declared that the Bill of Rights did not apply to Alabama, sought to eliminate judicial review of legislative acts, purchased 900 copies of Darwin on Trial for state science teachers, threatened to use National Guard troops to prevent removal of a courtroom plaque containing the Ten Commandments, removed what he claimed were demonic portraits from the governor’s mansion, and endorsed messianic prophecies of apocalypse beginning in Israel. The result was yet another barrage of national and international ridicule. Among other critical or satirical editorials were ones in the Economist, Time, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Tampa Tribune. Even Alabama opinion makers gasped at the reaction. One judge called James’s musing “Fobinisms,” and the head of the rival political party denounced the governor for making Alabama fodder for late-night television comics. More ominously, the CEO of the private Economic Development Partnership of



Alabama began to comment about the state’s poor image and the negative effect it had on economic development. Alabamians were plagued by low expectations, he added. Economic development seemed to con¤rm his argument. During the Hunt administration, the state tourism agency adopted the motto Alabama— the Great Surprise. And the Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau tagged a sponsorship announcement at the end of a National Public Radio program emanating from the city: “Birmingham: It’s better than you think.”20 Charles McNair, an Alabama-born novelist then living in Atlanta, explained in 1997: “It’s like getting beat up in a ¤st ¤ght when you’re young. You never get over the grudge. Alabama has been beaten up in war—the Civil War—and beaten up ever since in one media or another. There is a deep resentment in having anyone tell them how to live, a contrarian pride.”21 Whatever the cause of Alabama’s image problem, or the collective chip on the shoulders of so many of its people, or the population’s low expectations, something positive had to be done to overcome the barriers these posed to economic growth. Part of the answer was vigorous state promotion of economic development. Unfortunately, the state’s leadership de¤ned development in its narrowest sense: not quality K-12 public schools, respected research universities, broadened cultural activities, or a bilingual population, but tax deferments and ¤nancial incentive programs. Like many other southern states, Alabama of¤cials began courting businesses in the 1920s when they created the Department of Commerce and Industries (1923). Four years later the state established an industrial development board solely to recruit new plants. These early efforts paid off handsomely when Gulf States Paper and International Paper located the ¤rst two modern paper mills in Alabama in exchange for cash, free land, and state-¤nanced infrastructure improvements. In 1935 the legislature exempted new industries from all taxes except for schools for 10 years. The Cater (1949, named for state senator Silar D. Cater) and Wallace Acts (1951, named for Rep. George C. Wallace) permitted local governments or industrial development boards created by them to acquire, own, and improve properties that were then leased to private businesses in order to avoid state and local property taxes. The boards could also



issue public bonds to ¤nance industrial projects. A 1992 modi¤cation of these laws limited future tax abatement to noneducation taxes and removed the bond ¤nancing scheme. The following year legislators passed a law to attract automaker Mercedes-Benz, though the incentive package was available to other businesses as well. It applied state inducements to businesses offering relatively high wages, providing the German automaker $253 million in state incentives. Historically such state-funded incentives had been moderately effective in recruiting battles, especially for low-skill industries. According to one study, by 1970 nearly 40 percent of the South’s industry was located in rural areas or small towns, attracted by cheap labor and low taxes. In Alabama, a study indicated that many national corporations located in the state because of incentives provided by Cater-Wallace acts. Although of¤cials in neighboring states condemned Alabama’s largesse in the Mercedes-Benz deal, Tennessee provided Nissan a package of bene¤ts valued at $21 million (1980) and Saturn a package estimated at $51 million (1985). South Carolina attracted BMW in 1992 with a $130 million offer. (Nissan’s incentives averaged $11,000 per job created; Saturn’s, $26,000; BMW, $68,000; and Mercedes-Benz, $150,000.) Critics of such state development strategy lodged numerous complaints. By deferring or even waiving taxes, local communities starved schools and infrastructures. The businesses of the new economy, especially high-tech ¤rms, made their decisions on where to locate based on other considerations: convenience, proximity of markets, ef¤cient transportation, the availability of highly educated skilled labor and good schools, labor productivity, corporate and personal communication, accessibility of suppliers and raw materials, facilities, utilities, and cultural amenities. Taxes ranked as low as 10th place on a list of such considerations, though businesses that decided to locate for other reasons were pleased to accept state incentives once they had made a decision. Once industry came to a state seeking low taxes, it might just as likely move somewhere else when the 10-year tax holiday expired. Local industry also protested that such incentives were unfair, offering new industry rewards the state denied to well-established businesses. For instance, USX (TCI) howled in 1997 when state government offered Trico Steel $100 million in Mercedes-Benz act incentives to build a new plant in Decatur that would compete with the Birmingham facility. Some



politicians criticized existing loopholes in Alabama’s tax structure at the same time they created new loopholes to attract out-of-state companies. Advocates of state incentives simply pointed to the state’s successes during the last decade of the century: 1993, Mercedes-Benz’s SUV plant originally employing 1,900 in Vance; 1999, Honda’s initial employment of 1,600 in its $580 million plant at Lincoln; 1999, Navistar International’s $400 million investment in Huntsville; 2001, Toyota’s $220 million engine plant in Huntsville; 2002, Hyundai announced a $1 billion plant just below Montgomery. A total of $700 million in state incentives leveraged more than $3 billion in direct new investment and much more in suppliers and spinoff businesses. Objective economic analysis did not reconcile arguments for and against state incentives. The Alabama Development Of¤ce (ADO), created in 1969, was the state agency responsible for industrial recruitment and approving incentives. But given ADO’s limited budget and staff and its politically appointed director, the agency’s data were highly suspect. The chief function of ADO was to improve the sitting governor’s chances for reelection. And according to ADO ¤gures, virtually every governor in the late 20th century left competing states in the dust as Alabama raced toward economic dominance of the region. How this progress could be reconciled with the fact that at century’s end the only southern states Alabama exceeded economically were Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi seemed to bother the agency not at all. Nor did a 2002 South-wide study comparing Alabama’s frantic bidding war for new industry to a buffalo hunt. Public funds, the authors concluded, could be more pro¤tably invested in public education in order to grow the new-economy jobs that could survive pressures of globalization and new technology. One group that was bothered by ADO’s poor performance consisted of 70 companies, mainly in north Alabama and led by Alabama Power Company. Frustrated by the ineptness of a series of governors to improve the economy, they established the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA) in 1991. Many of the recruitment triumphs of the 1990s rightly belonged to this agency and its director, Neal Wade. Outspoken in his advocacy of constitutional, education, and other reforms, Wade mirrored a change in business leadership, especially in north Alabama. As Wade fully understood, Alabama’s ¤rst economic revolution was over, as



was the strategy of industrial recruitment that it produced. The second revolution called for a new kind of workforce and a similarly new recruitment strategy. The New Economy Although the new economy did not consist entirely of technology-driven, high-skill companies, such ¤rms were fundamental to economic change. For instance, Exxon began billion dollar production from three natural gas ¤elds in Mobile Bay that increased the state’s offshore output by 70 percent. Tourism made a 30-mile stretch of Gulf beaches in Baldwin County the state’s hottest real estate market even as gas rigs dotted the azure waters that beckoned swimmers. David Bronner, CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA), multiplied RSA’s resources from $500 million to $14 billion, much of which he used to transform downtown Montgomery with a series of state of¤ce buildings and to build the fabled $120 million Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, a world-renowned string of 18 top-quality courses stretching from Huntsville to Mobile. The courses not only reached pro¤tability sooner than expected but also won Golf Digest recognition as the world’s best value for golf. Using RSA’s half-billion-dollar national communications empire to publicize the courses, Bronner attracted hundreds of thousands of wellheeled outsiders who discovered an Alabama quite different from their stereotypes. As one of the nation’s most respected pension managers, the blunt-talking Bronner was often at the heart of the state’s attempt to build a new economy as well as a new culture. Although autos and tires belonged to the manufacturing sector, jobs in these industries were highly automated and well paying. Navistar, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Hyundai created a corridor along Interstates 20, 59, and 65 that threatened Detroit’s long hegemony over the auto industry. And by 1990 Alabama had also become the nation’s leading tire maker. As with auto plants, four of the ¤ve major tire plants were foreign owned, another evidence of the positive bene¤t of free trade and globalization. Despite such successes, Alabama failed to gain recognition as a full®edged Sunbelt success story. The failure resulted not because the state lacked the resources necessary for such designation. Rather, it was due to



haphazard and piecemeal development. Largely without leadership from state leaders or ADO, local visionaries took matters into their own hands. The result was pockets of educational and economic excellence surrounded by a vast landscape of collapsing industries, terrible schools, and human deprivation. Chief among the economic winners were Huntsville and Birmingham, which together accounted for two-thirds of the state’s engineers. Huntsville emerged from the Second World War a different city than when war began, standing at a historic crossroads. Looking to the past, there was a legacy as one of the largest cotton markets east of the Mississippi River with three large cotton mills still operating. Redstone and Huntsville arsenals presented a much different future, using cheap TVA hydroelectric power and the Appalachian region’s vast surplus population to attract a new kind of industry. Few local leaders envisioned what that future would be like. Nor was the evidence for Huntsville’s high-tech future encouraging. At the end of the war, research scientists were ¤ve times more numerous in other regions of the United States. Patents were issued to southerners at a rate less than one-third the national average. Alabama had little to offer high-tech companies that relied on good research universities, a highly skilled workforce, clean environment, ef¤cient, professional government, and cultural amenities. So the question for Madison County was whether a high-tech city was possible within a low-tech state. Over the next half century, Huntsville answered that question with a resounding af¤rmative. The critical decision came early. In the fall of 1949 Wernher von Braun led a small group of fellow rocket engineers on a site selection visit to Huntsville. They found Redstone Arsenal, the Tennessee River, the lush valley and high mountains much to their liking. Of course, most anything would have been better than the dry, ®at terrain at Fort Bliss, Texas, where the scientists had worked on V-2 rockets under close military supervision after their surrender to the allies in 1945. Von Braun soon returned to Huntsville with some 120 German scientists and engineers to begin work at the newly renamed Redstone Arsenal Ordnance Rocket Center. In their new city, they lived where they wanted, bought houses, joined and formed organizations. They obtained library cards, started Saint Marks Lutheran Church, founded classical music ensembles, including the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra and the Huntsville



Community Chorus, the Broadway Theatre League, the Arts Council, the German Club for international travel, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Most native Alabamians were too hospitable and delighted about the economic stimulus brought by the newcomers to ask troubling questions about previous Nazi af¤liations, V-2 rocket attacks on London, or the deaths of thousands of Russian, French, and Polish POWs while building German rocket facilities. In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Army established the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone and directed scientists toward military applications and away from von Braun’s lifelong interest in space rocketry. Four years later, he traded his military status for civilian control when the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center began operations with von Braun as director of Huntsville’s rocket engine component. Von Braun became responsible for planning, directing, and conducting the nation’s nonmilitary space activities. Development of Redstone, Jupiter, and Saturn launch vehicles pumped billions of dollars into the local economy. And the success of Redstone rockets that blasted American Alan Shepard into space and Saturn rockets that placed U.S. astronauts on the moon restored the nation’s con¤dence after a brief Soviet lead in space achievements. The Marshall facility, dedicated in 1960, cost $100 million. Two years later, NASA employees spent that much more in local businesses. Marshall Space Flight Center’s budget soared to $1.7 billion in 1964, and Huntsville derived 90 percent of its income from the aerospace industry. The investigation of the 1986 destruction of the Challenger space shuttle and its crew and a similar tragedy to Columbia in 2003 led to criticism of Marshall Center and a “cult of arrogance” that its successes had produced. But the long-term economic effect of this criticism was not signi¤cant. Government employment was not the only source of Huntsville’s new economy. By the mid-1960s more than 30 private aerospace ¤rms operated in the city (including Boeing, Chrysler, General Electric, Lockheed, and Northrop), employing more than 10,000 scientists and engineers. Olin King began one of those small engineering companies in 1957 when he arrived, according to local lore, in a battered Mercury with $300. King began working as an engineer, but in 1961 pooled his savings with several partners to start Space Craft Inc. Over the years the company morphed into



SCI Systems Inc. and helped establish the concept of contract manufacturing. Space Craft’s ¤rst-year sales totaled $200,000. In 2001, when a California ¤rm bought SCI for $5.5 billion, it led all state companies with sales of $8 billion. SCI’s 49 plants in 19 countries employed 35,000. Rooted in the space program, the company made the transition to building circuit boards for personal computers and cell phones. Although King’s odyssey to CEO of a Fortune 500 company is the ¤nest example of Huntsville’s economic miracle, it is only one of many. Trading one dominant industry (textiles) for another (aerospace) had its own risks. After the 1960s Apollo astronaut landings, NASA began cutbacks as government funds were redirected toward the war in Vietnam. In the decade after 1965, the city lost more than 17,000 NASA-related jobs, and Huntsville faced another crisis. But what the city still possessed were the excellent schools and cultural resources that were the legacy of Alabama’s initial ®irtation with the nation’s new economy. Business, civic, and political leaders mobilized to save commercial and residential neighborhoods that were sprouting For Sale signs like spring mushrooms. Unlike Jefferson County, where competing communities vied for new industry, Madison County formulated a coordinated development strategy involving civic, cultural, and academic leaders as well as Chamber of Commerce of¤cials. The effort paid off handsomely in a ®urry of new light industry (tires, chemicals, machinery, metals) as well as additional high-tech ¤rms not involved with aerospace. Between 1965 and 1978 Huntsville generated 14,000 new non-NASA industrial jobs and emerged with a much more diversi¤ed economy. The election of Ronald Reagan as president and his Star Wars Defense Initiative designed to topple the Soviet Union by spending so much on technology that the “evil empire” would overextend its economy, paid huge dividends to Huntsville. The city received the ¤fth largest concentration of Star Wars contracts of any metropolitan area; between 1983 and 1986, contracts worth $528 million went to 58 area laboratories, schools, and companies. Although more government funding went to Los Angeles and Boston, the size of those cities diffused the impact. Marshall also became host to the $8 billion manned space station project during this time. The result was a second-phase aerospace boom similar to the early 1960s. Local planners, projecting a doubling of the city’s population, be-



gan a massive highway program and an interstate connector to I-65 near Decatur. By 1983 almost one-¤fth of Madison County jobs were in high-tech ¤rms, giving Huntsville one of the nation’s most technologically sophisticated workforces, which, in turn, generated $1 billion in payrolls. Although Alabama did not qualify as one of the nation’s 24 states with signi¤cant high-tech employment, Huntsville had one of the highest concentrations of engineers, science technicians, mathematical and computer specialists, and natural scientists of any American city. Indeed, it compared favorably with Austin, Orlando, and North Carolina’s research triangle in high-tech industries, which accounted for 75 percent of U.S. manufacturing job growth between 1955 and 1979. Success bred success. Drawn by the highest salaries and population growth of any Alabama metropolitan area, Harbert Construction began a $60 million of¤ce park in 1985. The city’s Space Center became the state’s second most popular tourist attraction and in 1999 home to the National Space Science and Technology Center. Boeing, already with a presence in Huntsville, announced in 1997 a $400 million rocket-building plant a few miles away near Decatur. At turn-of-century Toyota chose Huntsville as the site of its new engine plant. Much of this progress resulted from economic and city planning, a concept that many Alabamians found vaguely sinister. It was Wernher von Braun who ¤rst envisioned the idea of a research park and Joe Moquin, CEO of Teledyne-Brown Engineering, who implemented it. Moquin was not impressed with the renovated cotton mill that served as his company’s initial home. Familiar with North Carolina’s research triangle, he requested that the city zone 1,000 acres for research and development. City planners were even more expansive, buying an additional 2,000 acres of former cotton ¤elds to augment Moquin’s request. The result was Cummings Research Park, second worldwide in actual developed land to the Research Triangle Park and fourth in employment. Cummings became home to a mix of local and Fortune 500 companies as well as to the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the state’s supercomputer. Cummings provided Huntsville a payroll of $2 billion in 2001, earned employees an average annual salary above $50,000, and drove local annual salaries to a southern average second only to Atlanta.



By end-of-century Huntsville’s saga had become a national success story. A 1998 study listed the Space City with the highest concentration of hightech workers. In 2000 a trade organization named it the ¤fth top center for software employment behind Boulder, Colorado, San Jose, California (in Silicon Valley), Washington, D.C., and North Carolina’s research triangle. In 2001 the January issue of Expansion Management magazine listed Huntsville as third among its top 25 high-tech cities, and Newsweek named it one of the nation’s Top 10 Techno Cities. The price for all this prosperity was too high for other Alabama communities. The funds required for high-quality public schools drove local property taxes to heights unacceptable to citizens in other cities and even generated a taxpayer backlash in Huntsville. Much of the city’s population—44 percent by 1990—came from outside Alabama. By comparison, only 20 percent of the population of Jefferson and Shelby counties was born outside the state. As the least southern-born and -bred, Madison County had to adjust to new ways of doing things, not a pleasant thought for many of the state’s citizens. Rigorous planning and zoning assumed that some sort of coordinated effort took precedence over individual preference. Even the state’s fastest metropolitan growth turned off some. A local mythology reported that one frustrated 1960s Huntsville mayor groused that many oldtime citizens wondered why so much change had to occur. All they wanted was buttermilk and cornbread, not a bush to be moved or tree cut. To Alabama’s economic development gurus, the mayor’s pique was a familiar refrain. But Huntsville’s saga proved that a new economy rode piggyback on a new culture. Birmingham could not match Huntsville, but it did manufacture its own economic minimiracle. Unlike Huntsville, whose economy was connected more tightly to Washington, D.C., than to the state, Birmingham’s transition was rooted ¤rmly in Alabama’s economic past. In some ways, Birmingham had advantages over its neighbor to the north. Its economy exited the war more diversi¤ed, and the city in 1940 had a population of nearly 270,000 compared to Huntsville’s 14,000 (by the 1990s Huntsville’s metropolitan population was 330,000, compared to Birmingham’s 900,000). There the advantages ended. Birmingham was hemmed in (some said strangled) by a rim of ¤ercely independent incorporated suburbs that fought



merger for many reasons, not the least of which was the desire to keep out blacks who constituted an ever larger share of downtown population. Multiple and con®icting development boards competed for the same industrial clients. The city stayed in the eye of the racial storm sweeping Alabama during the 1960s. Huntsville had a small black population, excellent schools, and a large nonnative white population that was considerably more tolerant about integration. Birmingham recovered thanks partly to a succession of progressive mayors who were closely allied to the business community: Albert Boutwell, George Siebels Jr., David Vann, and Richard Arrington. They struggled mightily and successfully to diversify the economy. Arrington, as the city’s ¤rst black mayor, was a particularly fortuitous choice. Beginning the ¤rst of four terms in 1979, the son of sharecroppers with a Ph.D. in biology felt comfortable in the world of high-tech conversation and entrepreneurship. Thanks to combined political and business efforts, by 1982 both South Central Bell and the University of Alabama at Birmingham employed more people than USX. UAB made a particularly signi¤cant impact as the city’s largest employer. Begun in 1945, when the university’s medical school moved to the city, UAB languished as a branch campus until the 1960s. Experiencing the tidal wave of baby boomers entering new urban universities during that decade, the university won separate status within the multicampus University of Alabama system. Specializing in medicine, dentistry, engineering, sciences, and related disciplines, UAB played a role in health care similar to the one the University of Alabama in Huntsville occupied in aerospace. One major bene¤ciary of UAB’s specialization was the burgeoning health care industry. Richard Scrushy not only graduated from UAB but also applied its vision of consolidated health care into HealthSouth, the nation’s second largest rehabilitative medical care company. Founded in 1984 with $50,000, it had facilities in every state, with 53,000 employees and a market value of $11 billion a decade later. By the mid-1990s HealthSouth was the top Alabama public company in both size and return to shareholders. In 1996 Scrushy (before being ¤red in disgrace for allegedly falsifying company pro¤ts) combined several physician practice management ¤rms into Caremark International in the largest acquisition ever made by an Alabama company ($2.5 billion).



Southern Research Institute (SRI) also had a symbiotic relationship with UAB. Located on the edge of campus, SRI dated back to 1941. The CEO of Alabama Power Company began the research institute to specialize in military and engineering projects, but SRI quickly turned its efforts toward genetic and materials engineering, biotechnology, and environmental science. At end-of-century it merged with UAB to become a research arm of the university. Engineering also thrived in Birmingham’s new economy. With a third of the state’s engineers and the second largest concentration in the region, engineering construction ¤rms such as Rust International, Harbert International, BE&K, and Bras¤eld and Gorrie gave the city 4 of the nation’s 100 largest engineering contractors. Rust dated back to 1905, Bras¤eld & Gorrie to 1922, while Harbert and BE&K were postwar innovators. Blount Inc. of Montgomery gave the state 5 of the top 100, and all engaged in the most sophisticated international construction projects. Other growth sectors also had roots in Alabama’s traditional economy. Liberty National Insurance Company began in 1900, organized by a group of Huntsville textile owners. But it did not prosper until a move to Birmingham in 1927. Under longtime CEO Frank P. Samford, the company grew into the leading life insurance company in the Southeast. A series of mergers orchestrated by CEO Frank Samford Jr. pumped up assets to $3.5 billion by 1985, when Torchmark (as the renamed company was then known) completed a string of consecutive earnings and dividend increases unbroken since 1952, allegedly the longest run of any company ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Mergers and consolidations also primed the local banking industry. Long known for their conservatism, Birmingham banks ®ourished in the aftermath of the 1980s savings and loan (S&L) company debacle, when risky investments resulted in many S&Ls entering bankruptcy and requiring massive federal bailouts. By century’s end 4 of the nation’s 50 largest banks had headquarters across from each other on the corner of 20th Street and 5th Avenue (Regions, Compass, SouthTrust, and AmSouth). Add Bobby Lowder’s Colonial Bank in Montgomery, and the state boasted 5 of the nation’s top 50, and Birmingham ranked as the nation’s fourth largest banking center. Birmingham claimed 6 Fortune 500 companies (Saks, Caremark, HealthSouth, AmSouth, Regions, and SouthTrust) in 2000, ranking the city twelfth



among American cities as corporate headquarters. An estimated 1 in 4 metropolitan-area families earned more than $75,000 in 1999, a remarkable achievement for a city that seemed to be staggered, on its knees, and unable to stand just 30 years earlier. Despite such triumphs, Birmingham faced challenges much larger than Huntsville’s. White ®ight continued to shrink the city’s core population. When refugees arrived in fast-growing and af®uent Hoover, Mountain Brook, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Gardendale, and Trussville, they often ridiculed downtown’s black political establishment, created their own school systems, and acted as if their welfare were unrelated to that of the city they had left behind. For a century, in fact, the economic bosses who ran Birmingham had chosen not to live amidst the pollution, crime, and poverty they partly created. Like the state, Birmingham’s miraculous economic recovery appears most impressive when compared to its own troubled past. Measured against the 25 largest metro areas in the South, the city ranked 22 in population and job growth between 1980 and 2000. During those two decades Birminghamarea jobs grew by 44 percent; ¤ve regional metro areas (Raleigh-DurhamChapel Hill; Austin-San Marcos; Orlando; West Palm Beach–Boca Raton; Atlanta) experienced job growth of more than 100 percent. By 2000 Raleigh’s metro area boasted a population where 41 percent of the people had college degrees. The Birmingham area had only 25 percent college graduates. Alabama not only exported talent, it exported products. That was one positive by-product of GATT and NAFTA. Just as there were losers, such as apparel from tariff reductions and international trade agreements, there were winners, such as autos. During 1996 Alabama businesses broke the state’s export record with sales of nearly $6 billion to overseas customers. New NAFTA-connected countries such as Mexico and Brazil joined traditional trading partners Canada and Japan as leading export consumers (exports to Mexico increased by 76 percent; to Brazil, by 62 percent). Alabama’s transportation equipment, electronics, and some textile manufacturers pro¤ted from NAFTA, while other textile and clothing companies suffered. The following year brought even larger exports to Mexico especially, as Mobile became the nation’s eighth busiest export center. By 2000 Mexico



had displaced Japan as the state’s second most important international customer. And a new product, autos and auto parts, had taken over as the state’s leading export industry, with a value of $1.6 billion. Mercedes-Benz M-Class sports utility vehicles appealed to foreign customers more than originally anticipated. By the end of the century the company was shipping $700 million worth of Alabama-made vehicles to 135 countries. This export pattern challenged some basic Alabama assumptions. Many citizens favored protectionism and opposed foreign-made goods, lower tariffs, easier access, cultural pluralism, social diversity, and foreigners in general. (A 2002 poll found that only 1 in 10 Alabamians thought NAFTA had been good for Alabama’s economy.) Yet the state’s booming auto and tire industries were mostly foreign owned: Michelin tires was a French ¤rm, Toyota and Honda plants were Japanese, Mercedes-Benz, German, and Hyundai, Korean. Outsiders led the company operations in Alabama just as Wernher von Braun had led Marshall Space Flight Center, David Bronner (from Iowa) had led the state retirement systems, George Crawford and John Eagan (from Georgia) had served as CEOs of TCI and ACIPCO. In a state long known for parochialism and defensiveness, a bright newcomer sometimes explained insensitively that an Alabama policy, practice, or procedure was not the way it was done in Germany, Japan, Korea, Minnesota, or even Georgia. Such comments usually set teeth on edge and often led to confrontations. But the truth was obvious: a century of historical evidence had demonstrated pretty conclusively that the way Alabama ran its economy could be improved. Even with all the gains of the new economy, Alabama struggled just to keep up. The state’s exports topped those of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, but lagged behind those of Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The nonpartisan Corporation for Enterprise Development regularly assigned grades of D or F to Alabama’s economic performance, development capacity, and state policy, and no better than B or C to its business vitality. These scores sometimes ranked the state dead last and always in the bottom 5 or 10 states. The state’s population grew by more than 8.2 percent at end of century, but in only one decade of the century (the 1970s) did Alabama’s growth exceed the national average. And the 8 percent growth for the 1990s trailed the southeastern average (13 percent; Georgia had a



growth rate of 20 percent; Florida, 17 percent; Tennessee, 12 percent). Between the 1930s and end-of-century, nearly a million more people left Alabama than relocated to it. In the area of high-tech jobs, Huntsville and Birmingham were isolated islands of progress in a low-tech state. Between 1994 and 2001 Alabama created 9,500 technology jobs (up 22 percent). During the same years, North Carolina created 33,600 (up 34 percent). A 1999 survey on state participation in the so-called new economy ranked Alabama 44th in 17 categories, including exports, workforce education, foreign investment, and the number of scientists and engineers. Alabama scored poorly in almost every category, indicating systematic economic problems (Internet access ranked 45th, workforce education 44th). Three years later the same survey dropped Alabama 3 spots to 47th place, ahead only of Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Because so few of Alabama’s new jobs were in the neweconomy sector, wages lagged. In 2001 three-fourths of new jobs paid less than workers needed in order to purchase the necessities of life, and half the new jobs created were low-wage cashiers, retail salesclerks, or nursing aides–orderlies. Gaps between haves and have-nots widened, not only among individuals but also between counties and entire regions of the state. At the heart of the problem was education, or lack of it. Alabama consistently ranked among the ¤ve bottom states in expenditures on K-12 schools. Survey after survey showed positive correlation between money spent on education and rates of economic development. But citizens did not need to read mind-numbing statistics. They only needed to examine the correlation of educational expenditures, high local taxes, and per capita income in Huntsville, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, and Auburn. The pattern quickly became clear. Communities with low taxes spent little on schools. Communities that spent little on schools provided a poorly educated labor force. A poorly educated labor force attracted low-wage jobs. Low-wage jobs produced low per capita income. It was not rocket science, but Alabamians still had trouble understanding the formula. Throughout the 1990s one industry after another complained about the educational quality of Alabama’s workforce. At Russell Corporation in Alexander City, 98 percent of employees tested below their last grade level in mathematics and 67 percent below their last grade in reading. In 1997 Harbison-Walker Refractory Company in Bessemer complained about the



declining pool of educationally quali¤ed workers. The president of the Alabama Industry and Manufacturers Association con¤rmed that the problem was statewide. And Jack Hammontree, director of ADO in 1989, acknowledged that high-quality education was an increasingly important factor in economic recruitment. This recognition explains why business leaders, especially in north Alabama, played a key role in 1990s reform movements targeting education, taxes, and the antiquated 1901 constitution. They also led the 2003 tax reform effort. CEOs such as Neale Travis of BellSouth, Elmer Harris of Alabama Power, Ted Kennedy of BE&K Engineering, John W. Woods of AmSouth, Herbert A. Sklenar of Vulcan Materials, Bill Smith of Royal Cup Coffee, and Caroline Novak of the Montgomery Museum, conceived the A+ educational reform movement. Backed by then-governor James E. Folsom Jr., the plan nearly won legislative approval for a massive increase in education funding. Unfortunately, conservative religious groups, ALFA, reluctant taxpayers, and AEA blocked the package, dooming reform for yet another generation. Together they ushered Alabama into a new century with a sputtering economic engine as quaint compared to the new economy as old-fashioned cylinders were to the new M-Class Mercedes rolling off assembly lines at Vance. Environmental Economics Pollution was one by-product of the old economy that continued into the new. Long accepted as one of those side effects of progress that could not be helped, the typical Alabama reaction came in 1941 when a Tuscaloosa city of¤cial explained the pervasive odor from a new paper mill that had received $15,000 in local incentives to locate on the Warrior River. Citizens, the of¤cial announced, were getting their money back “scent by scent.”22 Pollution was not so funny to west Anniston residents who discovered in the early 21st century that the local Monsanto chemical plant had been discharging PCBs into a local creek for 40 years despite warnings from scientists and gruesome ¤sh kills (within 10 seconds ¤sh spurted blood and shed their skins). A subsequent trial held the company liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. State of¤cials took little interest in such matters and long ignored Mon-



santo violations. Strip miners could pay ¤nes cheaper than they could restore mountains denuded of coal. Industry could pay penalties cheaper than halting discharges into the pristine Cahaba River. The state agency charged with responsibility of overseeing the environment, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), was chronically underfunded and understaffed and generally allied to polluters. Extensive ¤sh kills on the Warrior River as a result of runoff from an industry’s holding ponds led to a tough new antipollution act in 1971, but not until the company had denied responsibility and attacked Mike Howell, a Samford University biologist who had traced the kill to its source. By the mid-1990s Alabama ranked ¤fth in total releases of toxic chemicals into land, air, and water, and the federal environmental agency had restricted new air-polluting industry from locating in the Birmingham area and had threatened to take over ADEM’s functions. The Mobile delta, second largest in the nation, was dying. Mobile’s pro¤table shell¤sh industry was often shut down because of pollution. Alabama had lost 98 species of freshwater life, more than any other place in the continental United States. When the Coosa River was dammed and dredged, the river experienced the largest extinction in U.S. history. In fact, nearly half of all U.S. extinctions since European settlement have occurred in the Mobile basin. And many other species are endangered. The Alabama Environmental Council, Cahaba River Society, Rivers Alliance, League of Environmental Action Voters, Sierra Club, and other groups fought valiantly to stop environmental degradation, but usually encountered the same rapacious arguments advanced by earlier generations of Alabama entrepreneurs: jobs were more important than the environment. They did win a small victory in the 1980s with the Forever Wild initiative by adding ¤shermen, hunters, and outdoors people to their coalition. The legislation set aside some oil and gas revenue to purchase wild land and preserve it for future generations. A Biracial Economy One of the most intriguing (and neglected) aspects of Alabama’s traditional economy occurred within the black community. An unintended by-product of segregation, a shadow economy thrived during the 20th century. Because many white businesses would not serve black customers, ambi-



tious African Americans established restaurants, banks, barbershops, beauty parlors, shoe shops, livery stables, and other businesses. In Anniston, African Americans tried unsuccessfully to organize the Afro-American Cotton Mill Company. Dr. Charles E. Thomas, the ¤rst practicing black physician in Alabama, did open in 1893 what became the nation’s largest drugstore owned and operated by a black man. Anniston blacks also published the Baptist Leader newspaper and organized the Negro Business Men’s League. In Mobile, Dave Patton lived in a mansion on Davis Avenue and may have been the state’s ¤rst black millionaire. In Birmingham black mom-and-pop businesses ®ourished. In 1888 Rev. William R. Pettiford, pastor of 16th Street Baptist Church, led church members to establish the Alabama Penny Savings Bank, which became an important source of capital for black-owned businesses. W. C. Davis, an early black educator, also ran a delivery service. Charles M. Harris founded a funeral home in 1899. In the 1920s he began Protective Burial Association (which became Protective Industrial Life Insurance Company, the nation’s 10th largest black-owned insurance company). Blacks also ®ourished in the newspaper business, providing news of the black community that was banished from white-owned papers. Oscar W. Adams edited the Birmingham Reporter and Emory O. Jackson the Birmingham World. A. G. Gaston became Birmingham’s premier black businessman. Born in 1892 in Demopolis, he lived more than 100 years, dying in 1996. After his mother moved with him to Birmingham, Gaston attended Tuggle School through 10th grade and served in the army during World War I. He then worked for TCI, making railroad cars and mining coal. At TCI he demonstrated the entrepreneurial skills destined to make him a millionaire. He sold box lunches, opened a peanut and popcorn stand, and lent money at 25 cents on the dollar to be paid every two weeks (a phenomenal 650 percent annual interest rate). He organized a burial society, Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, Booker T. Washington Business College, Citizens Federal Savings Bank, a nursing home, motel, restaurant, and radio station. Generous in his philanthropies, Gaston established one of the city’s most important institutions, the Boys Club (which by 1985 enrolled 2,300 boys). He also became active in the state Republican Party (serving as a delegate to national conventions) and a low-pro¤le advocate of desegregation (he helped establish the biracial Community Action Committee and in 1963



served as a negotiator between M. L. King and the white business community). His successor as head of the far-®ung Gaston enterprises, Louis J. Willie, was quite a different second-generation black entrepreneur. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, and an economics graduate of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, Willie had served in the army during World War II, then used the GI bill to earn a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Michigan. Gaston hired Willie as controller of his insurance company in 1952, and the ambitious young man rose as quickly as the aging Gaston permitted. Like Gaston, Willie was a low-pro¤le desegregationist who became the ¤rst black member of Birmingham Kiwanis Club and Shoal Creek Country Club. That Gaston and Willie should have specialized in the insurance and burial businesses was entirely appropriate. No business was more central to the black community. Mutual aid societies had grown out of black churches as extensions of their care and concern for black communities. Alabama was a center of benevolent African American societies, producing more than any other Deep South state. In fact, Thomas Walker of Birmingham, a former slave-turned-preacher, inspired the black insurance movement in Alabama and Georgia when he created Union Central Relief Association in the late 19th century. By century’s end attorney Donald V. Watkins had eclipsed Gaston and Willie, representing a third generation of black Birmingham millionaires. Son of Levi Watkins, longtime president of Alabama State University, young Watkins graduated from his father’s school before completing a law degree at the University of Alabama in 1973. He earned a reputation as a tough civil rights attorney, assisting Montgomery’s legendary Fred Gray. After moving to Birmingham, he made millions in legal fees representing the city under black mayor Richard Arrington. Watkins enhanced his fortune by establishing Alamerica Bank and investing in ethanol. Worth an estimated $1.5 billion by end-of-century, he turned his attention to becoming the ¤rst African American to own a major league baseball franchise. Although Gaston, Willie, and Watkins proved that African American businessmen were quite capable of running extensive business empires, small businesses continued to be more typical of black enterprise. Suroy Foster, owner of Foster Construction in Opelika, learned the carpentry



trade from his father growing up in Dadeville. He entered Gadsden State Technical Trade School to major in electronics but found himself attracted to masonry instead. Committed to owning his own business from his teens, Foster established a brick masonry business in Opelika in the late 1960s that continued to operate into the new century. Women in the Job Force If African Americans represented the most surprising sector of Alabama’s traditional economy, women were not far behind. Like blacks, women had to ¤nd their way into an economy where many of the access points were closed by tradition, prejudice, and male egotism. Victorian and evangelical traditions conceived the role of white women to be that of wives and mothers. They should stay home and exercise civic and economic in®uence through their husbands and sons. For most African American and poor white women, such pious ideas were wholly irrelevant to real-life predicaments. Like many middle- and upper-class theories of proper poor folk’s conduct, the prism of experience higher up the economic ladder bore little resemblance to the vision from below. Working in the ¤elds or in textile mills, cleaning houses, cooking, taking in cleaning, sewing clothes for purchase, mending, cleaning hotel rooms, all these and more were the common domain of poor women. For many of their better-off sisters who could exercise choices in the matter, staying at home was a quite acceptable course widely supported by the larger society. The percentage of women in Alabama’s labor force declined from 27 percent in 1930 to only 24 percent 10 years later. World War II changed that as it did so much else. Of the more than 8 million women nationwide who entered the workforce during the war, tens of thousands lived in Alabama. Most occupied unskilled or semiskilled jobs. In 1940 a quarter of employed white women worked in clerical or sales, another quarter in factories and mills, and 17 percent as professionals (mainly as low-paid school teachers). One half of all employed black women worked as domestics, and another 17 percent as agricultural laborers. So the war not only increased the number of gainfully employed women, it also broadened their opportunities. Women became welders and assem-



bly line workers, airplane pilots, physicians, prison superintendents, bus drivers, and auto mechanics. Mobile’s Alabama Dry Dock and Shipping Company (ADDSCO) established one “all-girl” welding crew of 14, albeit with a male supervisor. But ADDSCO also promoted Mrs. R. B. Harleson to “leader-woman” in the fabrication layout department where she supervised a crew that included some men. Before the war Harleson had studied mechanical drawing; now the war allowed her to practice what she had learned. The shipyards also hired women guards, though male resistance to shifting gender roles led one observer to suggest that female guards be armed with hatpins, rubber blackjacks, or rolling pins rather than ¤rearms. Whether the author of these suggestions feared accidental discharge or intentional domestic mayhem remains a mystery. Some companies employing larger numbers of women also hired female counselors to ease the transition into the workplace. Issues such as child care, company rules, even how to clean grease from ¤ngernails concerned women. In October 1942 the state established an advisory committee on day care. The state already had 19 day care centers but needed twice that many more. And this was the point that riled many ministers who opposed women working: they would be compelled to neglect their children. Bishop Thomas J. Toolen, who directed the Catholic Diocese of MobileBirmingham, believed that most women worked only for the money and should stay home. Although many Protestant ministers agreed with Toolen, others believed women workers were essential to national defense. Although many women voluntarily returned to domestic spheres after 1945, others were forced out of the job market by returning veterans. Employers typically gave men ¤rst claim on jobs. Many women resisted this economic marginalization, a trend that grew stronger as more women attended college and acquired professional job skills. The number of womenowned Alabama businesses grew by 49 percent from 1987 to 1992, to a total of 71,500; 3,500 of them were located in Birmingham, which was one of the fastest growth areas in the nation for female entrepreneurship. Women ran one-third of the state’s businesses by 1996 and generated more than a billion dollars in revenues (most of these businesses were small, many one-person operations). Based on revenue generation, Alabama ranked 26th nationally in women-owned businesses by 1996. Success did not come easy. Women had dif¤culty obtaining credit unless



they had a husband willing to cosign papers. When Tommie Cummings started an accounting ¤rm in 1987, she had no female clients. But sectors of the new economy seemed particularly open to women because they depended on a hierarchy of knowledge rather than gender. Older sectors proved more dif¤cult. A 2000 study of 21 Birmingham corporate boards revealed that white men occupied 93 percent of the seats. None of these boards had more than 2 nonwhite or female directors; 10 had neither. However, a number employed women vice presidents. Among the 50 highest paid CEOs of Alabama’s publicly traded companies in 1996, there was not a single woman. That same year, the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research rated Alabama among the worst states for women to live. Women had a median income of $15,000 (42nd nationally), less than 55 percent of women in the labor force (46th nationally), only a third of businesses owned by women (47th nationally), less than 14 percent of women with four or more years of college (45th nationally). Some 26 percent of working women held managerial or professional jobs (26th nationally). Like blacks, women had come a long way in Alabama’s corporate community. Like blacks also, they had a long way to go before they achieved either balance or equality.



PART T WO

Alabama’s Society



4 Life from the Bottom Up Society

Nineteen nineteen was the ¤rst time I came to town. I knew two or three days before that I was coming, and I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep. I had visualized all sorts of things that a town would look like. We lived out there with woods all around and Daddy didn’t smoke and when we got down to the ferry and crossed the river, I could start smelling cigar smoke and the coal smoke and the rest of the town odors. I’ve heard that there were some of those people up there on Gunters Mountain that never did go to town. —Burton Troup of Marshall County, in J. Mack Lofton Jr., Voices from Alabama: A Twentieth-Century Mosaic

What do Alabamians look like? What do they eat? Where do they live? What are their hobbies? How are their families organized? Are they healthier or sicker than most Americans? Are most of them poor, middle class, or rich? How do they provide for the less fortunate, the poor, the mentally ill, children? How did society change during the years between 1900 and 2000? The answers to these questions supply meat and sinew to the dry bones of politics and economics. Urbanization In 1900 1,828,697 people lived within the boundaries of Alabama, most of them scattered across a rural landscape dotted with small towns of less than 1,000 souls. In the 10 years after the 1890 census, Alabama’s population shot


176 CHA P T ER FOU R

up by nearly 21 percent, partly due to high birth rates and partly due to rapid immigration into the mineral district. No decade in the new century would even come close to that rate of growth; few would even crack double ¤gures. During the last decades of the century, Alabama’s growth rate regularly fell below other southeastern states, although total population reached 4,447,000 at end-of-century (dropping the state from 22nd largest in 1990 to 23rd in 2000). Population distribution varied by decade, although certain patterns stand out. Rural life slowly declined as people moved ¤rst to cities, then to suburbs, then into rural areas just beyond suburbs. In 1900 less than 12 percent of Alabamians dwelt in urban areas (de¤ned as an incorporated town of 2,500 or more). Each decade brought increases in the percentage: 17 in 1910; 22 in 1920; 28 in 1930; 30 in 1940; 40 in 1950; 52 in 1960; and peaking at 61 percent in 1990. Rural population began the century at nearly 90 percent of the total, then declined steadily to 45 percent at century’s end. By 2000 Alabama’s rural farm population had declined to barely 1 percent of total population. Between 1900 and 1930 the exodus from rural Alabama became an avalanche as 14 counties lost population. These shifts accelerated between 1930 and 1950 (44 of 67 counties lost population during these two decades). By 1970 25 counties had fewer people than when the century began, with the highest losses occurring in the Black Belt where the decline was often more than half the total population. By that year, 9 urban counties (Jefferson, Mobile, Montgomery, Madison, Tuscaloosa, Calhoun, Etowah, Morgan, and Lauderdale) contained more than half the state’s people. Although it took six decades to do it, a majority of Alabamians lived in towns and cities by 1960. Ten years later, Alabama contained 123 towns of 2,500 or more. During the 1960s some of these hamlets lost population as yet another profound social transformation swept over America: people left cities for suburbs. Birmingham lost population during each of the century’s last four decades as whites especially ®ed to suburbs. More than half of all Alabama counties lost population during the 1980s, while Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery suburbs exploded with growth. During the 1990s the seven fastest-growing counties (led by Shelby) were all suburban, accounting for more than 40 percent of the state’s total population growth. Counties adjacent to Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile (Limestone,


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Shelby, Blount, Saint Clair, Autauga, Elmore, Baldwin) could scarcely build schools, hospitals, and shopping malls fast enough to accommodate af®uent migrants crowding into new subdivisions. The 2000 census detected yet another signi¤cant departure. The new de¤nition of “city” consisted of loose sprawl scattered across a once rural landscape. Called by various names—“countri¤ed cities,” “edgeless cities”— these new con¤gurations consisted of seams of settlement stretching out from dense urban cores along interstate highways, populated by people seeking acreage, gobbling up rural terrain, planting gardens next to satellite dishes, commuting to work, school, church, and social activities in “sport utility vehicles” (SUVs), and establishing a new pattern of American life that was neither rural, urban, nor suburban. In fact, between 1990 and 2000 Alabama’s urban population actually declined from 61 to 55 percent (in 2000 density of population as well as the threshold of 2,500 persons de¤ned an area as “urban”). At century’s end 54 percent of Bibb County’s working population, 49 percent of Chilton’s, and 29 percent of Walker’s commuted to metro area jobs, mainly in Birmingham. Ethnicity The ethnic composition of Alabama’s population underwent just as remarkable a change as the location of its people. In 1900 more than 45 percent of the state’s population consisted of African Americans, almost the same as on the eve of the Civil War. In subsequent decades, much of the massive hemorrhaging of people from rural counties consisted of blacks. These internal migrants generally headed for cities. Many more left the state altogether. Alabama had slightly more than 900,000 blacks in 1910. Sixty years later, the state had almost exactly the same number. While white population increased by double digits during every decade but two, between 1900 and 1970 black growth never achieved that level, and the African American population actually declined during the teens, 1940s, and 1960s, while remaining level during the 1950s. By 1970 Alabama blacks were more likely to live in cities (62 percent) than whites (57 percent). As racial barriers receded, so did black migration. By 2000 blacks actually increased their percentage of the population to 26 percent (compared to 12 percent in the United States).



Although Alabama’s percentage of African Americans constituted more than twice the national average, other ethnic groups lagged behind nationwide trends. Other races accounted for only 3 percent of Alabama’s total population in 2000. The number of Hispanics tripled during the 1990s (to 1.7 percent in 2000, compared to 12.5 percent nationwide). In Franklin County, Hispanics accounted for more than 7 percent of the population, and Albertville counted more than 5,000 Hispanic residents. In four north Alabama counties, Hispanics accounted for between 3.3 and 7.4 percent of total population. Asian immigrants settled mainly in the four largest cities and at Bayou La Batre, a coastal town whose historic shell¤sh industry came under Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian control. Asian-owned grocery stores, beauty shops, seafood businesses, and Buddhist temples transformed the sleepy commercial ¤shing village into an Oriental community in all but politics. Like the transition from rural to urban to suburban to edgeless cities, ethnic patterns were part of a larger national phenomenon. Fueled by immigration, high birth rates, or both, Hispanic, black, and Asian American families were changing American demography. The Census Bureau in 1996 projected that by 2050 non-Hispanic whites would have declined from 74 percent of the population to only 53 percent. Hispanics would constitute a quarter, blacks 14 percent, and Asians 8 percent. Whether black, white, brown, or yellow, Alabama’s 2000 population did have the distinction of being one of the nation’s most provincial. The state ranked seventh in percentage of residents born in the state where they resided (ahead of only Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, and Iowa). Of course provincialism constituted both liability and asset. Part of Alabama’s sad de¤ciencies in politics, economics, and education emanated from a popular culture that saw nothing wrong with woeful underfunding of state institutions. Having done things that way for a century, citizens saw no compelling reason to change, especially because they had never lived in a state where things were done differently. On the other hand, the state’s legendary sense of community, family solidarity, history, pride, folk culture, religious homogeneity, hospitality, and neighborliness were rooted in the same parochialism and social cohesion.


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Urban Consciousness When rural people moved to town, they did not immediately jettison rural values or patterns of life. Rural-minded people living in cities experienced tensions between institutions and ways of life left behind and new realities governing their conduct. Birmingham epitomized such con®icts. Rural folkways of personal honor, independence, heavy drinking, male hierarchy, and carrying weapons translated into chaotic patterns of urban conduct. Easily offended by personal insult, packed into crowded neighborhoods, and isolated from kinship networks, rural people often responded quickly and violently to affronts, real or imagined. At the beginning of the 20th century, the metropolis was known as Bad Birmingham, the city of minerals and murders. Because so many new residents were rootless young men without wives or families, prostitution, gambling, and public drunkenness proliferated. Attempts by city of¤cials to isolate prostitution might remove the moral blight from sight but not from the minds of males. In Montgomery, two Coca-Cola company delivery men counted the city’s bordellos during the late 1930s before the U.S. Army closed most of them. They recorded 274 brothels scattered across town, though most were located along Pollard Street near the Alabama River. To counter such outrages, evangelical Christians relied on tried and tested rural religion. Methodist and Baptist churches followed parishioners into town where they institutionalized rural religious rituals. Traditional August camp meetings became weeklong summer revivals. Hell-¤re-anddamnation sermons remained a staple of religious discourse. Many ministers and lay leaders paid little attention to urban social problems, believing as they frequently explained that a new coat of paint on the pigpen did not markedly improve the character of the pig within. Only being born-again had any lasting effect on personal conduct. Citywide revivals borrowed both from rural and urban folkways. Alabama native son and Methodist preacher Sam Jones ®ourished in such an environment (Jones called Birmingham a “hell-hole” of sin and impurity). Dwight L. Moody, the most famous revivalist of his time, also preached in the city. Strict Sabbatarianism prevailed, and by 1908 Birmingham prohib-



ited golf, baseball, tennis, football, hunting, shooting, gaming, card playing, and even dominoes on the “Lord’s day.” Such prohibitions notwithstanding, brothels, saloons, and dance halls continued to prosper on Fridays and Saturdays. Despite the initial prevalence of rural-mindedness, subtle changes began to occur. Well-educated rural ministers began to consider country church pastorates as apprenticeships where they obtained experience that would lead them into more prestigious and well-paying urban pastorates. As urban churches grew in size and af®uence, they recognized serious social dislocation that demanded collective ministries. Immigration into Birmingham by European Jews and Catholics as well as by rural blacks confronted white evangelicals with a sense of urgency. Alcohol had to be kept out of the hands of newcomers in order to reduce violence and restrain undesirable conduct. New religious groups, largely unknown in rural communities, had to be socialized in Anglo-American values and hopefully converted to the Protestant faith. Prohibition was only one manifestation of new religious sensibilities. Others included philanthropy and social service. In 1899 the Sisters of Charity came to Birmingham to open a new hospital for the poor. Saint Vincent’s Hospital opened in November 1900, serving many of the city’s indigent sick and injured. Marie Forsman, a Saint Vincent’s nursing graduate, became the city’s ¤rst public health nurse in 1907, visiting poor whites and tending their health needs. A year later, the city hired its ¤rst “district nurse” for indigent blacks. Jewish residents created the Daughters of Israel, the Hebrew Relief Society, and the Council of Jewish Charities to assist indigent members of their faith. Saint Paul’s Catholic Church spawned the Ladies of Charity, and in 1905 the Salvation Army opened a rescue home for unwed, pregnant teenagers. The last year of the 19th century, religious women formed the Free Kindergarten Association to care for young children of mothers forced to work. Negro children who got into trouble found support in the Juvenile Court Association, composed of women from each of 30 African American churches, who took in delinquent children. The women raised $2,000 in 1907 to buy 25 acres of land near Montgomery where they built a six-room cottage, the beginning of Mount Meigs Industrial School and Reformatory. White Methodist women pioneered settlement houses in the city, which provided a full range of social ministries as


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well as Bible study and preaching services. Soon Southern Baptists established similar institutions. As decades passed, urban clergy tried to instill a sense of civic responsibility and unity of purpose in their congregations. As one Methodist minister wrote in 1927 in an essay entitled “A Christian Obligation to His City,” “it is one thing to live in a city—it is quite another thing to live for a city.”1 Technology was mainly a city slicker during the 20th century and changed cities as profoundly as new religious currents. Montgomery boasted nearly 12,000 telephones by 1930. Alabama’s 674,000 families owned an astounding 322,000 radios in 1940. Air-conditioning began to appear in downtown stores in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile after World War II. Television arrived in Montgomery in 1953 amid unfounded fears that church attendance would plummet as families gathered around the new machine. The city’s ¤rst television station, WSFA, molli¤ed the city’s ministerial association by broadcasting worship services. Automobiles also multiplied in urban space. Private autos in Birmingham created such traf¤c jams that “jitneys” (modi¤ed vehicles capable of carrying 10 or so passengers) appeared in the 1920s. Trolleys and streetcars offered a primitive form of mass urban transit. But individualistic Alabamians brought the same values to transportation they did to politics and religion. They did not need someone telling them how to travel any more than they did how to vote or what to believe about God. They preferred to make such decisions for themselves. When the century ended, Alabamians ranked number one in at least one category: the percentage of workers (96 percent) who drove to work. They were also ¤rst in driving alone, re®ecting their rejection of public transportation and carpooling. This propensity resulted in such high rates of ozone pollution that Birmingham was not allowed new pollution-producing industry after 1990. A preference for buying American and low per capita income predisposed citizens both toward certain makes and ages of autos. Half the population drove Chevrolets and Fords, and a third drove vehicles seven years or older. Family Life Transitions from familiar rural terrains to unfamiliar urban ones placed added strains on families. So did poverty. Urban newcomers consisted



mainly of younger males. Poverty compounded migration as women and children were forced into labor markets. Poor women were more likely to become single parents and to divorce. Even routine matters such as acquiring adequate housing or child care could become monumental headaches. With a per capita income nearly $6,000 below the national average in 2000 ($23,000 to $28,500) and a poverty rate 3 percentage points higher (16.2 percent compared to 13.3), many Alabamians found economic conditions constantly erupting into family life. The state’s percentage of single-parent families often ranked highest among states, and four out of ¤ve were headed by females. The state’s divorce to marriage ratio was also higher than the national average in 2000. That year, Alabama had the fourth highest divorce rate, 40 percent higher than the national average. Poverty, high teenage marriage rates, easy divorce laws, the prevalence of religious groups that endorsed hierarchical male-dominated families rather than companionate marriages, all were blamed for the problem. The fact that the nation’s highest divorce rates were in the Bible Belt states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama embarrassed evangelical churches. Among Christians nationally, Baptists had a divorce rate higher than any other group except those who attended nondenominational churches. The paradox of a state renowned for its evangelical Christianity also setting standards for divorce rates confused observers about the relationship of belief to practice. A high divorce rate came with high social costs. More than half of Alabama’s children younger than ¤ve attended full-time day care in 2000, a rate second only to Mississippi (56 percent in Alabama compared to 41 percent nationally). Low-income, single-parent families, reforms that forced women on welfare to take jobs, and high divorce rates all contributed to the phenomenon. Four out of ¤ve Alabama families with working mothers relied on nonparental child care. And Alabama’s day care standards were low. Compounding the problem of working mothers was the problem of unwed ones. A dramatic increase in the number of births to unwed mothers during the century’s last four decades forced many to seek help from relatives or child care. In 1960 12 percent of Alabama births were to unwed mothers; 40 years later, the ¤gure had increased to 38 percent. This high rate among women who often ignored prenatal care partially explained a 2000 infant mortality rate nearly a third higher than the national average. Income levels also in®uenced housing choices. By end-of-century one in


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six Alabamians lived in mobile homes (750,000 people). During the decades after 1950 the state experienced the second largest sales increase of such dwellings. As many residents purchased factory-built homes as they did traditional ones during the 1990s. The advantage involved price: more than half of all mobile homes were valued at less than $15,000. And the clout of manufacturers (Alabama was the third largest manufacturer of mobile homes) among legislators left the industry largely unregulated and its product liable to accidents from electrical malfunctions and high winds. Even with mobile home availability, Alabama ranked high in housing without telephones, running water, plumbing, or electricity. On the positive side, inexpensive mobile homes turned more Alabamians into owners than was the case nationally. Poverty Mattie May Jordan does not ¤t familiar stereotypes of most Alabamians when they envision the poor. Born in Ohio in 1889, she moved with her family to Alabama in 1904 because of her father’s poor health. A physician recommended Florida, but the family was afraid of hurricanes and alligators, so they settled in Washington County in the lower Tombigbee River Valley. They had no money, so the valley’s rolling pine hills and poor soil allowed them to homestead federal land. A homemade log cabin replaced their tent, and in time a simple board-and-batten structure with a metal roof and porch stood near where the log cabin had been. Their nearest neighbors were a mile down a dirt road, and they had to carry water from a spring on the property of a black farm owner nearby. They worshiped once a month at Buck Hill Baptist Church, which was two miles from their house, and the church building also functioned as school for the Jordan children. Pine Barren Creek furnished ample water for baptisms. A devout Christian, May Jordan also attended Wesley Chapel Methodist Church in Bigbee when her own church had no services. Physicians were too far away to be of any real value, so the family relied on home remedies, herb medicine, and a “faith doctor.” The happy family sang hymns in the evening and enjoyed hunting and ¤shing on holidays. The Jordans had been farmers in Ohio. But the acidic soil of Washington County and the invasion of boll weevils made that occupation impractical.



So they raised small crops of sugar cane, sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts, tapped pine trees for turpentine, and traded furs. Hunting and trapping provided primary income during winter months. Eugene Jordan, May’s father, borrowed money and traveled the muddy back roads of Washington County in a mule-drawn wagon, buying animal pelts, which he then sold in Mobile. Beginning in December 1912 the 23-year-old Mattie May spent two seasons accompanying her father, cooking meals, preparing furs for shipment, and maintaining the mule and wagon while he walked impassable roads to customers’ homes. May began to keep a journal describing the folkways of the people she encountered during their travels. Though white themselves, the Jordans bought furs from black and mixed-race trappers as well as whites. And May’s journal makes clear the easy way that poor people often helped one another. Both blacks and whites offered shelter and food when her father left her alone at their campsite. May and her father in turn helped farmers whose wagons were mired in mud. Not only racial but gender divisions seemed of less importance among the poor families they encountered. Men and women shared activities: storytelling, playing musical instruments, camp meeting revivals, preparing furs, even hunting. May Jordan ¤lled her diary with jokes and stories. Family and community ¤gured most prominently in poor women’s lives and in May’s diary, but work dominated male existence. Religion often played a central role for both sexes. May Jordan also recounted details of ®ora and fauna, weather and road conditions, enjoyment of the outdoors, hunting and ¤shing, walking through deep forests and appreciation for the beauty of nature. At times the poorly educated young woman wrote lyrical if ungrammatical prose: Jack Frost “has powdered the grass with A ¤ne suit of Ice and over the shivering water he spread A carpet that will sparkle in old Hannahs rays when she rises so bright.”2 Six months after her last diary entry in 1914, May Jordan died of malaria at age 25. Her father died of the same malady six weeks later. May’s seven younger siblings and widowed mother desperately dipped turpentine and farmed until a 1916 hurricane blew in from the Gulf, ruining their crops. The family never recovered from the very disaster they had sought to avoid by locating in Washington County. Unable to pay taxes on their land, one son joined the marines in 1916 and the other children moved to Mobile, where several went to work at Mobile Cotton Mill. Several younger chil-


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dren were sent to the Protestant Children’s facility or foster homes; one worked as a “servant.” May’s mother died of pellagra, a disease resulting from dietary de¤ciency, in 1923. May Jordan’s life was not exceptional in 20th-century Alabama. In fact, the extent of poverty de¤ned much of the state’s history. Physical isolation rendered the rural poor largely invisible. And the generalizations and stereotypes of an increasingly urban population that neither observed them ¤rsthand nor remembered their misery made the poor even more remote. As with ¤ckle lovers, so with the ¤ckle upwardly mobile: to be out of sight was to be out of mind. The reality of poverty clashed with American assumptions of an open, classless society, with free and easy access to wealth and power. Upward mobility may be the most cherished of all American ideals. In Alabama it was certainly one of the most elusive. The American success story, in fact, eluded many citizens, and the society always operated somewhere between its own elaborate mythology of “rags to riches” and equally ®awed Marxist assumptions of a rigid and impenetrable class structure. As decades passed, Alabamians became more conscious of the reality of class (especially during the 1930s and 1960s). They also felt uncomfortable with the harsh and materialistic concept of class, preferring the gentler term “status,” which corresponded better with their values of equality and accessibility. But both terms refer to social differentiation, the way people separate from one another, often based on invidious comparisons. A number of characteristic features of Alabama life worked against rigid class structures: Jacksonian bias against elites and aristocracy; the sustained power of a frontier psychology of equality; the Protestant work ethic; urbanization and industrialism, which eroded the pretense of traditional planter elites. Until late in the 20th century, the relationship of people to land determined their prestige and power. A typical class division in a rural Alabama community during the ¤rst half of the century located people according to whether or not they owned land. Beyond this primary difference between tenants and owners were secondary divisions among owners according to the size of their holdings. Caste considerations ¤gured even larger: were they white or black? Usually poor people of both races were more likely to separate, divorce,



desert, or cohabit without bene¤t of marriage. Hierarchical, male-dominated family structures prevailed and women and children were deemed subordinate. People generally sought recreation, marriage, friends and churches within their own class. Poor whites differentiated themselves (and were differentiated by others) according to their conduct and moral values: they were either “poor but proud” or “po’ white trash.” Poor blacks were further divisible by lightness of skin, job skills, manners, dress, and extent of education. When middle-class Alabamians remembered poverty at all, it was according to some general cataclysm such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. During those locust years when all seemed equally destitute, facile explanations of individual excess or moral failure could not explain why so many were so poor. But when good times returned for most, poverty remained for many. In 1960 38 percent of white Americans age 14 and over earned less than $2,000 annually. The ¤gure in Alabama was nearly 45 percent. Twenty-eight of Alabama’s 67 counties had poverty rates over 20 percent. Children under age 18 and adults beyond age 64 were the most likely Alabamians to be poor. Compounding poverty, Alabama, in 2000, had the nation’s second lowest family welfare payments and a state income tax that began taxing earnings of a family of four at $4,600 a year, approximately a third of the federal poverty level (by comparison, Mississippi’s tax threshold for a family of four was $15,000). Sales taxes on food, clothing, prescription medicine, and electricity—which consumed a much higher proportion of total incomes than for the nonpoor—deepened the regressive nature of Alabama’s tax system. (The poor paid some 12 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes during the 1990s; the richest, about 3 percent.) Although the 1990s economic boom lowered the state’s poverty rate to 15 percent, Alabama remained the seventh poorest state in 1999. Only Shelby County had a poverty rate below 10 percent. The gap between poorest and richest Alabamians expanded during the decades between 1970 and 2000. Alabama in 2000 contained 8 of the nation’s 100 poorest counties, each with a poverty rate between 28 and 34 percent, and all were located in the Black Belt. No metropolitan area topped Birmingham and its suburbs in the chasm between rich and poor; and 14 Alabama cities of 10,000 or more were among the poorest 500 American cities. But statewide, rural


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areas were as likely to be poor as inner cities. In 1990 urban and rural poverty rates were nearly identical at 18.4 and 18.3 percent, respectively. Poverty had many manifestations, none more disturbing than its effect on children. The number of children under 5 who lived in poverty actually increased from 24 to 26 percent between 1989 and 1993 despite a robust state economy. Among children under age 18, the poverty rate dropped to 21 percent at century’s end, substantially down from previous years (but still ranking the state high in percentage of children living in poverty). Nearly every study of the problem found a direct correlation between family income and child well-being. Shelby County, one of Alabama’s most af®uent counties, regularly ranked ¤rst in the state in 16 measurements of child welfare, while Black Belt counties just as regularly ranked lowest. The epidemic of single, teenage mothers accounted for much of the problem. Traditional families—married moms and dads living with their own children in the same home—became an endangered institution by century’s end. Nearly 1 Alabama child in 3 lived in a single-parent household in 1990. Black single mothers had nearly a 50–50 chance of being poor; white single mothers 1 in 6; black couples only 1 in 10. The high divorce rate was one culprit in causing poverty. With more than 1 in 3 Alabama births to an unmarried woman, a frightful sociological pattern emerged. A 1992 report in American Behavioral Scientist found that out-ofwedlock birth was the strongest predictor of low birth weight, teen pregnancy, and juvenile delinquency. That conclusion certainly held true for Alabama. In the mid 1990s Alabama ranked 12th in one-parent families, 7th in child hunger, 5th in low birth weights, 3rd in births to teens, and 6th in infant mortality. Children of divorced parents were 4 times more likely to need social services because they were 4 times as likely to be poor. They performed worse in school and were more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. They were also more likely to be sexually abused and to end their own marriages in divorce. Mae Mack of Jefferson County represented the pattern of family indigence and personal irresponsibility. In interviews with an oral historian, Mack described a classic dysfunctional life. One of 13 children and raised by an older sister, she became pregnant at age 11 and again at 13. She dropped out of school to tend her baby and to work. A third pregnancy caused her



sister to evict her from the room she was borrowing. Without house or job, her weight dropped to 90 pounds before she began selling sex for food. She got a job washing dishes and moved into public housing. She ¤nally married after the birth of a fourth child. Middle-class people attributed such conduct to personal moral failings. Academics understood the problem chie®y as resulting from a crippling family environment. Some mixture of both seemed at work in most cases. Mack’s problem obtaining housing was not unusual. Antiquated shacks and used mobile homes provided shelter in the country, and public housing served the urban poor. In 1985 more than 10 percent of Birmingham’s population (30,000 people) lived in 17 public housing centers (or “projects” as residents called them), one of the nation’s highest rates. At least 10,000 more clamored to get in. Some 20 percent of the city’s population lived in substandard housing, the same level as the city’s poverty rate. By dawn on summer days a line more than a block long already would have formed outside the public housing of¤ce. One reason for this crisis was the expansion of UAB onto land previously inhabited by poor blacks living in dilapidated houses. Clearing 60 blocks of Southside for UAB construction displaced 1,000 poor black families. The development was good for UAB and for Birmingham’s economic stability, but for black families displaced from historic neighborhoods, UAB’s progress came at their expense. Health was another casualty of low income. The malaria and pellagra that decimated the Jordan family was one expression of the problem. Another was clay eating. Technically called geophagy, the practice abounds in Africa, where it is regarded as a normal part of diet. Believed to supply iron and kaolin (the principal ingredient in Kaopectate, an over-the-counter medication for diarrhea), certain red and white clays became a regular part of poor black and white diet, especially among pregnant women. Oral histories with 10 black tenant farmers ages 42 to 87 who worked on a large Black Belt cotton farm south of Montgomery revealed that 9 had eaten dirt during some phase of their lives between the 1880s and 1960s. A 1959 study revealed that half the pregnant black women in Alabama had consumed dirt during their pregnancy and that all their diets were de¤cient in iron, thiamin, and niacin. Each month one convenience store on U.S. 280 near Auburn University sold 50 one-pound bags of Down Home Georgia White Dirt, a clay that blacks fried and ate. No proven harm resulted from clay


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eating, but the stereotype hung heavy over poor people who indulged in the practice. Given what middle- and upper-class people considered such bizarre practices as geophagy, it is no wonder that they developed so many negative stereotypes about the poor. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty in 1967 described a “culture of poverty” where “the poor think differently; they have a different set of values.”3 Experts considered poor people more likely to be individualistic, fundamentalist, fatalistic, traditionalist, anxious, tied to family, and neglectful of longrange planning. Accounts of Alabama’s poor whites contained similar stereotypes. Mitchell B. Garrett, a Howard College professor and Clay County native, noted both poor white aspirations for a better life and their offenses against thrift. He remembered one pot-bellied family who ate dry red clay used as chinking in their chimney, crumbling off small chunks that they melted like fudge in their mouths. He described them as both lazy and sickly. Herman Clarence Nixon, a historian from Calhoun County, brie®y managed his father’s plantation and denied that tenants of either race were inherently shiftless, unreliable, or lazy. In fact, his descriptions attribute to them considerable initiative and independence. But sharp class distinctions did arise between three social groups that Nixon described as “milltown,” “uptown,” and “Niggertown.” Poor people valued a different kind of evangelical religion and perpetuated an alternative folk culture. Bud Medders, a tall, lean, white, Calhoun County sharecropper, became a rustic wit and skillful raconteur under the in®uence of several drinks of corn liquor. A fallen Primitive Baptist who voted regularly to “turn the rascals out,” Medders was a spiritual descendent of “Simon Suggs,” a famous antebellum poor white literary invention of novelist Johnson J. Hooper. During the Spanish-American War, Bud learned that national conscription might result in his being sent to ¤ght in Cuba. Hearing a rumor that a Spanish immigrant had begun working in a nearby plant, Medders inquired of the postmaster whether or not government of¤cials would permit him to shoot the local Spaniard as his contribution to the war effort. When the wife of a white tenant bitterly complained over a charge at the country store run by William D. Nixon, Herman’s father, he angrily refused to argue with a woman. But if she went home and put on some



breeches, he vowed to slap her face. Undaunted, the woman promised to return home and put on the breeches. The most popular items in Nixon’s country store measured the buying habits of poor tenants: stick candy, Bruton’s snuff, Duke’s Mixture smoking tobacco and paper for roll-your-own cigarettes (the most skilled could roll a cigarette with the ¤ngers of a single hand and never spill a bit), “sowbelly meat,” roasted coffee, Dr. M. A. Simmons Liver Medicine, Tutt’s Pills, Wine of Cardui, quinine, castor oil, calomel, turpentine, and Epsom salts. The interior lives of poor people were often at variance with middle-class perceptions. Buttressed by strong families and keen identity with local communities, many created a rich folk culture and possessed a remarkable sense of self-worth. If treated unfairly, tenant farmers simply moved. Cooperative work—whether hog killing at the ¤rst frost for men, or quilting, cooking, and putting up vegetables and fruits for women—provided social outlets as well as occasions for storytelling, gossip, smoking, and drinking. Marvin Malley Champion could have been one of Eugene Jordan’s furtrading customers had the Champion family lived a little to the southwest of their home in southeastern Wilcox County. Nine houses made up the community of Independent, located in a vast forest near the Alabama River bottom. All families knew each other and all stood ready to help during times of crisis. Everyone was a sharecropper, but the Champions supplemented farm income by hunting and trapping. Marvin Champion borrowed a hunting dog from an elderly black neighbor and caught opossums and racoons for their meat and pelts. A trader came through the community to purchase skins twice a year, but paid low prices. So the Champions usually shipped their furs to Saint Louis for higher payments. They became skilled skinners because the slip of a knife cost them money. Champion dreaded hog killing time, and he regretted the slow, painful deaths of animals caught in his traps. But cruel as such practices were, “that was the way of bread and meat at that time.”4 Champion’s father, like most poor men of the time, was a jack-of-all-trades. He sharpened plows, ¤led crosscut saws, pulled the teeth of farm animals, seldom charging for his work. For heat in winter, the Champions walked four miles to the nearest railroad line and picked up coal that fell off trains headed to and from Mobile. Neighborliness among Alabama’s poor came as no surprise. A 1999 survey ranked low-income families in Alabama as far more likely to partici-


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pate in religious activities and community service than their peers in other states. Experts theorized that poor people had more empathy for each other than middle-class people had for them. But why the poor in Alabama should be so much more empathetic than the poor in 12 other states puzzled surveyors. Perhaps the pervasive evangelical religion played a role or the parochialism and strong family ties of an essentially sedentary population. Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist from Calhoun County, speculated that “hungry does not have a color” to explain why poor black families were so quick to help even poorer white ones. Of all the lessons his mother taught him growing up poor, “the most important was that life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it. The only day I ever made her truly ashamed of me was the day I made fun of a boy from a family that was even poorer than us. His daddy had shaved his head to cheat the lice, and I laughed at him, made fun of him, until I saw the look in my mama’s eyes.” Bragg also explained why ¤ghting to protect name and family counted for more than education among the poor (genteel southerners fought for abstract concepts of honor; poor people fought out of a sense of personal or family pride). His father taught him to ¤ght dirty if necessary to win; his mother taught him “not to give a damn when it hurt.”5 Although many poor people rejected proffered aid as insulting and condescending, others accepted what they could get. Poor whites tended to be more resentful than poor blacks, perhaps taking too much pride in their race. Believing that welfare was too identi¤ed with blacks, derelicts, and moral mis¤ts, they often did not seek help even in severest need. They tended to avoid organizations that could leverage power and in®uence on their behalf, especially when such organizations were biracial. As a result, throughout the 20th century half or more of Alabama’s poor were white. Despite that fact, middle- and upper-class Alabamians routinely described poverty and the welfare system as predominantly an African American predicament. Poverty did operate most oppressively on blacks. Even if their children worked hard, persevered, graduated from college, learned a general American accent, and obtained appropriate professional positions, they still battled discrimination based on skin color. The children of poor whites could travel a similar path and become largely indistinguishable from other whites of



similar socioeconomic status, “passing” easily into higher-class status. Many carried a chip on their shoulder in the passing—antipathy toward exclusive college fraternities and sororities, or what they contemptuously referred to as the “country-club set”; others hid their origins as carefully as they could, learned to play golf, joined the country club, subscribed to Southern Living, moved to the suburbs, and tried to forget their humble beginnings. For those willing to seek help, Alabama put in place an elaborate and controversial welfare system. In its origins, welfare in Alabama derived from English poor laws. An expression both of Christian charity and secular philanthropy, poor laws provided state aid to society’s unfortunates. In America as in England, the public divided the poor into two classes: the deserving poor, whose misfortune was not entirely of their own making; the undeserving poor, who brought disaster upon themselves by their own wickedness, sloth, or poor decisions. Children posed an obvious dilemma for such reasoning. Most people agreed that children should be held harmless of their parents’ misdeeds. Hence they were always a worthy object of welfare. Functionally, welfare systems provided “inside” and “outside” relief. Outside relief provided a small monthly stipend that allowed paupers to remain within existing family or social structures. Inside relief institutionalized the poor in almshouses, mental hospitals, or other public facilities. Whether welfare primarily helped poor people, sought to control them, or manipulated them into middle-class values, religion, and work ethic remains unresolved. Some welfare “reformers” clearly sought to maintain social stability, encourage a Protestant work ethic, teach modern concepts of hygiene, and ensure social tranquility and order. Other reformers sought broader, more humane, and “Christian” goals of uplift. Many of them expressed outrage at social injustice and the abuse of children, whether by avaricious mill owners or uneducated and unenlightened parents. Before the New Deal and the Great Society federalized and standardized welfare in America, Alabama pursued its own meandering welfare policies. The ¤ts and starts resulted from a ¤erce internal debate characteristic of the state’s individualistic citizenry. Parties to the debate included self-serving political elites, underfunded governments, genuinely pious religious communities, and emerging female social groups. Modern welfare began in 1883 when the Alabama legislature required


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counties to establish a separate fund to assist the poor. County of¤cials generally used this money to build an almshouse. But citizens did not welcome such an institution to their neighborhood, perceiving “inmates” to be derelict in both ¤nancial resources and moral sensibilities. That year, Jefferson County commissioners awarded the contract for care for paupers to the lowest “responsible” bid. The resulting almshouse contained six wards: two each for white men and women, one each for black men and women. Tuberculosis patients occupied eight rooms, and a separate building housed insane indigents. The seriousness with which citizens treated inhabitants of such facilities can be inferred from the racial composition. In an era of deepening racial apartheid, brothels, prisons, and almshouses remained virtually the only social institutions to combine the races in a single place. Paralleling public relief, a private, mainly religious welfare system developed in Birmingham: United Hebrew Charities, a Mercy Home created by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Alabama Industrial School for Wayward Boys, the Birmingham Free Kindergarten Association, the Birmingham Social Settlement Association, the Salvation Army house, Boys Club, Girls Home, Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Holy Innocents Hospital (a facility for indigent children ¤nanced by the Episcopal church), Pisgah Home (a rescue agency for adult men), and Hillman Hospital (a public charity facility). Various religious denominations also supported seven settlement houses around the city by 1917. Women led efforts to build and maintain most private welfare facilities, sometimes complaining that men seemed uninterested in such matters. The president of the WCTU Mercy Home scolded: “Strange to say the men of our city and state are indifferent to this question of the care of the dependent and defective; and most of them seem to consider all effort for this class a kind of woman’s ‘fad’ instead of an important social obligation.”6 In 1913 Birmingham provided $20,000 for charitable activities, and the city also established a welfare department. But the issue barely registered on the barometer of city politics, and business elites were too absorbed with economic development and running state politics to worry about such extraneous matters. Such work was better left to women. The problem was that women did not control city revenues or expenditures. Although Jefferson County’s almshouse at Ketona provided much more space for whites than blacks, the reverse ratio characterized the “inmates.”



The matter-of-fact but chilling records of white patients listed “pregnant pauper,” “syphilitic prostitute,” “hysterical female with opium addiction,” “sick tramp,” “idiotic pauper,” a six-year-old child and her syphilitic mother, a “sick inebriate,” a “sick prostitute.” No wonder a terri¤ed poor white man on outside welfare in 1934 protested that people like him feared more than anything else that if they were cut off relief, they would have to enter the county almshouse at Ketona: “Many old people had almost rather die than to go to the poor house.”7 So appalling were conditions that the legislature passed a law in 1927 prohibiting placing a child under 18 in an almshouse (though lists of residents proved the law was often violated). The legislature had sound reasons for such action. Most counties let out care to the lowest private bidder (the average rate in 1917 was $7 to $12 per pauper per month). The husband-wife managers of the Butler County Poorhouse at Greenville remembered one woman who raised a son in the facility and whose husband died there. The son graduated to another state institution, Kilby Prison, for making whiskey. Patients had to raise most of their own food on a 120-acre farm. One retarded man, Dave Majors, sometimes hitchhiked to visit relatives. On one occasion, a school bus ¤lled with children passed by, and the children began shouting insults at him. He retaliated by throwing a rock at the bus, which broke out a window. Terri¤ed, he returned to the almshouse, packed his clothes, and ran away. The Mobile County Poor Asylum contained an indigent mixed-race couple, a violently insane former sailor, a gourmet cook, an aristocraticacting woman who insisted on being fed small, dainty bites of food, a young man who thought he was a horse, a black nurse who cared for fellow patients when he was able, and Zenas Moore, a highly educated former editor of Mobile and New York newspapers who was con¤ned to a wheelchair. When a ¤re in October 1908 raced through the facility, the white superintendent and a black nurse ran into the building. Two paralyzed men cried like children for help, and Zenas Moore begged: “Boys, save me! Don’t let me be burned to death.”8 Only the heroism of the superintendent, black staff, and patients themselves kept the casualties to one killed and four badly burned. In Calhoun County the superintendent was by trade a blacksmith without quali¤cations to oversee the almshouse, which provided no music, nurse, or recreation. Food was of poor quality. Tubercular and insane inmates


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mingled freely with healthy but indigent residents. The building was not ¤reproof; bedding and clothing were ¤lthy; rooms were vermin infested; water was often unavailable. One young insane man without control of his bladder or bowels occupied the same room as an unrelated elderly insane woman. Despite such abuses, the system steadily expanded as the heart of state¤nanced welfare. By 1923 55 almshouses housed 900 indigents. That year Alabama spent less ($188 per person) per inmate than Kentucky, Tennessee, or even Mississippi. The national average was $335. A national welfare survey that year described Alabama almshouses as ¤retraps consisting of dilapidated shacks with ¤lthy and dangerous sanitary systems. The initial inspection report of the state’s almshouses in 1909 was understated but brutally frank in its conclusions: In many cases, the Boards of County commissioners let the paupers out to the lowest bidder, and in the majority of instances these bids are very low and are insuf¤cient for the proper care and attention of these unfortunates. The majority of the paupers of our state are either mentally unbalanced, or physically disabled, and it is necessary that they at all times have more or less attention, and with the low bid at which they are taken, it is impossible to give them this, hence they get very little attention, and in many cases actually suffer. In many cases I am impressed with the idea that the almshouses are maintained for the purpose of having a place of banishment, so to speak, a quiet, secluded spot to carry those unfortunates to die.9 Whereas political and business leaders generally ignored such conditions, religious leaders, unionists, and women reformers became increasingly angry as abuses became common knowledge. And they increasingly turned their attention to child labor. In 1918 the Alabama Child Labor Committee lobbied hard for creation of a state child welfare department. The committee, in conjunction with the University of Alabama, called for a study of child welfare in the state and a plan of action to address de¤ciencies. Newly elected progressive governor Thomas Kilby had just hired Dr. Hastings Hart of the Child Welfare League of America to survey a broader range of Alabama problems. Draw-



ing participation from Alabamians of many different backgrounds, Hart methodically built a case for change in his December 1918 report. Alabama had made enormous progress in diversifying and building its economy, but had badly underfunded education, especially for Negroes. The state expended more revenue on the health of cattle and hogs than on the health of people. The state desperately needed a state board of public welfare. Government distributed the tax burden inequitably, transferring the heaviest burden of ¤nancing state services to those least able to pay. State institutions were woefully underfunded. The state’s ¤nancial capacity was much greater than its effort; the state debt was low and so were taxes. To those who insisted citizens would never tolerate increased taxes, Hart responded that citizens seemed to him to be concerned about the sick, the feebleminded, and public education. Hart was correct. For once in the 20th century, all the stars in the reform ¤rmament were aligned. Women politicized by woman suffrage demanded change. Even traditional churchwomen who rejected the suffrage movement often favored restrictions on child labor. Many evangelical pastors, in®uenced by social gospel ideas, joined the cause. So did organized labor, women’s clubs, and some progressive businessmen. And for once there was a resident in the governor’s of¤ce who led instead of followed. Thomas Kilby might have been an Anniston foundryman and banker and no friend of organized labor. But he was also a social reformer determined to end the waste of human resources and make government ef¤cient and humane. One of the governor’s ¤rst acts was to push through the legislature creation of the Alabama Child Welfare Department. Although state action trailed two years behind the creation of North Carolina’s public welfare system, it also preceded by two years initial federal appropriations for maternal and child health and by 16 years the Social Security Act. The initial appropriation of barely $12,000 grew to more than four times that amount by 1927, when 11 counties had their own child welfare boards and 53 employed social workers. Kilby’s choice to direct the agency came as no surprise. He selected Loraine Bedsole Bush Tunstall. She became one of several women who played an unprecedented role in Kilby’s administration: Sarah E. Luther headed the Division of Exceptional Education in the new State Board of Education, and Augusta Martin was appointed ¤rst child labor inspector.


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Tunstall was a native of Clarke County where a governess had provided her early education, followed by study at Thomasville High School and in Washington, D.C. She worked in the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor as a factory inspector, where she became a disciple of that agency’s initial director, Julia Lathrop. From Lathrop she learned how to skillfully direct a publicly funded agency that depended on male politicians for its budget. She left the Children’s Bureau to work for the National Child Labor Committee, securing child welfare legislation in various states. Returning to Alabama in that same capacity, she was an obvious choice as the agency’s ¤rst director. Her professional experience served her well. So did her birth to a well-connected Alabama family and her marriage to former state prison inspector and in®uential Methodist layman Dr. Charles Fletcher Bush. Although Bush was deceased when his widow began her professional career, Thomas M. Owen—director of the state archives and himself well-connected politically through his wife—became a mentor and helped her draft legislation creating the new agency. Tunstall ran her agency competently, earning the respect of her staff, governors, and legislators, and paving the way for many women to secure state government appointments. She also criticized underfunding of services to African Americans, pointing out in 1931 that blacks constituted 36 percent of the state’s population but their children received only 3 percent of the agency’s services. The new agency assumed major responsibilities. It enforced school attendance laws, inspected factories and mills to assure compliance with child labor laws, conducted sociological surveys, and monitored moral conditions (underage sexual abuse, prostitution) and medical treatment. By the 1930s the agency had added a third dimension to state services. Previously, state government had provided only highways and schools. After 1919, it added public welfare and public health as essential state responsibilities. By mid-Depression, Alabama’s Child Welfare Department was out of money and overwhelmed. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal stepped into the void, creating the Social Security Administration in 1935. Although in subsequent decades GOP of¤cials vied with Democrats in obligatory praise and vows of support for Social Security, Republicans at the time considered the act dangerous folly and protosocialism. They warned that it



would destroy America’s work ethic and multiply dependency on government. In a sense they were correct. Policy intended to be a short-term palliative evolved into generational welfare dependency for some. But all that was in the distant future. In 1935 Alabamians of both races and most economic conditions welcomed Social Security, both the retirement and family welfare features. That same year, the legislature abolished the Child Welfare Department, transferring its responsibilities to the vastly enlarged Department of Public Welfare. Care for the poor now became a local, state, and federal responsibility, with state matches determining the size of the federal dole. The larger the state payments, the more federal moneys ®owed into the state. Under the new law, county social workers assumed responsibility not only for children but also for the elderly, mentally and physically handicapped, unemployed women, and dependent mothers. Federal funds launched the agency through an initial grant of $250,000, a sum matched by the state thanks to energetic lobbying by PTA, civic and women’s clubs, and reform governor Bibb Graves. In subsequent months, 31 wretched county almshouses closed. This alone improved care for the poor immeasurably despite their terror at what might happen to them when they were turned out of the only home many of them had known. By 1941 only 9 almshouses remained. Three years later, Mobile’s facility closed amid revelations of gross negligence that had denied residents decent food, plumbing, and sanitation. Only 2 facilities remained by 1951. New Deal surveys of children receiving aid documented the extent of state neglect. Of 1,244 children obtaining physical examinations, 67 percent suffered from some defect or disease, including tuberculosis, venereal disease, hookworm, and nutritional disorders. The new welfare agency also continued to make professional opportunities available for talented women. After the brief initial term under a male administrator, Loula Friend Dunn became director in 1937. Like Loraine Tunstall a native of Clarke County, Dunn had studied social work at Auburn University and the University of North Carolina. She became a caseworker in the old Child Welfare Department in 1923, where she worked her way up the administrative ladder. Con¤dent of her own ability but required to be solicitous of in®uential politicians, she suffered fools poorly. After providing more than a decade of leadership, Dunn resigned to be-


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come executive director of the American Public Welfare Association. In a profession increasingly dominated by male administrators, Alabama’s welfare department continued largely under the leadership of talented women. Dunn left behind a staff of women as feisty as she was. When one county commissioner, representing a powerful courthouse gang, presented the county welfare director with a list of names whom he deemed worthy of state aid, the young woman ripped up the list in his presence and icily told him henceforth to follow the proper impartial procedures. Although Alabamians generally supported welfare programs in the 1930s and ’40s, they attached conditions. A columnist for the Alabama Baptist praised Loula Dunn for providing free lunches to 45,000 needy schoolchildren but cautioned welfare workers to preserve the children’s pride. “Make all charity Christian charity,” the writer admonished, in order to avoid creating “professional paupers.”10 One unintended consequence of the Social Security Act was the decline in private and religious charitable agencies after 1940. Although Gov. James E. Folsom persuaded a reluctant legislature to increase the state match for the disabled, the elderly, and dependent children, state provision never approached regional or national standards. So the post–World War II drift toward a more pietistic religion left a gap in the social service network. As memories of the Great Depression dimmed and anger at civil rights activists and “welfare cheaters” increased, most white Alabamians turned against the system. Even many middle-class blacks and thoughtful reformers bemoaned welfare that seemed to trap generation after generation in a cycle of dependency on woefully inadequate public assistance. By the 1990s Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—essentially a dole to single women with dependent children—topped out at $118 per month, a total that had not increased in a decade and a half. Meanwhile taxpayer rebellion mobilized behind political candidates who vowed to move welfare recipients into the labor force. The rebellion culminated in a massive congressional overhaul of federal welfare policy in 1996 that promised to end “welfare as we know it.” Coupled with a booming economy then scraping the bottom of the labor pool, welfare reform transferred millions of welfare recipients into training programs and jobs. Once again Alabama’s Department of Human Resources (DHR), as the welfare agency was then named, performed splen-



didly. In 2000 Alabama became one of only six states to win federal bonuses for success in moving welfare recipients into jobs, retention of jobs, or improved wages. The trouble was that the “reforms” actually cost Alabama more money than the old system. Direct cash welfare payments declined from $75 million in 1996 to $32 million in 2001. But the state paid the lowest monthly AFDC payments in the nation, topping out at $164 a month for a family of three. By 2001 the state paid $110 million a year for day care to allow former welfare recipients to work compared to only $38 million ¤ve years earlier. Although most Alabamians agreed that workfare was better than welfare, savings on their tax bills seemed a remote fantasy. Surveys also questioned the ef¤cacy and ef¤ciency of reform. One survey in 2000 found that only half the 20,000 adults who stopped receiving welfare were working at least part-time jobs (although others may have entered the underground cash economy or subsisted on child-support payments or charity). On the positive side, nearly 90 percent of former welfare recipients said they were as well off as or better off than when they had received welfare. Nonetheless, that year Alabama still ranked 47th in the well-being of its children and 50th in monthly welfare payments to those still on state rolls. And charities reported being deluged by poor people seeking to ¤ll gaps in their incomes. A more ominous problem festered during the same decade. The crisis stemmed from a lawsuit ¤led in 1988 on behalf of an infant in foster care anonymously referred to as “R. C.” The suit claimed, and the federal courts found, that R. C. had been denied adequate care by the notoriously underfunded welfare department. Actually this condition was not uncommon in the South, and some states discovered the extent in gruesome ways. In Atlanta, a six-year-old boy in foster care was starved, battered, and tortured to death by a foster grandmother after being taken from his mother. He had been tied with belts to a banister and weighed only 29 pounds when he died. The R. C. case gave Alabama the perfect cover for reform: the terrible, meddlesome federal courts compelled the state to provide humane human services. But this time the remedy required higher taxes, and legislators balked. Without more funds, DHR could not implement changes demanded by the courts. In 1991 the state signed a consent decree to improve conditions, with a 1999 deadline for compliance. After some years of painfully slow progress, Gov. Fob James reneged on the state’s earlier com-


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mitments and renewed legal action against what he termed interventionist federal judges. Meanwhile R. C. grew up, entered high school, and the state continued to pay foster parents $8 a day (between $230 to $266 a month) to care for a child. Critics noted that the daily stipend would not even board a dog at a kennel. Not surprisingly, given Alabama’s sorry record of care for the poor, state foster care payments were the nation’s lowest. Mississippi paid between $325 and $390 a month; West Virginia, $400; Arkansas, between $400 and $475. Payment to foster parents constituted only part of the problem. At the end of the century Alabama social workers also had the nation’s ¤fth highest volume of case loads, which often prevented them from investigating child abuse cases for days or even weeks. Low pay, impossibly heavy case loads, low morale, all caused high rates of staff turnover. At century’s end, 98 of the state’s 431 child support positions were un¤lled. In Jefferson County, 70 percent of caseworkers had been hired in the previous 18 months; in Madison County the percentage was 60 percent. A series of DHR directors promised compliance only to discover that no funds were available to allow them to meet federal standards to which the state had consented. In March 2001 only 25 of 67 counties were in compliance. By the end of the year, 38 had fallen into line. After 14 years of federal oversight and the vigorous efforts of DHR director Bill Fuller, the agency moved close to compliance in 2002. And a court-appointed monitor told federal judge Ira DeMent that in counties that had implemented reforms, foster care standards were as good as any in the country. But a state that claimed it could not afford humane care for 5,000 of its own foster children somehow found $6.2 million to pay the court-appointed Florida resident who served as legal monitor after 1991. Penology A state that would not adequately invest in its children would not likely provide adequate care for its prisoners. So studies at century’s end showing that Alabama prisons housed more inmates per guard and spent less doing it than any other southern state surprised no one. In some cases, one guard was responsible for the security of 400 prisoners. And the $18.27 per inmate



the state spent in 1999 compared to a southern average more than twice as much. Not surprisingly, suits on behalf of convicts resulted in court orders demanding better treatment and requiring that overcrowding be eliminated. At turn-of-century, more than 2,000 state inmates languished in county jails; a third of them had been there more than 30 days, in violation of the court order. Prisons were short 400 guards. The state’s prisoner-toguard ratio was more than twice the national average. So underfunded and understaffed was the Department of Corrections that it stopped jail inspections and halted families of prisoners from sending Christmas gifts for lack of staff to inspect them. Prisons designed to house 12,000 inmates contained 27,000. Alabama also imposed the death penalty more frequently per capita than any other state. In 1996–97 the state sentenced 31 people to death, the same number as Florida, which had a population nearly four times as large. Various late-century governors offered their own solutions to the state’s vexing prison problems. Gov. Fob James reinstated the chain gang and the hitching post (convicts were handcuffed to an outdoor restraining bar). A federal judge ruled the practices unconstitutional and allowed prisoners to sue the state. Gov. Don Siegelman investigated paying out-of-state private companies to incarcerate prisoners, but their bids proved too high. Fob James’s reintroduction of corporal punishment in the 1990s triggered a barrage of international criticism, which the governor did not understand and deeply resented. Had he known more Alabama history, he would not have been surprised. Physical brutality had long characterized penology in Alabama. Before beatings were of¤cially banned in 1952, some white guards boasted about beating black prisoners merely for the fun of it. They sometimes used the of¤cial state instrument for such beatings, a double-thick leather belt three or four feet long and three inches wide studded with belt brads. Governor Kilby (1918–22) abolished such beatings, but the ban did not survive his governorship. In the 1930s a white prison guard admitted beating a black prisoner to death, explaining that he had lost his copy of the rules for administering beatings and had forgotten that an inmate could be whipped only once a day. Women prisoners posed special problems. There were so few of them that early in the century women were often simply added to male prisons and convict camps. In such circumstances they were physically and sexually


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abused by male prisoners, wardens, guards, and staff. Gov. Emmet O’Neal, though not progressive on most issues, routinely pardoned women prisoners assigned to convict camps because of the danger from males. Alabamians expressed little interest in the welfare of female prisoners for a number of reasons. Between 1900 and 1930 more than 90 percent of female convicts were black. And until 1979 more than 80 percent remained black. The rest were almost all poor whites. Nor were any of them the sort of women—usually called ladies—whom some Alabama men elevated to a pedestal. Between 1910 and 1920 5 of the 14 female felons sentenced to prison were charged with sex-related crimes; between 1920 and 1930 32 percent of the 47 white women sent to prison were accused of similar crimes, 30 percent of violent crimes, and 36 percent of crimes against property. The racial and sexual nature of female criminality determined the length of sentences as well. A prostitute convicted of murder served only 2 years of a 12-year sentence. A 31-year-old woman convicted of miscegenation served 49 years of a 6-year sentence. A 16-year-old girl was sentenced to 7 years for felonious adultery. Once sentenced to prison, women entered an institution run almost exclusively by men. In 1917 only one female worked at the state prison, and she was not even present when female inmates were beaten. Since submission by prisoners was considered an important goal of penology, rape became a standard part of reminding women of their status. Early in the century Julia Tutwiler began a campaign to separate men and women in the state prison system. This was ¤nally accomplished in 1922 when male convicts were transferred to the newly constructed, stateof-the-art Kilby Prison, while women were left behind in Speigner, whose male warden described it as “unsanitary, a ¤retrap, pest hole, and to all intents and purposes useless for a modern prison. . . . I suggest that it be converted into Female or . . . in-curables prison.”11 Despite the conversion he recommended, warden and staff remained male. And abuses continued. Although white women’s groups endorsed prison reform in broad terms, they were cautious about details. Perhaps they worried about being identi¤ed with women who had violated so many standards of proper moral conduct. Or perhaps they hesitated because female prisoners were so overwhelmingly black. For whatever reason, prison remained the ultimate hellon-earth for women unfortunate enough to wind up there. Even at that, it



was only a little worse than conditions for women in the state’s mental institutions. Health The state failed yet another fundamental quality of life test, the health of its people. As the century ended, Alabama had the highest infant mortality rate of any state, 2nd highest rates of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and 3rd highest motor vehicle and homicide death rates. Other death rates were nearly as bad: 4th highest for heart disease and overall death; 6th for ¤rearm deaths; 7th for stroke deaths; 8th for cancer deaths. The state ranked 11th in on-the-job deaths, 12th in percentage of population that smoked tobacco products, and 15th in number of people without health insurance. One respected organization rated the state 48th in overall health. Another placed Alabama at the center of an eight state southern Stroke Belt (where the stroke mortality rate was one and a half times higher than the rest of America). The ultimate ignominy came in 1990 when the National Council for International Health declined to meet in Alabama because its health problems so much resembled those of third world countries. Health problems were not altogether or even primarily the result of failed public policy. Alabamians simply preferred to eat the wrong kinds of foods, to smoke, and to neglect exercise. The foods they ate tended to be fat and fried, two reasons they were so tasty. Such a diet inclined them toward obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Because so many of them were poor or lacked health insurance, they postponed medical examinations and relied on hospital emergency rooms as primary care provider. Families whose employers provided health insurance in 2000 paid the second highest premiums in the country, partly because risks were so high. Thin coverage of rural counties by physicians and hospitals compounded the health crisis. In 1992 30 of the state’s 67 counties had no pediatrician; 43 had no psychiatrist; 15 had no general surgeon; 14 had no internist. The state, despite the presence of a world-class medical center, ranked low in patient access to physicians. In the 1990s rural hospitals closed in many counties, casualties of their heavy dependence on Medicaid and Medicare payments. Though not all health problems were related to failed political leader-


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ship, some were. Always alert for some scheme to draw down more federal funds, state of¤cials unwilling to increase taxes to pay the required 30 percent match for Medicaid (the federal health care program for indigent Americans) devised an ingenious scam. They collected federal money received by hospitals for charity care and recycled it as part of the 30 percent match required of the state, in essence reducing state payments to only 15 percent of the $3.2 billion annual bill. At ¤rst federal of¤cials allowed the practice rather than deny indigent care, and when they threatened to cut off funding, angry Alabama of¤ceholders threatened to sue. Federal of¤cials, fearful of the consequences of such punitive action on the poor, constantly backed away from ultimatums, further emboldening state resistance. Problems also arose with Medicare. Much Medicare and Medicaid money ultimately found its way to nursing homes for care of the elderly. But annual inspections of Alabama nursing homes designated them worst in the Southeast in a broad range of categories: insuf¤cient staff (3rd worst in the nation); help for residents who could not eat or care for themselves (2nd worst); ®awed patient care assessments (7th worst); preventing accidents (10th worst). By century’s end, more than 1,200 complaints against nursing home care were backlogged awaiting action. Although Alabama Medicaid ranked 1st in the Southeast in payments to nursing homes, the state spent least on inspection. When inspectors ¤nally arrived, they often found dreadful conditions, widely publicized in a 1989 series of newspaper reports. The investigation revealed that one in eight Alabama nursing homes failed to meet basic state health department requirements. None of this was news to public health of¤cials. Alabamians had suffered high rates of disease and poor medical care for a century or more. Industrial jobs—foundry work, textile mill labor, coal and iron ore mining, commercial ¤shing, lumbering—were all dangerous. North Alabama was an extension of Appalachia, which in the 1920s and ’30s had the nation’s highest infant mortality rate and its second most dangerous occupation (coal mining). And only a tiny fraction of its people had health insurance. Compounding problems of indigence and isolation were issues deeply rooted in culture. The Calvinistic religion widely believed in Alabama ¤t the indigence and powerlessness of so many of its people. A sense of fatalism prevailed: “When your number is up, your number is up!” A sovereign



God weighed all events with a cosmic calculator; and he would work his eternal will against a farmer plowing his ¤eld as easily as a coal miner deep in the earth. Why worry about brown lung, black lung, lung cancer, stroke, heart attack, or diabetes? When God was ready for you, you could not delay the grim reaper. Practically speaking, such fatalism promoted a lifestyle that assumed God was ready long before most deaths were necessary. Isolation, individualism, and indigence had another effect. People learned to rely on themselves and nature for healing. Long before holistic medicine gained currency among the Aquarius generation, it permeated folk belief in Alabama. The herbalist Tommie Bass of mountainous Cherokee County was its most famous practitioner. Living in a two-room cottage heated by a pot-bellied stove, Bass (who never owned a car and did not know how to drive one anyway) traveled on a three-wheel motor-driven cycle until the motor failed. Then he just pedaled it about. Bass learned about herbs from his mother, from Cherokee Indians who escaped the Trail of Tears, from books, and from experimentation. One Native American informant knew 3,000 different medicinal plants. Working as a child at his father’s fur-trading posts in northeastern Alabama and northern Georgia brought Bass into daily contact with people who could not reach a physician even if they had possessed the money to pay for one. From 1918 to 1960 Bass practiced his craft in obscurity. During following decades, he became a star of the folk medicine movement, lecturing botany and medical school students from Duke, the University of North Carolina, and elsewhere. Denying any mystical quality to his medicine, Bass connected herbs to nature. Manufactured and synthetic medicines were too harsh, he warned. God had made humankind from dust, and humans had to return to their origins to mend their bodies properly. Each plant grown in the soil had some component of use to the body. Herbs worked slower than medicine but more harmoniously. Within the complex structure of plants, he believed, researchers could ¤nd a cure for every disease, even cancer. A gentle, foot-washing, Freewill Baptist, Bass grounded herbal medicine in literal biblicism. Alabama folklorist Ray Brown was able to ¤ll a 250-page book with home remedies, cures, and folk beliefs taken from people like Bass: family members, herbalists, midwives, preachers, farmers, industrial workers,


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housewives, and other ordinary people, both black and white. Among his recorded remedies: Jerusalem oak cured tuberculosis; yellowroot, the “queen of herbs,” cured many ailments, including stomach ulcers and pellagra; pumpkin seed tea controlled nausea; a warm, moist wood-ash poultice placed on the jaw relieved toothache; red clover blossom tea cured breast cancer. Physicians slowly eroded both the theory and practice of such folk remedies. As access to health care professionals expanded, the practice of midwifery and herb medicine contracted. The 58–year journal of a pioneering Montgomery pediatrician traces the substitution of one kind of medical wisdom for another. Dr. Harris P. Dawson opened his practice in 1911 and continued until his retirement in 1968. When he began, only 12 physicians served the populous capital city. When he retired, there were as many pediatricians as there had been physicians of all kinds when he began. In the early days of his practice, an of¤ce visit cost a dollar, daytime home visits $3, night visits $2 more. Hospital beds cost $4 to $8 a day. Patients paid with hams, chickens, eggs, and fresh fruits and vegetables. During the Great Depression, Dawson had to teach pediatric nursing at Saint Margaret’s Hospital in order to staff his practice. When Mayor William A. Gunter established a charity pediatric clinic in the basement of City Hall, Dawson volunteered to treat patients, both poor white and black. The physician also became school physician for the Montgomery County School Board. In these capacities, the physician encouraged preventive pediatrics. Because of the unsanitary local milk supply, he encouraged breast feeding. Four out of ¤ve patients agreed to breast feed their infants, but one mother proved a star pupil. The woman had lost a child in infancy, then breast fed a robust second baby. When a third came along, it too developed into a healthy, plump child. At age three the mother rushed the baby to Dawson with a case of pneumonia. When the child began to cry, the anxious mother opened her dress and began to nurse. The horri¤ed doctor inquired why she had not weaned the three year old. The mother replied that female friends told her as long as she continued to nurse she would not become pregnant, so she had allowed the child to nurse at least once or twice a day. Folk wisdom died hard despite the incursions of modern medicine. Many chronic diseases found in Alabama thrived because of climate and



geography. Mosquito-borne yellow fever and malaria relied on a damp, wet environment. After Dr. Lloyd Noland instituted TCI’s program of industrial medicine early in the century, malaria cases fell from 8,000 in 1912 to 30 in 1917. Lax sanitation sent tuberculosis rates in the opposite direction: 2,900 cases with 2,500 deaths in 1916, 3,200 cases with 2,700 deaths in 1917. Pellagra was a more subtle killer. First diagnosed in 1902, early symptoms of the disease—reddened, crusty skin that peeled, leaving a glossy layer of tissue underneath—resembled sunburn or poison oak. Then symmetrical lesions appeared on the skin surfaces often crowned by a butter®ylike design across the nose. Left untreated, the disease spread to the digestive tract where it produced listlessness and malaise. Diarrhea, constipation, muscle weakness, and burning sensations followed. In severe cases, pellagra triggered psychological symptoms: melancholy, depression, confusion, hallucination, paranoia, even suicide. Known as the disease of the four Ds—diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death—it could be fatal. Pellagra was both chronic and seasonal, with symptoms appearing after Christmas, worsening during springtime, and diminishing during summer and fall. In June 1914 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a Jewish immigrant working for the U.S. Public Health Service, correctly diagnosed what caused pellagra: a diet dominated by the three Ms: meat, meal, and molasses. Fresh meat, milk, and eggs seemed to reverse symptoms. Goldberger’s theory proved controversial within the medical community. Dr. J. F. Yarborough, who managed a hospital for pellagra patients in Columbia, Alabama, disputed Goldberger’s analysis and recommended a regimen of drugs as primary treatment. Goldberger persisted, and by 1916 he had tied pellagra to southern diet and poverty. Further surveys proved him correct. Textile mill villages and areas with high rates of rural poverty (where fresh vegetables and fruits were absent or unaffordable) produced a perfect inverse correlation of income to pellagra rates. Families with incomes of less than six dollars per adult male for a 15–day period experienced a disease rate of 43 cases per thousand population. The rate of disease dropped steadily with each increase in income. The lower the income, the greater the reliance on salt pork and cornmeal, with molasses as sweetener and dessert, and the scarcer the supplies of fresh meat, green vegetables, fresh fruit, eggs, butter, cheese, and milk. Pellagra was rooted in the economy of the poor.


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Alabama’s civic boosters were as embarrassed by this ¤nding as they were by lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. They denied the cause and the pervasive poverty. The medical profession seemed to be demeaning southern manhood and virility, joining Yankee schemes to ridicule the South. But time proved their pride hollow and their boasts without merit. In 1916 the states of Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas reported 70,000 cases of pellagra. Between 1914 and 1917, Alabama registered 1,600 cases and nearly 1,100 deaths from the disease. And when cotton prices soared in 1917–18, providing farmers a more balanced diet, the rate of pellagra declined sharply. The agricultural depression of the 1920s sent rates soaring again until Goldberger came to the rescue. He discovered in the 1920s that brewer’s yeast cured the disease quickest and most cheaply. By 1937 researchers at the University of Wisconsin traced the cause of pellagra to a de¤ciency of nicotinic acid. The University of Wisconsin team received assistance from Dr. Tom Spies of Birmingham. A native Texan who had watched people die of pellagra during his childhood, Spies graduated from Harvard, paid serious attention to Goldberger’s theories and papers, and ignored ridicule from fellow Alabama physicians. Spies began work with a skeleton staff in a hallway near the emergency entrance of Hillman Hospital. Without clinic, state appropriations, or federal grants, the physician chose 50 pellagra patients to treat with lean beef and fresh vegetables. In 1938 he added nicotinic acid to the regimen. By 1941 the Spies Nutrition Clinic occupied a newly constructed building where the University of Alabama Medical School would soon relocate. It specialized in treating metabolic diseases such as pellagra, a disease fast on its way to extinction. Hookworm was not as deadly as pellagra but was much more widespread. Like pellagra, it was rooted in rural poverty. Speci¤cally, it was related to lack of shoes and unsanitary hygiene practices. Hookworms entered the victim’s body through skin between the toes or through an abrasion, causing an irritation that rural people called “ground itch.” The parasite then moved through the bloodstream to the lungs, by way of the bronchial passage into the throat, then into the gastrointestinal system. Fastened onto the lining of the intestine, it feasted on the host’s blood. The female could lay as many as 10,000 eggs a day, which exited the body in feces, there to begin the cycle again. The parasite ®ourished in warm, moist, sandy, or



loamy soils common in the South. Although the disease could lead to severe anemia in poor people with already inadequate diets, more common symptoms included pale skin, indigestion, weakness, shortness of breath, mental slowness, muscle weakness, lack of energy; in short, the symptoms that would lead generations of nonsoutherners to characterize natives of the region as dumb, lazy, and yellow skinned. Dr. Charles W. Stiles played the same role in the eradication of hookworm that Joseph Goldberger did for pellagra: chief diagnostician and publicist. As director of the Division of Zoology in the nation’s capital, Stiles brought much prestige to his 1903 address to the Medical Association of Alabama. He carefully delineated the pathology of hookworm, its life cycle, symptoms, and causes. His message sank in, and by 1910 the president of the state medical association pronounced hookworm second only to tuberculosis as a peril to public health, infecting as many as 35 percent of those tested for the disease. When elements of the Alabama National Guard were sent to the Mexican border just before World War I, 60 percent were discovered to be suffering from hookworm. Some 50 percent of the 250,000 homes inspected contained no indoor bathrooms or outdoor privies, explaining the rapid spread of the disease. Some Alabama physicians had already wrestled with the problem before Stiles spoke to the medical association. For Dr. John Waller Hagood, interest in hookworm was personal. Edwin W. Hagood was the ninth son born to Thomas S. and Demovel S. Hagood; John Waller, the third son. Eight of the nine sons enjoyed excellent health and lived an average of 80 years. But Edwin was sickly, undersized (he weighed only 60 pounds on his 15th birthday in 1901), and unable to attend school. Puzzled local physicians in Lowndes County prescribed chewing tobacco, painted him with iodine, and ¤nally gave him up for dead. A family move to Evergreen in Conecuh County did no good either. While Dr. John Hagood was establishing a medical practice in Evergreen, his younger brother Robert was attending medical school at Tulane University. Sometime during the winter of 1901 or 1902, Robert attended lectures at Tulane by a European physician on the detection and treatment of hookworm. The description of symptoms so exactly matched those of his younger brother Edwin that he engaged in further conversations with the visitor about his brother’s condition, had a prescription prepared in New Orleans, and caught a night train home to


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Conecuh County. John began treatment the Saturday night he arrived home, and the next day they were still counting worms passed. Over the next two years, Edwin grew to normal size, returned to school, graduated, attended Howard College in Birmingham (later Samford University) where he made all As, continued his education at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he continued his brilliant academic performance, then began a long and distinguished ministerial career. In 1910 his brother John began to test rich and poor, black and white patients for hookworm and found the parasite common in all classes of Conecuh County residents. His efforts to educate the medical profession statewide matched those of Charles Stiles within the region. According to Hagood family lore, their treatment of Edwin in 1901 or 1902 was the ¤rst proper and successful treatment for hookworm in the state.12 Efforts such as those by the Hagood brothers were well and good but reached only a tiny fraction of those suffering from the disease. Widespread treatment had to await establishment of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm in 1909. This northern-based medical philanthropy provided for testing and treating millions of southerners infected with the parasite. Public schools became primary battlegrounds in the war on the lowly hookworm. Public health staff tested tens of thousands of children and found hookworms in nearly half. Resistance came mainly from proud but poor parents who opposed the invasion of their children’s privacy (children tested had to provide a feces sample) and resultant ridicule when the tests proved positive. In a 1930s Tuscaloosa County rural community, the nurse trumped parental resistance with bribes to children: one piece of stick candy for a feces specimen, another if they took their medicine. Traditional folk opposition to outside experts quickly took over as angry parents alleged that the nurse was poisoning their children. But the persistent nurse won the day by offering a picnic with free ice cream to all children who were free of hookworm when reexamined. The work of the Rockefeller Commission changed health care, public health, and education in the South. Citizens began to recognize that education depended to some degree on the general health of students. Publicity about the causes of hookworm resulted in widespread construction of simple outdoor privies. Alliances formed between educators and health reformers. Unfortunately, these alliances were most effective in the upper



South and Florida and least effective in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. In the three Deep South states, local nurses such as the one in Tuscaloosa County had to perform health inspections because of rural white hostility toward outside “experts.” When Charles Stiles reinvestigated the extent of hookworm in the 1930s, he found to his amazement that rates of infection were once again spiraling upward. He found rates of infection that varied from 26 to 49 percent. There were many explanations: entrenched political elites kept taxes low, preventing adequate funding for public health; schools did a poor job of educating children about their health; public health remained a low priority in Alabama. Once again, widely distrusted federal of¤cials and northern philanthropists did more to aid poor Alabamians than did their own state of¤cials. Although Alabama had created a board of health in 1874, the state appropriated only $17,000 for this agency in 1910. By 1918 the Department of Public Health received $26,200, but nearly $20,000 of that amount went to administrative salaries. By comparison, the same legislature allocated $28,000 to prevent hog cholera and $25,000 more to eradicate cattle tick, a total of $83,000 to prevent and treat diseases in animals, compared to only $26,200 for preventing and treating diseases in people. Hastings Hart made prominent use of this puzzling priority in his report to Governor Kilby, and an embarrassed legislature (®ush with wartime tax revenue that made higher taxes unnecessary) increased public health appropriations to $90,000. Gov. Bibb Graves moved the public health budget up to nearly $300,000 in 1928. By that year, 48 counties contained local health departments. Funding declined again during the Great Depression. But tremendous federal investments and growing state interest drove expenditures to near national averages by the 1970s. By then, all counties had full-time health of¤cers and portable X-ray units. Free clinics and hospitals had existed in Birmingham since the beginning of the century, and Montgomery In¤rmary provided similar care when it opened in 1886. But lack of ¤nancial support caused the in¤rmary to close. The reform-minded Episcopal priest Edgar Gardner Murphy chided the city in 1900, noting that the only medical facility available to the poor had closed for lack of a sum smaller than “Montgomery is spending on the music and bunting for her Street Fair.”13 The indictment, severe though it


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was, could have been directed at the state’s commitment to public health throughout the century. On mental health issues, Alabamians had initially been more enlightened. Inspired by the passionate reformism of Dorothea Dix and demonstrating genuine compassion for the mentally ill, leading citizens had promoted an “insane asylum” in the 1840s. Gov. Reuben Chapman, citing lack of state funds, had urged citizens to support charities that cared for mental patients. The legislature had rebelled, arguing that citizens were not overburdened with taxes and that so grievous a social crisis should hinge on ethical and moral considerations rather than economic conditions. The 1852 legislature and a new governor provided for construction of a model facility headed by a skilled physician. Dorothea Dix recommended Dr. Peter Bryce of South Carolina, and his choice in a process remarkably free of politics set mental reform on a steady course. The mental hospital, built in Tuscaloosa and soon named for Bryce, accepted male and female, black and white patients, who were segregated internally. Most were poor and had limited educations. Expenditures per capita were among the lowest in the nation, but Bryce and his staff did much with little. The facility became known as one of the nation’s most enlightened mental hospitals. It was the ¤rst “insane asylum” in the nation to unshackle patients and one of the ¤rst to utilize occupational therapy. Yet by 1875 even Bryce conceded that it had become more a place to warehouse the mentally ill than a rehabilitation center to restore health. And hundreds of mental patients remained in county almshouses. Although the rise of modern psychiatric medicine brought improvements, Bryce Hospital sometimes became entangled in the web of social Darwinism dominating Western thought. One unfortunate by-product of this relationship between psychiatry and Darwinism was the new “science” of eugenics pioneered in the United Kingdom and the northeastern U.S. In order to improve the human species and reduce mental illness, eugenicists advocated restrictive marriage laws, the sexual isolation of mental defectives to keep them from reproducing, forced sterilization of mental defectives, and restriction of immigration, which was blamed for introducing so many mentally diseased people into the United States. Northern and western states rushed to adopt all or part of this agenda, though southern states lagged behind. Slowly, southern physicians and mental health lead-



ers succumbed to the argument that they were increasingly out of step with their professions and took the lead in “reform.” James T. Searcy, then superintendent of Bryce’s hospital, and William Partlow, his chief assistant, became key regional leaders in the eugenics movement. For 15 years, Partlow sterilized every patient released from his new mental hospital and helped persuade Alabama to become the ¤rst state to enact the eugenics agenda. Reformist organizations such as the Russell Sage Foundation and the Southern Sociological Congress endorsed the changes, but the Alabama Medical Association dragged its feet, refusing to endorse sterilization. Nonetheless, the legislature did pass a law in 1919 allowing the commitment to the hospital of any “feebleminded” person in order to segregate them and prevent reproduction. By linking eugenics to campaigns against tuberculosis and venereal disease, and to attempts to improve maternal and infant welfare, and limit immigration, eugenicists were able to gain traction for their movement. Though Florida’s legislature rejected compulsory sterilization bills twice during the 1930s (crippling amendments to the proposed bills limited sterilization to those over age 70, required operations to be performed by clairvoyants on a moonlit night, and mandated an all-female referendum on a cold day in July), William Partlow’s prestige propelled the issue to more serious consideration in Alabama. State health of¤cer J. N. Baker endorsed Partlow’s plan to isolate and sterilize defectives, praising Nazi Germany’s “bold experiment in mass sterilization.” The Alabama Society for Mental Hygiene and the American Association of University Women both endorsed his plans. The legislature could hardly resist such eminent advice and passed a law giving superintendents of state mental institutions discretion to sterilize sexual perverts, homosexuals, sodomists, rapists, the mentally de¤cient, and those “habitually and constantly dependent upon public relief or support of charity.” Although the legislation required evidence of genetic, mental, or moral degeneracy, it did not provide for judicial review. The state’s most prominent newspapers—the Montgomery Advertiser and Birmingham News—endorsed the legislation, as did scientists at the University of Alabama. Opposition came from an odd alliance: organized labor, Catholics, the Alabama Baptist newspaper, and leading Southern Baptist legislators. Gov. Bibb Graves vetoed the bill in a rare challenge to “reform” measures sent to him by the legislature. Alabama’s supreme court also is-


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sued an advisory opinion that the law violated the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution. Partlow attributed Graves’s veto to “religious and political scruples,” and perhaps the governor’s membership in a conservative Church of Christ did play a role in his thinking. Partlow was a persistent man and tried one last time in the mid 1940s to pass a compulsory sterilization law. He mobilized an impressive set of endorsements: Planned Parenthood, the AAUW, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, scientists at the state’s universities, mainline Protestant ministers from Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist denominations. But conservative Protestant and Catholic legislators opposed it and were able to kill the bill by procedural votes in the lower house. Women’s Clubs shortly dropped their support of the legislation, and Partlow’s coalition quickly fell apart. States where eugenicists were successful in passing compulsory sterilization— Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—continued to perform such operations on mental patients as late as the 1960s until courts struck down the provisions. In 1973 Alabama’s supreme court declared unconstitutional the 1919 law allowing assignment of mental patients to hospitals in order to prevent reproduction. Traditional Alabama conservative religious values and concern for individual rights had served the state well, blunting a medical and scienti¤c reform that had horri¤c consequences. By the 1970s Alabama’s mental health community had more pressing legal matters to consider. A class action lawsuit had been ¤led on behalf of Ricky Wyatt, a patient at Bryce Hospital, alleging that underfunding had led to unconstitutional staff cuts and poor treatment at all three of the state’s mental hospitals (Bryce, Searcy, and Partlow). Three years earlier, thengovernor Lurleen Wallace had brought such conditions to public attention on a visit to her hometown. A tour of the mental hospitals left her shaken and in tears. Patients received virtually no treatment. Facilities were overcrowded, ¤lthy, and understaffed. Some patients were chained to beds, tied in straitjackets, or lying in their own bodily wastes. The daily food allowance amounted to less than 50 cents a person. Searcy, the mental facility for blacks, was the worst of the three. Only one licensed physician and a few unlicenced Cuban refugee doctors tended 2,200 patients. As the Wyatt case wound its way through courts, even mental health of¤cials who had been sued testi¤ed on behalf of the plaintiffs. Sickened by decades of underfunding that had left their hospitals nothing more than warehouses where



mentally ill people were sent to die, they denounced the legislature for its neglect. Justice Department of¤cials insisted on referring to Alabama’s “misnomered” “mental health system.” A new commissioner of mental health, Dr. Stonewall Stickney, proposed to decentralize the system and develop community-based mental health programs so that patients could remain in their communities and near families. Not only was state funding inadequate for that initiative, but an unexpected decline in tax revenue earmarked for mental health forced him to terminate 99 more professional employees in 1970. The federal judge Frank M. Johnson presided at the trial, and the middle district U.S. attorney Ira DeMent handled the case for the Justice Department. His own tour of Bryce had left DeMent outraged. Beds lacked linen; some patients slept on ®oors; ancient shower stalls did not work; human feces were caked on toilets and walls; one small shower served 131 male patients, and another accommodated 75 women. Patients had not been bathed in days. The stench was overpowering. DeMent next visited Partlow where he found conditions no better: 80 retarded children with only 1 person to supervise them ate dirt and drank from ¤lthy puddles of water. Temperatures in buildings ranged from 90 to 100 degrees. Patients were dying from heatstroke and dehydration. One naked, unattended black child in a catatonic state cowered amid piles of dirty laundry. These conditions existed because appropriations for the mentally ill averaged less than $7 a day, half the rate of adjacent states. The scandal spurred legislators into action. They proposed to divert $24 million from teachers’ retirement to mental health. This effort to rob Peter in order to pay Paul died aborning due to Alabama Education Association opposition. In the face of legislative capitulation, Judge Johnson took matters into his own hands. He ruled in 1971 that patients had a constitutional right to receive treatment and ordered the state to develop a plan within six months. State of¤cials fought the order and delayed implementation of the plan. A year later, Johnson issued a landmark order based on imminent danger to patients in all three facilities: he ordered immediate employment of 300 aides and subsequent hiring of additional professional staff. He established for the ¤rst time in American legal history the constitutional right to minimum standards for mentally ill and retarded patients.


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The Wyatt v. Stickney decision went to the Supreme Court on appeal, where it was upheld. In addition to revolutionizing care for mentally impaired patients in Alabama, the case triggered litigation and reform in other states. It also provoked many Alabama conservatives to complain about federal judicial activism and the appropriateness of a judge essentially requiring higher expenditures for mental health, theoretically the appropriate function of the legislative branch of government. Patients at Bryce, Searcy, and Partlow were less concerned with arcane details of states’ rights theory or separation of powers. Troubles for the mental health system did not end in 1972. Five years later, federal of¤cials began to monitor state mental health programs for compliance with Wyatt standards. In 1986 the state ¤nally signed a consent decree to provide adequate care. And in 2003 a federal judge declared the state in compliance after 32 years of foot-dragging. By then, Alabama’s mental health system performed much like other systems. Patients had declined from more than 6,000 to approximately 1,500. The Alabama Mental Health Department had 4,100 employees and a $430 million budget. And plaintiffs’ lawyers had received some $10 million in legal fees over the years. As mental health reform demonstrated, Alabamians could solve their own problems when they chose to do so. Frank Johnson and Ira DeMent may have been federal magistrates, but they were also Alabamians, and Republican Alabamians at that. Nor were Johnson and DeMent lone voices crying in the wilderness. A number of new activist agencies took up the cause of social reform: Children First Foundation, Voices for Alabama’s Children, Alabama Poverty Project, Alabama Arise. Healthy Alabama 2000, a decadelong project to improve health during the 1990s, set 85 health goals. On 31 measures, Alabamians reached or exceeded the benchmarks. The trend was positive on 32 other measures. Only in 15 areas was the trend in the wrong direction. Many of the improvements were in children’s health: a sharp decline in infant mortality to the lowest rate ever recorded in Alabama; a successful Children’s Health Insurance Program; infant immunization rates that rose from 50 percent in 1991 to 87 percent by 1998. Unfortunately, such Alabama reform efforts originated not in the halls of the legislature but in academic of¤ces, Sunday schools, law of¤ces, at meetings of social workers and



pediatric associations. In Alabama, the political establishment was once again part of the problem, not part of the solution. The World According to S OUTHERN L I VING For those lucky enough not to be poor or ill, life was considerably more promising. A combination of greater access to college, rising per capita incomes, and prosperity generated by the new economy broadened the middle class and even enlarged the small but in®uential number of wealthy citizens. Only some 15,000 Alabamians had earned enough to pay federal taxes during the 1930s. By century’s end, the Fortune 500 list of wealthiest Americans regularly listed Alabamians in that rari¤ed company. The Robert Trent Jones golf courses didn’t attract just wealthy Japanese and Canadian tourists among af®uent visitors who came to play. Plenty of wellheeled Alabamians sent divots ®ying as well. The de¤nition of how such newly af®uent southerners should dress, eat, drink, garden, vacation, and travel came from Birmingham, Alabama. In 1966 Southern Living, the brainchild of Emory Cunningham, CEO of Progressive Farmer Company, became a reality. The Birmingham resident and Auburn University graduate had long dreamed of a southern magazine rooted in prosperity, brie, and sophistication instead of pellagra, beans, and shotguns. Together with Auburn sidekick Don Logan, Cunningham rede¤ned southernness. By century’s end Southern Living’s recipes, gardens, houses-beautiful southern style, nostalgic literary nuggets, and lifestyle advertising reached 14 million readers each month, including 3 million subscribers, mainly in the core South (excluding west Texas and south Florida). Don Logan added Oxmoor House, which published a line of cookbooks and upscale magazines (Southern Accents; Cooking Light, the nation’s largest food magazine; Weight Watchers, for all those who became too fond of the recipes in Southern Living; and Coastal Living). By 2000 Southern Progress’s empire made an annual pro¤t of $200 million, enough to have lured Time-Warner into a $480 million buyout. Emory Cunningham retired to trusteeship at his beloved Auburn University, and Don Logan left for New York City where he wound up managing AOL and Time-Warner’s publication empire. There was much irony in the fact that the de¤nition of what it meant to be fashionably and af®uently southern in the year 2000 was


S O CI ET Y 219

largely the product of two “good old boys” from small-town north Alabama educated at the state’s premier agricultural school. Cunningham was generous with his fortune as well as his ideas. And such generosity by newly af®uent Alabamians created one of America’s most philanthropic populations. Though institutional philanthropy did not reach the levels of more af®uent states, Alabamians were among the most generous contributors to charity. And slowly even organized philanthropy felt the in®uence of new wealth. The Greater Birmingham Foundation topped $100 million in assets as the 21st century began. Only 64 U.S. community foundations had more assets, and only 6 of these were located in the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Of course, how a person ¤t into Alabama society depended largely on what socioeconomic layer of society the person came from. Though not impervious to change (as many upwardly mobile middle-class Alabamians proved after the Second World War), neither was success in Alabama society as simple as the old bromide of preparing, working hard, being patient, seizing opportunity when it came along, then enjoying the good life. Many hardworking risk-takers remained trapped in dead-end jobs in dying communities for reasons not altogether of their own making.


5 Teaching the People Education

Tired little feet swinging from high hard benches; children huddled about smokey wood stoves trying their best to keep warm; in many instances thirsty, for there is no adequate water supply; impaired eyes due to poor lighting; utter barrenness of room due to lack of proper desks and other equipment; this is the picture of the average rural school in Alabama. . . . The people . . . want better schools and they will show that . . . by giving an overwhelming majority to the educational bond issue. . . . The prominent leaders in the opposition are highly educated and highly paid corporation lawyers or those who, for a fee, are willing to take a position hostile to progress in this state. . . . Has any one of these opponents ever shown any great desire to protect the pocketbook of the farmer? No! All they want is money and more of it to hoard and spend on improving their mines and sweatshops, so that your son and daughter who has not had the educational advantages necessary for a high salaried position may wear their lives away at a pittance, so that the treasuries of those men may at all times be ¤lled to over®owing. Yes, verily, the love of money is the root of all evil. —Thomas M. Owen Jr., Florence Times-News, January 2, 1928

Being a teacher in Alabama never has been an easy job. Some education problems were rooted deep in the state’s frontier past: resistance to taxes; belief in Jacksonian egalitarianism rather than educational elitism; resistance to new ideas. Other problems emerged from the 1901 constitution: limits on property taxes, which forced the state to rely on unpredictable and


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unreliable income and sales taxes; a costly dual system of schools for blacks and whites. One should not conclude from these problems that Alabamians cared nothing about educating their children. They did care, at least about the rudimentary education necessary for the low-skill jobs available to them. The public schools they established in the early 19th century were public in intent and values rather than in funding. Not until 1854 did the legislature enact legislation creating a state school system, and even then only at the urging of Baptist and Methodist religious leaders centered in the Black Belt, many of whom were immigrants from New England who had attended ¤ne common schools in their native region. Their concern was the state’s “moral order,” though by that term they meant a generalized sense of the way people in a community were connected and the obligations each person had to neighbors, rather than conformity to a set of sectarian religious doctrines. School funds came from taxes, private donations, subscription fees, community fund-raising, tuition, lotteries, and riverboat gambling. Despite such efforts, 12 to 14 percent of Alabama whites and virtually all slaves were illiterate at the time of the Civil War. (Added together these two groups may have outnumbered the literate population because 46 percent of Alabamians were slaves who were at least of¤cially forbidden by law to read or write.) Republican Reconstruction governments assumed the responsibilities of creating and ¤nancing universal common school education, but white resistance to taxes, pervasive poverty, high birth rates, scattered rural population, and the wasteful expense of operating a dual-race school system conspired to keep education rudimentary for most citizens. Public Schools As a new century dawned, the state’s public schools were woefully inadequate. The school year was about the same as when Reconstruction had ended a generation earlier. The historian C. Vann Woodward described the South’s public schools in 1900 as “miserably supported, poorly attended, wretchedly taught and wholly inadequate.”1 Even a casual examination of Alabama schools proved his point. If historical estimates of white, Civil War–era illiteracy rates were cor-


222 CHA P T ER F I V E

rect (12–14 percent), it is easy to trace the source of the problem. Alabama experienced a massive educational dislocation during and after the Civil War. Many schools closed during the war; teachers died in Confederate service; and the institutional disruption of Reconstruction years reduced literacy rates in all southern states. Draconian tax cuts by frugal Democratic legislatures after they regained power from Republicans drained funding from education budgets. As a result, U.S. censuses reported white illiteracy rates in Alabama of 25 percent in 1880, 18 percent in 1890, and 15 percent in 1900 (when 104,000 whites over age 10 could not read or write). In 1900 only South Carolina and Louisiana had higher total rates of illiteracy. The 1910 census recorded a signi¤cant reduction in white illiteracy to 10 percent (though that rate remained 6th highest of any state). Closer inspection revealed important regional variations. White adult male illiteracy rates ranged from 14–21 percent in the eastern hill and Appalachian counties to only 3 percent in the Black Belt. Black illiteracy rates (39 percent) ran nearly four times higher than white rates in 1920. As bad as educational conditions were statewide, they were even worse in rural areas. In 1910 rural rates of illiteracy were a third higher than in urban areas. Of nearly 4,600 rural white schools in 1913, 3,400 of them employed a single teacher and nearly 900 more only two. Embarrassed both by low rankings and the failure of large numbers of draftees to pass intelligence tests required by the military during World War I, education of¤cials and reform-minded citizens created the Alabama Illiteracy Commission in 1915. A mixture of motives—Christian uplift, civic idealism, state boosterism, concern about business progress—energized reformers. They worked through free Opportunity Schools staffed by volunteers. The schools attracted mainly adults over age 21 but also admitted students 16–20 who had not completed fourth grade. State funding for Opportunity Schools did not begin until 1919, and much of the money to operate them was raised within the African American community. Black enrollment in such schools expanded to 16,000 by 1931, when the number of schools reached nearly 500. Legislative reforms during the war years also created county school districts under charge of superintendents, levied new taxes, and enacted a school code. But the percent of total state revenue expended on public schools actually declined from 38 percent in 1913 to 30 percent in 1921.


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Local funding steadily increased from 47 percent of total school funding in 1917 to 66 percent by 1921. Despite improvements, conditions remained woefully inadequate. Inequities of region and race abounded. In 1918 7 of 10 rural teachers held the two lowest certi¤cation credentials; only 3 of 10 urban teachers did so. In 1927 Alabama ranked 45th of 48 states in literacy and had the 7th highest rate of white illiteracy. Conditions in individual counties revealed stark contrasts between ruraltown, black-white education. Lowndes County in 1914 contained only four white illiterates, a rate of half of 1 percent, the state’s lowest. But that same county in 1930 spent on average less than $5 to educate a black child compared to $96 for a white youth. Chambers County in 1901 paid white teachers a monthly average of $35, black teachers only $21. During the 1905–6 school year, the white school term increased to 146 days; black schools averaged just 90 days. Chambers County white teachers that year averaged $46 a month; black teachers, $24. In 1911 98 white students attended the county high school; there was no high school for blacks. Average annual teachers’ salaries in 1911 varied from $428 for white males to $407 for white females to $157 for black males and $90 for black females. The value of equipment in the county’s white schools in 1913–14 stood at $2,500 compared to $500 for black schools. As decades passed, the state increasingly relied on state funding, and local sources declined as a percentage of total educational revenue to the point where Alabama trailed all states in local funding. Illiteracy and high school dropout rates continued throughout the century to rank near the top. In 1986 only 67 percent of Alabama young people of graduation age actually received a diploma; in 1990 the state ranked tenth highest in high school drop outs. In 1996 34 percent of adult Alabamians (930,000) did not possess a high school diploma; 456,000 were functionally illiterate (de¤ned as literacy below ninth grade level); and 93,000 had completed fourth grade or less. For most of these unfortunates, the problem was not lack of desire but lack of opportunity, as the aptly named Opportunity Schools of the teens and ’20s made clear. Though many well-to-do Alabamians accused illiterates of failures ranging from genetics to habitual laziness, the Opportunity School movement suggested other causes: chronic underfunding of educa-



tion, especially for blacks; lack of schools in rural areas where most illiterates lived; the necessity for children in poor families to work as soon as they were able. From one remote Appalachian woman came ungrammatical testimony about the most obvious of problems, hiring a teacher for the community school: “I’m the onliest one that kin read in this settlement, and when I gits a-holt of a paper I reads hit to all the neighbors. I can’t read writin’ though. Whut with the boll weevil and the children hevin’ ter work and all the likely young folks gone down ter the mill, thar hain’t nobody ter go noways.”2 One Opportunity School teacher in the coal mining district submitted a similar report about her 1925 night class: The second meeting showed great progress. . . . We had ¤fteen present but could not work any because we had only one lantern and a miner’s lamp. The people decided that we couldn’t work without lights, so one man said he would buy the lamps and the other folks furnished the oil. Tonight we had our regular classes with lectures on geography and health. We had a very hot discussion in geography about the world’s being ®at. Work seems to be the only objection the people have for not attending school. My, but these people are slaves to work.3 Legislative reforms re®ected the growing concern about the quality of public schools. The 1907 legislature passed a county high school law; by 1918, 57 of 67 counties contained at least one high school (usually for whites), and secondary enrollment had reached 6,500. In 1915 reformers pushed through a compulsory attendance law. Enforcement was lax, and many farm, mine, and mill families could not afford to lose the income derived from the children’s work. So a 1918 survey of 12 counties by the National Child Labor Committee discovered that children of tenant farmers missed school about one-third more frequently than owners’ children. Tenant children also failed grades more often. As late as 1923–24, nearly a quarter of total school enrollment was in the ¤rst grade, an indication of how few students even reached high school. And 44 counties had school terms shorter than seven months.


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The state simply ignored late 19th-century Supreme Court decisions that required that racially separate schools must be equal. In 1924 blacks comprised 40 percent of state population, but Alabama spent less than $1.5 million on Negro children compared to $13 million for whites. Statewide in 1919–20 white urban schools operated an average of 174 days; white rural schools, 123. Black urban schools nearly equaled the ¤gure for whites, operating 170 days. But black rural schools were open an average of only 87 days. One in eight teachers had inadequate credentials, but the ¤gure for black teachers was much higher. The state operated on the principle that a poorly prepared teacher was better than no teacher, especially for one-room rural schools that otherwise would not open. Teacher salaries statewide in 1919–20 revealed the same multiple discrepancies as in Chambers County: rural white males averaged $630 a year; rural white females, $430. White urban males averaged $1,481; women, $762. Black rural male teachers averaged $206; women, $167. Urban black males averaged $635; women, $407. Such discrepancies continued throughout the early decades of the 20th century. In 1920 the state superintendent of education Spright Dowell, later president of Auburn University and a prominent Baptist layman with a sensitive conscience about right and wrong, deplored Alabama’s poor provision for its children. He pointed to Sidney Lanier High School in the capital, which had a capacity of 700 but enrolled more than 1,000. In 1925 Jefferson County schools closed ¤ve weeks before the scheduled end of term because money ran out. The local Ku Klux Klan tried to help by holding musical performances to raise money for teachers. Reform governor Bibb Graves pushed through a Uni¤ed Program in 1927 to ensure a minimum seven-month school term statewide for all children. His reforms also increased the number of rural schools, enlarged vocational education, and multiplied spending on adult illiterates. But his proposed $20 million bond issue for school construction was voted down in 1928 as Thomas M. Owen Jr. feared, victim to the antitax sentiment whipped up by large corporations and landowners. Graves’s reforms helped, but individual communities still varied widely in resources and quality of education. A 1934 community study of Gorgas in Tuscaloosa County found the elementary school in such wretched shape that state education of¤cials had recommended abandoning the building



(problems included unsatisfactory lighting, poor ventilation, ¤re hazards, dilapidated desks too large for young children, doors without locks, and broken window panes). Lack of money had prevented either closing the school or repairing it. The high school had no maps, globes, dictionaries, modern science equipment, or foreign language courses. Just to keep local schools open, parents had to pay fees equal to one-tenth of the total education budget ($1.50 per child in elementary school, up to $10 per high school student). Poorer students could not afford high school tuition and simply dropped out. In three of the previous four years, the school term had ended early because of insuf¤cient funds. Math courses were elective, but boys had to take agriculture every year and girls had to take three years of home economics. Among landowners’ children, 84 percent attended school. Among sharecroppers’ children, 58 percent did so. For children of black owners or tenants, the community provided only four grades, which enrolled less than half of school-age children. In 1930s Gorgas, education was pegged to the limited reality of a child’s life, not to her dreams or aspirations. Conditions were little better in similar communities across the state. And where they were better, the improvement resulted mainly from the herculean initiatives of local people, not from efforts by the legislature or underfunded local school districts. In the spring of 1921 local citizens in Pinson called a town meeting at the Baptist church to discuss how to build a new school. The county had no money to help, so the people collected donations and pledges, purchased land, and began their school. Local people picked up rocks out of Turkey Creek and carried them to the building site. Teachers at Silver Lake Institute rewarded A and B students by allowing them to carry rocks for their new school. Parents laid the rocks and did the carpentry themselves. Heroic as such efforts were, they did not create high-quality schools. By 1980 less than 60 percent of Alabamians age 25 or older had completed high school. Ten years later, Alabama continued to rank 50th of 50 states in high school graduates. In 1997 the state had moved up to 46th place but remained 8th in percent of adults over age 25 with less than a 9th grade education. The social consequences of this century-long neglect were apparent on every hand. In 1989 more than 65 percent of food stamp and welfare expenditures went to high school dropouts. Ninety percent of Alabama’s 13,000


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prison inmates had not graduated from high school. Approximately 70 percent of Medicaid payments went to nongraduates. Black Education African American schools remained inadequate throughout the 20th century. Not only was funding inequitably distributed, but blacks differed among themselves about what their children should learn. Vocational and agricultural education prepared black students for jobs actually available to them. But many black leaders believed that such education locked them into a second-class economic future. This debate swirled around Booker T. Washington, founder and longtime president of Tuskegee University. Washington discouraged classical studies as both irrelevant to the lives of his students and unrealizable as professions within a tightly constricted, segregated society. He used his vast network of northern philanthropists, southern business and political leaders, and black educators to restrain black teachers dedicated to a different vision of education and to fund those loyal to the Tuskegee model of applied education. Although many black leaders of his own time and historians since have criticized Washington’s accommodationism to white supremacy, he did build educational institutions and professional organizations that promoted democracy and undermined Jim Crow. The Tuskegee ideal of hard work, self-esteem, and Christian virtue raised both expectations and competence, challenging white supremacy within the context of a nonpolitical and individualistic education. Of course, opportunities available to teachers educated at Tuskegee, Talladega College, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, and other black colleges came within a segregated system governed by wide discrepancies in pay, facilities, and equipment. And teachers were the key to black progress. In 1910 more than half of all black college graduates in the United States became teachers (another one-sixth entered the ministry). Teachers became pivotal community leaders, though their dependence on white educational of¤cials kept them from becoming as autonomous as black ministers. Professionalization accompanied improvements in funding. Only 12 percent of the nation’s black teachers were college graduates in 1930; that ¤gure had climbed to 35 percent in 1940 and to 72 percent in 1952. Considered by later civil rights leaders to be cautiously conservative members of the



middle class who had much to lose in integrated schools, black teachers nonetheless kept hope alive for many black youth and prepared the way for substantial change. Birmingham offered lots of candidates for testing such theories. During World War I, labor shortages in the Magic City combined with a black exodus of young, skilled labor to the north to provide black leaders with unprecedented leverage. They insisted that new schools be constructed for their children, which was accomplished in the 1920s despite protests from white labor unions and the resurgent KKK. In 1923 70 percent of black students studied in dilapidated wooden buildings; only 33 percent remained in such schools by 1931. Only one-quarter of the city’s black schoolage children attended school in 1916; two-thirds were enrolled 15 years later. Black educators agreed that the decade of the 1920s was one of substantial educational progress. Financing Schools Equitably and Adequately The commitment of so many Alabamians to keeping their taxes low seemed at the root of Alabama’s education problems. Citizens preached a good sermon. In poll after poll they supported higher local taxes for public schools. Even Republicans favored this solution by a margin of nearly two to one. But when people had a chance to actually cast ballots to increase funding for schools, they defeated local property tax referenda two-thirds of the time. Citizens in well-educated, af®uent communities such as Auburn, Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, and Huntsville tended to vote yes. So did some towns with strong local support for schools such as Eufaula. But elsewhere—Jasper, Mobile, Montgomery—property tax increases usually suffered crushing defeats. As a result, money from the state educational foundation—used after the late 1930s to operate schools—constituted an ever-larger percentage of funding. This reversed the pattern early in the century of a nearly equal split between state and local sources. The state foundation funded all public schools at the same rate based on average student attendance. In the late 1930s, when little local money was available, this was an equitable if wholly inadequate system for funding schools. But as more af®uent communities


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pumped local tax dollars into their schools, the equity component of the system broke down. By the mid-1990s the federal government provided 11 percent of Alabama public school money (7th highest among states), the state furnished 70 percent (ranking 3rd nationally), and local governments supplied 19 percent (50th among states). Because the 1901 constitution made it dif¤cult to raise property taxes, state funds came mainly from the highly volatile state income tax, which provided 51 percent of state education trust fund revenues, and sales taxes, which added 34 percent. These two tax streams over®owed during boom times and dropped to a trickle during recessions. This fact explained why the state had to prorate education funding 14 times between 1949 and 2001. Relying upon the most unstable form of taxes—income and sales—and rejecting the most stable— property—Alabamians selected a course guaranteed to result in inequity, inadequacy, and chaos. Then citizens became furious at political leaders when the inevitable occurred. Tax comparisons with states whose economies had zoomed by Alabama— Florida, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina—no longer comprised even remote equivalents. Even states comparable in per capita income and costof-living—South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas —were spending far more local money on schools. Most embarrassing of all, by 1999 26 percent of Mississippi school systems taxed at higher rates than Alabama’s top system, Mountain Brook. If Alabama had made the same tax effort in 1999 as Mississippi, the state would have generated $836 million more for its schools. These were not surprising revelations to Alabamians. State newspapers, education leaders, and business reformers had hammered the facts home for years. Reams of paper from seemingly endless special commissions documented educational de¤ciencies at every level. But citizens routinely elected legislators who insisted education problems could be solved by less waste and more ef¤ciency (though they never found a way to do either), that higher property taxes were unnecessary and unfair. Funded by forestry interests, agricultural commodity groups, and especially ALFA, such politicians wrung their hands during proration, gave teachers large salary increases the year before elections, and chronically betrayed the children of Alabama. Alabama’s expenditure per pupil during 1991–92 ranked the



state 46th; by 1999–2000 the state’s ranking had fallen to 49th. Expenditures for public schools from 1970–1993 ranked the state 49th. Alabama teachers fared substantially better, earning 39th place in teacher salaries during 1995–96 (though that was still 15 percent below the national average). Adjusted for Alabama’s lower cost-of-living, Alabama still ranked only 29th that year. In 1994 Alabama was the only Deep South state with no statewide appropriation for educational technology (the last such appropriation had been a decade earlier when the legislature had set aside $20 million for new computers). That year Georgia spent $86 million on educational technology; Tennessee, $78 million; and Florida, $135 million. By end-of-century Alabama’s education system was often in proration and perpetually in shambles. One af®uent Birmingham area school system sued the state to prevent transfer of local funds from wealthy systems to poorer ones. The Governor’s Commission on Early Learning called for expenditures of $300 million a year to provide universal early childhood programs. State school of¤cials drafted an adequacy plan costing $1.6 billion more annually. Education Week assigned Alabama schools a grade of B− for adequacy of resources, C− for standards and accountability, C for equity, D for improving teacher quality, and F in school climate. In 2000 the American Legislative Exchange Council’s report on education ranked Alabama 46th in academic achievement, a drop of four places from 1999. In Lawrence County a straitlaced Republican, Church of Christ school superintendent fumed over such reports. No amount of local tax effort would ever solve his school’s problems—simply because an acre of land in Lawrence County would never be worth as much as an acre in Hoover. Inspired by a successful equity funding lawsuit in Kentucky, superintendent DeWayne Key organized the Alabama Coalition for Equity (ACE) and sued the state. Several other plaintiff groups joined ACE, hired attorneys Jim Speake and C. C. “Bo” Torbert, and went to court in 1990. A trial two years later documented the consequences of inadequacy in many poor and rural school systems. In March 1993 circuit judge Eugene Reese found for the plaintiffs, declaring the state’s school funding to be unconstitutional because it was neither equitable nor adequate. Gov. James Folsom Jr. and Judge Reese appointed a facilitator to work with the plaintiffs and defendants toward a remedy order, which was delivered to Judge


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Reese in October 1993. That same month a group of education reformers presented the legislature a plan known as Alabama First, which called for signi¤cant tax increases accompanied by major accountability provisions. Reese approved the remedy order, but the education reform legislation died in the legislature when Paul Hubbert, locked in a Democratic primary challenge to Governor Folsom, declared the package too expensive and the accountability measures unacceptable, and withheld key AEA support. In November 1994 former governor Fob James upset Folsom by some 10,000 votes and attacked Reese’s order as an example of judicial usurpation of legislative prerogatives. Governor James pushed through a minimum reallocation of funds from wealthy systems to poor ones, which generated much negative reaction without substantially addressing either inequity or inadequacy. Conservative Republican control of the state supreme court resulted in reversal of Reese’s remedy order and propelled the state into further chaos. According to the supreme court, the legislature—which for a century had presided over and exacerbated both an inequitable and inadequate public school system—was the only appropriate branch of government to solve the problems it had largely created. Meanwhile, yet another generation of Alabama children passed through a public school system that left them unprepared for the realities of a 21st-century economy. Having refused either to enlarge the pie by tax increases or divide the pie into equal slices based on enrollment in the 128 state school systems, the supreme court and legislature left only one alternative: academic cannibalism. Various parts of the state educational establishment went to war with each other, seeking by lobbying and political action committees to obtain what the other sector had. AEA forced through the legislature a bill devoting new revenue to bring K-12 teacher salaries to the national average (despite the fact that Alabama teacher salaries were 83 percent of the national average already, whereas per pupil expenditures were only 74 percent of national norms). Higher education and the Alabama School Board Association sued to prevent a proration-driven raid on their monies hatched by Hubbert and Governor Siegelman. And if students in all those underfunded high school government classes were watching carefully, they saw a sorry spectacle of government carried out mainly by their teachers. It was not a pretty sight! A frustrated DeWayne Key, who had started the



battle for equity a decade earlier, did what an increasingly large number of Alabama parents were doing: he left the public schools for a parochial institution. Accountability The issue of how well Alabama schools performed during the 20th century was complicated by issues of race and poverty. As the Supreme Court began scrutinizing whether separate schools really were equal, state of¤cials made belated and inadequate attempts to improve black schools. But it was too little, too late. In 1954 the Brown v. Board of Education decision rocked the South, calling into question whether Alabama would even maintain a public school system. With public support for schools increasingly divided along racial lines, a bad situation became worse. The state’s high school graduation rate put Alabama among the bottom 10 states. The reasons were obvious: a high proportion of black students on whom the state spent little money; a high rate of poverty (students who came from indigent families regardless of race scored low on standardized tests); high percentages of handicapped and special needs children; a poorly developed and funded system of early childhood education (early intervention even before kindergarten was the most reliable way to raise the performance of poor youngsters). Teachers and business leaders argued endlessly over the edi¤cation of testing in measuring student performance. The 1990s A+ educational effort tied accountability and reform to massive increases in funding. Paul Hubbert and AEA resisted most of these attempts, though the State Board of Education and individual school boards were more receptive. They realized that assuring citizens more careful management of educational resources and higher test scores were crucial to any favorable vote on tax increases. When the A+ reform effort got under way, state standards were largely a joke. The 1988 high school exit exam tested reading competence for graduation at a ¤fth grade eighth-month level, and no exam questions required analysis or comparisons. Every math question on the exit exam was covered by the end of ¤fth grade. Such information was a closely guarded secret in State Department of Education of¤ces.


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Despite attempts to keep exit standards from public scrutiny, employers had no problem ¤guring out that something was terribly wrong. They, after all, employed these “graduates.” In 1990 the Nation’s Report Card, which set levels of student work at a basic performance level, ranked 40 percent of Alabama students at or above average and 60 percent below. Even though the legislature rejected the funding component of the A+ reform, the widespread publicity attendant to A+ town meetings across the state and saturation newspaper coverage of educational de¤ciencies created momentum for change. AEA of¤cials continued to grouse about the inadequacy of standardized tests as a benchmark for student learning, but they reluctantly conceded the issue. And new state school superintendent Ed Richardson pushed hard for higher standards. Supported by one of the strongest state school boards elected in the 20th century, the blunt-talking Richardson established a system of rating schools. The state took over ¤nancial and academic management of failing schools, publicized school performance in an annual report to citizens, steadily raised graduation requirements, and imposed one of the most academically rigorous core curricula found anywhere (so tough, in fact, that implementation of some components had to be delayed or weakened lest more than half of Alabama high schoolers fail the exam). By century’s end Alabama students took the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) in grades 3–11, the Basic Competency Test in grade 9, and the High School Basic Skills Exit Exam in grades 11–12. Passing rates for the tougher exams, though pegged downward from initial ambitious levels, varied from 78 to 86 percent in 1991. And ACT scores that year averaged 21.3 in Alabama compared to 22 nationwide. On the more-demanding 1993 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 12 percent of Alabama eighth graders earned pro¤ciency, ranking the state 39th among 41 states participating. Students from surrounding states (except Mississippi and Louisiana) scored signi¤cantly higher. Nevertheless, state schools made slow but steady progress. Newspapers trumpeted the good news. For 1996–97 state Stanford Achievement Test scores were higher than two years earlier for every school system, led by Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, Hoover, and Muscle Shoals. By 1996 the Nation’s Report Card (which reported NAEP scores) noted that the number of Alabama students performing at or above grade level



had increased since 1990 from 40 to 45 percent. Although math scores still lagged behind other states, results from the 2000 NAEP tests revealed signi¤cant improvements over the performance of Alabama students four years earlier. In 2001–2 ACT scores still lagged behind the national average, but they outperformed a number of other southeastern states. In 1999–2000 Alabama public schools for the ¤rst time reached or exceeded the national average in every grade and subject on the SAT. It was a day of rejoicing, as even many inner-city schools ¤nally competed at acceptable levels. National studies helped de¤ne why the state did not perform even better. Studies of national SAT scores revealed that per capita spending on students or teachers’ salaries made less difference on student performance than incomes and educational levels of parents, smaller class sizes, and access to preschool programs. Results on standardized tests also increased when the same test was given repeatedly or when teaching-to-the-test became a major component of a school’s curriculum. Whatever the cause, by 2000 Alabama had lost its dubious distinction as one of the 10 least-educated states. And blacks had narrowed educational de¤ciencies as well. Worrisome problems remained, most of them rooted in the state’s poverty. The ¤rst statewide reports analyzing SAT results by race, gender, and income level found troubling patterns. Math scores ranged from an average of 40 among black students to 49 for Hispanics, 65 for whites, and 81 for Asians. Every area of the SAT recorded the same pattern: science ranged from 39 for blacks to 74 for Asians, language skills from 45 to 77, reading from 35 to 68. In every skill except science, girls outperformed boys. Students from af®uent backgrounds posted an overall score of 67 compared to a 40 by poorer students. Among eleventh graders who quali¤ed for free lunches because of low family income, only 44 percent passed the exam; for those who paid for their lunch, 73 percent passed. Even in school systems with uniformly well-funded classes as in Hoover, white third graders scored an overall 75 in reading compared to 45 for black third graders. In Alabama, where nearly a quarter of children under 18 were poor and a third lived with a single parent (third highest and highest rates, respectively, in the nation), the social demography did not favor massive improvements. But Richardson and his supportive school board plugged gamely ahead. Early in the new century, they announced plans to implement a supplemental exam in addition to SAT. Tests would move away from a choice of four or


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¤ve possible multiple-choice answers to a system requiring more reading, computing, and writing. Most of these measures were postponed when voters defeated statewide tax reform and tax increases by a 2-to-1 margin in September 2003. Throughout the century, some individual Alabama schools performed surprisingly well. In 1957 Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery ranked among the nation’s top seven high schools in producing National Merit Scholarship winners. And in 2001 four state schools scored in the top 25 nationwide for ACT performance: the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School, Birmingham’s Altamont School, the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile, and the Lamp Magnet School in Montgomery. Culture Battles in Public Schools Citizens also continued to fuss over the basic purpose of education. Should schools teach skills necessary for a well-paying job? Or should they focus on the process of thinking and analysis, encouraging students to determine values and attitudes for themselves? Many parents demanded that schools reinforce family and parental values. The science curriculum, especially evolutionary science, became a central battleground in this dispute. At the insistence of Christian activists, Eagle Forum, and governors James and Siegelman, the State Board of Education adopted a 261-word insert for textbooks warning that evolution was theory, not fact. Governor James even brought the state unwanted attention by imitating an ape, presumably on the evolutionary rise, at a state school board meeting. Science teachers and their allies waged a largely futile campaign to brand antievolutionists as advocates of religious rather than scienti¤c explanations for the origins of life. Despite their efforts, the word “evolution” slowly disappeared from state science textbooks. Legislative adoption of an anti-Communism curriculum in 1963 re®ected many of the same tensions. Only four states passed laws requiring public schools to teach classes about Communism. All were in the South (Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana). All also experienced divisive debates during the 1960s about the in®uence of Communists in the civil rights movement. Alabama’s law left individual teachers little discre-



tion, mandating that classes teach the dangers, evils, and false ideology of Communism. The state developed one of the most impressive teacher preparation programs and aired 36 segments on statewide public television. Three decades later, battles over prayer, Bible reading, and posting the Ten Commandments continued this long-running debate over the extent to which public schools should seek to indoctrinate students. Many conservative parents also opposed teaching pluralism, diversity, and tolerance as important democratic values. Their inability to control school policy or curriculum led many evangelical Christians to withdraw their children from public schools. Ironically, many members of the same evangelical denominations that had helped create public schools in the 1840s and 1850s led the battle to withdraw from them a little more than a century later. One source of this change was racial. Alabama had only 13 private, segregationist schools in the Black Belt in 1966. By the 1970s most whites had withdrawn from public schools to enter private academies. Paradoxical given their antiblack origins, many of the new schools carried Christian names and operated out of churches. When courts struck down all forms of state aid to private academies, the quality of such schools was not much different from the schools they sought to escape. By 1990 52 percent of school-age whites in the Black Belt (exclusive of Montgomery) did not attend public schools, compared to less than 3 percent of school-age black children. Between 1990 and 2000 religious concerns about both the quality and secularism of public schools added to the exodus. By century’s end 10 percent of school-age children in grades 1–12 attended private schools, up from 8 percent 10 years earlier. And in urban areas such as Birmingham, an ever-growing number of black parents were deserting underachieving public schools as well. Statewide, 15 percent of white children and 3 percent of black students attended private schools (including home schools). Some private schools predated both the racial and religious battles of the late 20th century and made major contributions to American education. Marietta Johnson, a 38-year-old teacher from Saint Paul, Minnesota, moved to the utopian community of Fairhope and in 1907 opened an experimental School of Organic Education. A mesmerizing public speaker, accomplished fund-raiser, and spokeswoman for progressive education, Johnson devoted her school to the premise that learning was lifelong, hence “organic.” Each


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child should learn at its own pace. She administered no tests, assigned no grades, and included dance, art, crafts, music, and drama in a high school curriculum that also included four years of history, literature, math, and science, plus two years of Latin and French. Renowned education reformer John Dewey visited Johnson’s school in 1913 and was so impressed with her theories that he wrote several articles about them. The school operated Alabama’s ¤rst kindergarten and continued until the 1980s, when the high school was closed. Many experimental schools nationwide patterned after the Organic School continued. Montgomery and Birmingham also had clusters of excellent private schools serving children of urban elites. Higher Education Not surprisingly, Alabamians traditionally spent as little on higher education as they did on public schools. In 1918 Alabama ranked eleventh among 12 southern states on money expended for colleges. During the ¤rst decades of the 20th century, southern public universities became caught up in the progressive commitment to social service characterized by extension education and engagement with regional problems. Clashes over a central commitment to liberal arts, humanities, classics, and religion on one hand and primary concern for utility, research, and social uplift on the other created substantial tensions on and off campus. Although many educational reformers preached wider democracy, on their campuses they practiced elitism, paternalism, and hierarchy. To many leaders of land grant and state universities, the small denominational colleges with their classical curricula that had dominated southern higher education throughout the 19th century were symbolic of impractical, elitist, isolated colleges. But their efforts on behalf of reform and enlarged engagement with regional problems ran into formidable barriers: lack of funding; increasing obsession by the 1920s with college football; conservatism among most white citizens. Not until the onset of massive federal funding would the South’s state institutions ®ourish. At that point, ®agship public universities in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Texas played major roles in modernizing their states. The University of Alabama and Auburn trailed peer institutions for a number of reasons. Most citizens and governors seemed not to understand the



relationship between high-quality research universities and economic development. Even if they had understood, to nurture such universities required lots of state funding and tolerance of a considerable amount of diversity among faculty and students. Furthermore, all southern state university systems were rife with political intrigue, and Alabama was worse than most. Finally, most Alabamians thought their universities were already world class, a perception reinforced by boosterism among alumni, trustees, and administrators, but shared by few outside the state. There are numerous ways to measure the quality of colleges and universities, every one of which seems to be the basis for a different national ranking. One prominent sociologist uses a subjective reference point. Obviously most alumni of a university believe it is academically outstanding, as do most citizens of the state where it is located. So the standard becomes what do people outside the state who are not alumni think? And how do academic peers and ranking services regard it? Not surprisingly, Alabama citizens rate their major research universities more highly than do external evaluators. One widely quoted (though academically suspect) annual ranking by U.S. News & World Report scores postsecondary schools based on a variety of criteria. The magazine’s 2003 rankings listed Auburn 95th and Alabama 99th among 123 “best national universities” that offered doctoral degrees, behind not only elite Ivy League schools, but even Pepperdine, Baylor, Brigham Young, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Tulsa. Another assessment is based on periodic ratings of graduate programs by the American Council on Education and other groups that appeared in 1970, 1982, and 1995. Faculty members nationwide participated in these peer rankings, and, despite some criticisms, they were widely used to identify quality university research programs. The 1996 issue of Change magazine published results of the 1995 rankings that listed Auburn number 98 and the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa 100 among the 104 institutions evaluated. Even more embarrassing were their respective rankings (22nd and 24th) among all southern universities and among all-important Southeastern Conference institutions (8th and 9th). None of the state’s research institutions made the top 20 in biological sciences, engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, or social and behavioral sciences. Had the results been the ¤nal NCAA Division 1 football poll, the report would have been


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the occasion for weeping, gnashing of teeth, and ¤ring every administrator in sight. Since this was only a ranking of graduate research programs, the report failed to elicit even a modestly bored “ho-hum” (except perhaps among the select few who understood the tremendous spin-off effect of high-quality research on high-tech businesses). More typical of state reaction was a ®ap over college admission standards early in the 21st century. The ACT scores of college freshmen ranked Auburn 12th among 16 peer universities and Alabama dead last. Auburn scored 14th on SAT exams, Alabama ranked last again. The grade point averages of entering Auburn freshmen ranked 15th of 17 peer universities, Alabama 11th. This revelation became the basis for a recommendation from Auburn administrators to extend admission priority to betterquali¤ed students. Auburn trustees adopted the move, although powerful state senator Lowell Barron worried that such a system might be elitist and discriminate against poor students from bad high schools, something Auburn’s 16 ACT score and 3.0 GPA requirement certainly did not do. Missed in the ensuing debate was a fairly obvious point. Most high-quality universities assume freshmen are adequately prepared for college. This debate also revealed one of the most obvious sources of opposition to improving the quality of state colleges. For many Alabamians, accessibility was more important than quality. Ranking 43rd in the number of people obtaining bachelor’s degrees in 2001 (20 percent of all adults compared to 22 percent in the Southeast) and realizing that bachelor’s recipients earned $500,000 more in lifetime income than non–college graduates, Alabamians badly wanted a degree. But barriers to that goal abounded. Cost was a factor. From 1995 to 2000 Alabama’s funding per student for higher education actually dropped, suffering the second largest decline in the 16-state region. Tuition and fees increased by a third, meaning they cost a typical Alabama family more than the national average. In 1992 Alabama’s public colleges and universities received 44 percent of their money from state appropriations and 20 percent from tuition and fees. By 1997 the comparable percentages were 40 and 23. With so many other valid demands for funding and no new revenue sources, the percentage of state funding going to higher education declined from 13 percent in 1981–82 to 11 percent 10 years later. As a result, the state’s poor children generally did not enroll. (In 2000 only 14 percent of



Alabama’s low-income students attended college compared to 24 percent nationally.) The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education issued Alabama a stinging report card in 2000: if Alabama were a college student, the report concluded, it would receive an F in preparation for college (40 percent of high school graduates had to enroll in remedial classes), a C+ for participation, a D for affordability, a B− for completion of degree, and a C for bene¤ts to the state. Where the state excelled was availability. By 2001 nearly a third of the state’s 18 to 24 year olds enrolled in college, the same percentage as nationally and higher than all but one southern state. That had not always been the case. In 1960 even Mississippi had enrolled more students in college than Alabama, which trailed all states in 50th place. That year, Alabama had no junior college, only six regional vocational trade schools, two unaccredited state colleges for African Americans, two major universities, and four teachers’ colleges. All that changed thanks to the opportunistic alliance of Gov. George Wallace and Rep. Rankin Fite. Wallace’s ideology included a populistic streak. As a freshman state representative from Barbour County in 1947, Wallace had authored legislation to create the state’s ¤rst postsecondary trade schools. Rankin Fite was a powerful state legislator from rural Marion County in northwest Alabama. As Speaker of the House and chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, Fite was considered the pork barrel king of Alabama. One critic joked that the municipal airport he obtained for his hometown of Hamilton (population 1,942) was large enough to land a 727 jet. When Wallace became governor in January 1963, he bypassed Fite in favor of Albert Brewer as house speaker. To make amends, he rewarded Fite with chairmanship of the strategic Ways and Means Committee. Fite wanted more: a Junior College and Trade School Authority that would locate a trade school in Marion County. His bill authorized construction of ¤ve trade schools and an equal number of junior colleges, funded by an additional two-cent tax on beer. Brewer and Wallace agreed to back the plan, which sailed through the house. The senate put up a stiffer battle. Senators balked at the plan for a number of reasons. Education funding was chronically inadequate already; the state had declared proration in ¤ve of six years prior to the Wallace administration. As a result, K-12 and


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higher education forces opposed the plan. So did senators from urban counties. The 21 wet counties, mostly urban, would pay the beer tax to provide colleges for mostly rural counties, many of them dry. Many senators also feared the power such legislation would give Wallace. The Alabama Trade School and Junior College Authority vested control in a committee consisting of the governor, his ¤nance director, and the superintendent of education. The senate broadened oversight by transferring control to the ninemember state Board of Education (BOE) (though it was appointed by the governor at that time and remained under his domination). After a 107hour ¤libuster, weary senators passed the legislation by a single vote. As a consequence of transfer of control to the BOE, the initial plan to create 10 schools soon spiraled to 41 as each board member insisted on a school in his district. And Wallace used new schools as a political plum in his bid for legislative support. By the end of Wallace’s ¤rst term, he presided over an empire of 11 junior colleges, 24 trade schools, and 4 community colleges. Wallace proudly proclaimed that the new system would make Alabama “the Athens of the South.” That is not quite what happened. Mainly the system strengthened Wallace’s formidable political machine. Nearly all presidents of the new schools had been Alabama secondary school administrators. Only three held earned doctorates. Few had experience in higher education. Traditional in both curricula and programs and oriented toward transfer to four-year schools, the colleges were often caught in spirited debates about quality of courses and transferability of credits. Many administrators served in the legislature, and their debts to Wallace were obvious: by the 1980s all but 2 of the 41 colleges in the system possessed a Wallace hall, Wallace administration building, or Wallace boulevard. Two of the colleges themselves were named for George Wallace, one for his wife, Lurleen, and one for his father. Critics directed numerous attacks at the system: a poor state such as Alabama could not afford so much duplication; the system developed primarily as a result of political payoffs, without rational planning or coordination with four-year institutions; its oversight by the BOE created two competing systems in higher education; administrators initially consisted mainly of inexperienced Wallace cronies; the quality of programs was at best weak, at worst little more than remediation of work students should have mastered in a good high school.



Proponents retorted that the system ful¤lled the dreams of tens of thousands of rural and working-class citizens who aspired to greater opportunities for their children if not for themselves. The system opened access to college for masses of young people who otherwise could not have afforded or been admitted to four-year institutions. By locating schools within commuting distance of most Alabamians and keeping tuition low, the system democratized higher education. During the four decades after its creation, the system did vastly expand educational opportunity. By 1989 42 schools enrolled 64,000 students, by far the most extensive single higher education system in the South, consuming state appropriations of $142 million. Until then, each campus operated like an independent ¤efdom, primarily through its state legislative delegation. A muckraking series in the Birmingham News that year revealed some of the consequences: one technical school with only 238 students; outdated training programs that poorly served the expanding high-tech economy; political entanglements and con®icts of interest; lack of central ¤nancial oversight; duplication; inef¤ciency; academic programs of questionable quality; inappropriate salaries based on quali¤cations. Among other discoveries, enterprising reporters found that seven legislators were on payrolls of two-year colleges. Three schools served a single midsize city. One faculty member who taught barbering to prison inmates made $46,000 but had only a bachelor’s degree. That was $17,200 more than a physics teacher with a Ph.D. and four years teaching experience earned at Jefferson State Junior College and more than the average salary of full professors at Auburn University. Fred Gainous, new chancellor of the two-year system, vowed to reform conditions in light of the 1989 exposé. He began to merge schools and reform curricula and salary structures. As the ¤rst African American director of a segment of Alabama higher education, he worked in an awkward situation. But some of his reforms began to take root. The reform-minded state BOE elected in the 1990s supported his changes. There was much to change. In 1995 4 of 10 entering freshmen had to enroll in remedial courses. The college system had grown like kudzu, offering classes at 187 different sites. Lack of cooperation between 4- and 2-year schools caused senior institutions to reject many courses for transfer. In Montgomery, Alabama State University, Troy State in Montgomery,


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and Auburn University at Montgomery offered competing 4-year programs only miles apart. Trenholm State Technical College and Patterson State both offered 2-year courses in the capital. That year, Alabama’s 48 2- and 4-year schools surpassed all southern states except Arkansas in colleges per capita. Six engineering programs (3 within the University of Alabama system alone), 2 medical colleges, 9 degree programs in nursing (2 in the Auburn system located only 45 miles apart) provided taxpayers good reasons not to believe higher education needed more money. Meanwhile 20 legislators, one-seventh the total, were college employees. Another 5 served on university boards of trustees. Whereas K-12 advocates could make a strong case for underfunding, higher education had a hard task to convince voters. In 1995 Alabama ranked 14th in per capita state and local funding for higher education. The legislature made a small step toward accountability during the Brewer administration by establishing the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE), which was created to end duplication. Unfortunately, the legislature, nervous about surrendering its authority over pork, vested little enforcement power in ACHE. Legislators reviewed the performance of the agency’s director every four years, and well-connected college presidents simply ignored him. In the late 1980s Wallace State Community College in Hanceville took ACHE to court for trying to block a costly physical therapy program duplicating a similar one less than an hour’s drive away at UAB. The legislature intervened to give the program to Wallace State. After a bloody battle, Gainous did prevail in a merger battle over Patterson State and Trenholm State technical colleges, nine miles apart in Montgomery. By 2000 other mergers reduced the number of public two-year colleges from 43 to 30. But sometimes the reduction in colleges did not mean fewer teaching sites, and local constituencies fought every merger. Obviously, persistent funding problems among the state’s major universities did not result from insuf¤cient revenue so much as from an overbuilt, inef¤cient system. A poor state tried to support too many programs, in too many places, with political considerations paramount among what programs were taught and where they were located. As if these problems were not bad enough, the state’s research universities were governed by a politically inspired trustee system more worthy of a third world banana republic than a ¤rst-rate American research university.



Of course, politics played some role in the governance of all state universities, one reason that private universities had historically dominated quality higher education in America. But Alabama raised the practice to high art. Wallace routinely picked political cronies as presidents of the four-year former teacher colleges. But Auburn University was most beset with politically manipulated trustees. Unlike the self-perpetuating board at the University of Alabama, whose trustees nominated their successors who were usually approved without debate by the state senate, the governor nominated Auburn trustees subject to senate approval. Because of intense political involvements by the school’s extension agents on behalf of conservative Democrats, Jim Folsom tried to pack the board with his own trustees in 1947. Board-packing became a re¤ned art in the 1980s and 1990s, when activist trustee Bobby Lowder determined to take control of Auburn. Whether on behalf of his obsession with football—as some critics claimed—or his determination to recast the school according to his vision of what a land grant university should be (priority given to agriculture, engineering, and business; downsizing religion, journalism, and other liberal arts)—Lowder pushed for a series of changes usually left to university administrations. Clashing with presidents, hammering out decisions in secret executive sessions, establishing independent lines of communication directly with coaches that bypassed presidents and athletic directors, Lowder secured his power by a phenomenal attention to state politics and trustee policy. Trying always to avoid public attention, he contributed heavily to political action committees that quietly moved money into the campaigns of favored candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and key senators who controlled trustee con¤rmation procedures. With Lowder, neither political party nor ideology mattered. Between 1986 and 2002 he allegedly backed two conservative Republicans and two liberal Democrats for governor. The payoff was control over their nominations to the board. Gov. Fob James, allied to ALFA, tried to block Lowder, using ALFA’s comical private investigation of two of Lowder’s senatorial allies as leverage. But the results made the Watergate break-in of the Nixon years look like a highly professional crime. One investigator left a briefcase full of information in an Auburn of¤ce, which divulged the investigation. Lowder took no more chances. Having heavily backed Gov. Don Siegelman for governor in 1998, he sought appointments of friends and business


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associates to the board. By 2001 nearly the entire Auburn board also served on the board of Colonial Bank’s holding company or had loans with the bank. Trustees included the bank’s lobbyist, and Jack Miller, a Colonial Bank director whose law ¤rm earned $1.8 million in legal fees and expenses from the bank. Nine votes of no con¤dence by university constituencies, a takeover of the alumni association by an anti-Lowder faction, and organization of a political action committee, the Auburn Trustee Improvement Association, made the vaunted Auburn university family one of the most dysfunctional university families anywhere. National media coverage in the New York Times and other outlets did nothing to improve Auburn’s image and in fact con¤rmed many stereotypes of the state as footballobsessed, zany, and seriously off target so far as education was concerned. In December 2003 SACS (the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) placed Auburn on probation based on a two-year investigation of charges that trustees had improperly intruded into the university’s internal management of academics and athletics. Had Auburn’s problems been an isolated incident, it would have been only a sad aberration at a ¤ne land grant university. Regrettably that was not the case. Investigations revealed that the University of Alabama, Auburn, and the University of South Alabama spent $77,000 in 2000 ®ying trustees to various functions, including sporting events. South Alabama’s trustees sued the university’s private foundation over the way it managed the school’s endowment. Trustees at numerous schools violated the state “sunshine” law by holding secret meetings where decisions were made that did not involve the good name or reputation of individuals. At Alabama State University, battles over control of the trustees between powerful AEA leader Joe Reed and millionaire trustee Donald Watkins became front-page news and nearly cost the school its accreditation. Trustees at the University of West Alabama ¤red a popular president, some claimed because he blocked an attempt to take over a Bullock County plantation and build a conference center on it (halfway across the state from campus). The lawyer for the landowner was also a university trustee and was not happy with the president’s rejection of the deal. In 2003 the school joined Auburn on SACS’s probation list. In Mobile a Republican legislator claimed that Gov. Guy Hunt tried to block his nomination to the University of South Alabama board because he had voted against the governor on a bill. Until the 1980s the University of Alabama board sailed professionally



through such perilous seas with minimal controversy. Creation of the University of Alabama in Birmingham changed all that. Trustee discontent with UAB arose from a variety of sources: UAB’s rapid growth during the 1960s and 1970s; strong UAB presidents from the medical college who insisted on stronger legislative support for their campus; increased national and international attention on UAB’s excellent medical programs; and, most importantly, UAB’s decision to establish Division 1 basketball and football programs, which trustees believed would compete with programs at Tuscaloosa and which they claimed UAB administrators had promised not to implement. Beginning in the 1980s when Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley held up trustee appointments to the Alabama board because they were deemed too pro-UAB, periodic skirmishes occurred. By the century’s end full-scale war threatened. UAB alumni, backed by black Birmingham legislators, demanded one of their own be appointed to the system’s board. UA trustees seemed to ¤nd multiple reasons—usually residence—why this was inappropriate, unwise, or illegal. In at least two ways, UA trustees were like AU’s: both groups preferred meeting in secret and neither represented the diversity of the state. Few women or blacks served on either board. In other ways, the boards were dissimilar. Alabama’s ¤rst black trustee described UA trustees as largely passive, ratifying and con¤rming what was brought before them, just the opposite of Auburn’s interventionist board. Partly as a result of such con®icts, all three universities became revolving doors for presidents and system chancellors. The pattern through the 1970s had been long and generally distinguished presidential tenures followed by retirement. But during the last two decades of the century, presidents regularly came and went, some casualties of their inability to attract winning football coaches, others because they dared resist trustee interference, still others because they had better offers at more highly regarded universities. By the early 21st century reformers targeted trustee systems as well as taxes and an antiquated constitution. At Auburn they supported a new selection process to limit terms of trustees and allow distinguished alumni who lived outside the state to serve. Under intense pressure, UA trustees ¤nally selected a UAB graduate for their board. Newspapers sued Auburn to end secret trustee meetings. Reformers, led by former governor Albert


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Brewer, also proposed increasing the power of ACHE so the agency could actually control competing campuses and programs, or replacing it with a powerful state board to oversee all state colleges and universities. Spiraling chaos among the system’s 10 independent boards of trustees, supposedly regulated by an emasculated commission on higher education, certainly inspired little public con¤dence in higher education. But neither did proposals for a coordinating board of regents seem to have any chance among legislators who had a powerful personal stake in keeping matters the way they were. Chaotic institutional governance often negated herculean efforts by all the state’s colleges and universities to overcome de¤ciencies in funding and student preparation. Perhaps all three state research universities did their best work by taking freshmen where they found them and four years later graduating distinguished citizens. Indeed, Auburn University’s mission statement identi¤ed undergraduate teaching and land grant missions in agriculture and engineering but did not list across-the-board research commitments characteristic of other comprehensive land grant universities. Yet all three schools served their state well. Nearly 40 percent of Auburn’s students came from out of state despite higher costs. The student newspaper regularly won the highest journalistic awards despite the fact that independent-minded editors were often in trouble for criticizing presidential and trustee policies. Despite lack of high-pro¤le research programs, some amazing individuals built world-class, innovative programs. At Auburn the ¤sheries program was named number 1 by its 22 peers in a 1988 study. An architecture graduate, Paul Rudolph, became chairman of the prestigious Architecture Department at Yale University. Another AU architecture alumnus, Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, cofounded his alma mater’s Rural Studio in the Black Belt, designed to introduce middle-class students to the world of poor black Alabamians. Although Auburn boasted the South’s oldest architecture school, Mockbee probably generated more favorable national publicity than anyone in the program’s history, culminating in his selection as recipient of a $500,000 “genius grant” by the MacArthur Foundation. The University of Alabama suffered less trustee embarrassment than Auburn but more than compensated by its fraternity machine. Built upon



the symbiotic relationship between powerful fraternities and sororities, the law school, and Alabama politics, “the Machine” (as it was called) provided 8 of 23 Alabama governors during the century and many of its congressmen and U.S. senators (only 2 Auburn graduates served as governor). Based on divisions of color and class, the Machine became nationally known due to the political prominence of its alumni, including their rejection of black members once the university integrated. Even intervention by administrators and trustees failed to integrate Bama’s Greek system. Nevertheless, the university produced a steady stream of Rhodes Scholars and other distinguished graduates. One biology graduate, Edward O. Wilson, became arguably the world’s leading evolutionary biologist at Harvard and a rare double Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Although UAB had a brief history, by 2000 it could make a good case for providing the state’s most highly regarded research programs. Established in Mobile in 1859, the medical college of Alabama moved to Birmingham in 1945 following a bitter eight-year turf battle. UA trustee Winton “Red” Blount played a decisive role in transforming the medical college and its associated branch campus into a full-®edged urban comprehensive university during the 1960s. His help in recruiting cardiologist John Kirklin to UAB in 1966 was a singular event in the history of the school, which soon became a national research center in cardiology. In 1967 the Journal of the American Medical Association ranked UAB as the nation’s second best medical school. By end-of-century UAB ranked 29th in federal funding for research and development (16th among public universities), trailing only Duke and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in the Southeast. Between 1969 and 2001 the school doubled its external funding every decade. UAB generated 53,000 jobs (3 of every 100 in Alabama) and in 2001 expended $1.6 billion on a state investment of $205 million. UAB research spun-off eight new Birmingham companies during the late 1980s alone. After years of superb presidential leadership, UAB joined Auburn and Alabama administrative turmoil at century’s end. This, together with the state’s ¤nancial woes, antiquated constitution, and byzantine politics, sent some distinguished faculty packing for greener pastures (notably, internationally known child development researchers Craig and Sharon Ramey and Roy Curtiss III, who left UAB for Washington University, where he was in-


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ducted into the National Academy of Sciences [NAS]; the only Alabama member of NAS, America’s most prestigious society for scientists and engineers, was also a UAB professor, Dr. Max Cooper). Although not so well known, the state’s black colleges labored under even greater burdens. Never adequately funded and enrolling many students with only rudimentary preparation for college, the state’s black colleges performed far better than the state had a right to expect. Tuskegee Institute, under the administration of the legendary Booker T. Washington, stole the spotlight from other black schools. A genius both at networking and publicizing, Washington became the nation’s premier black leader before his death in 1915. After his death, one of his recruits—George Washington Carver—rose to near mythological stature as a botanist. Primary attention on Tuskegee obscured other developments. Schools such as Alabama State and Alabama A&M played key roles in educating a new generation of teachers. But in some ways the most interesting story in black higher education occurred on the campuses of the small religious colleges. Their leaders were most resistant to Tuskegee-style industrial education, which they considered inferior to the traditional classical curriculum. Talladega College notably did not follow Tuskegee’s lead and became famous for its production of scientists and other distinguished graduates. Even after decades of neglect and enrollment declines, 28 Talladega grads earned doctorates between 1975 and 1980. The school’s German Club won ¤rst place for ¤ve consecutive years at the annual convention of the Alabama Federation of German Clubs. Talladega College was one of 14 private colleges in the state, more than a third of them historically black. Along with Talladega, some of the private schools excelled in undergraduate education. U.S. News & World Report (2003) listed Birmingham-Southern College 66th among the nation’s best liberal arts colleges. The same magazine listed Samford University 5th among the South’s regional universities and Spring Hill College 13th. All four schools had distinguished records of service to their state, region, and denomination. Education could have been the key to unlocking a different kind of future for Alabama. As the century ended, there were signs the state was



¤nally awakening to that reality. But there were nearly as many countervailing signs of intractability: underfunded K-12 schools, politicized universities, boards of trustees that would have been as embarrassing as they would have been unthinkable in other states. Which way the state would move in education policy remained both unclear and critically important.


6 On and Off the Pedestal Women

Being smart can be a real detriment to a woman unless she knows how to go about it tactfully. —Nanci Kincaid, Balls: A Novel

Revolutions come in all shapes and sizes. Some are big, violent, and noisy. Others are so quiet that they barely announce their arrival. Some run their course in a few months or years. Others take decades to play out and defy the concept of sudden change altogether. Some compromise and accommodate. Others contest ground so ¤ercely that in the end it is hard to know which side lost and which won. When the 20th century dawned, Alabama women were just beginning to challenge inherited Victorian values. Buttressed by evangelical Christian admonitions to be submissive and southern cultural expectations to reign over domestic life from their pedestals, women found Victorianism an even tighter binding than the corsets and other contraptions that constrained their bodies. God not only had created women and men differently; he had intended them for separate spheres, or so Victorians believed. Women presided over hearth and home. They provided faithful companionship, ¤delity in sexual as well as domestic service, maternal nurturing both for children and sometimes equally infantile spouses. They managed household duties so as to assure husbands community respect and domestic tranquility. They gladsomely accepted a secondary role outside the home, keeping political opinions to themselves and eschewing publicity and notoriety. Whatever aspirations they might have for personal accomplishment outside


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families, they sublimated for the sake of husbands and children. They had no sexual yearnings themselves but accepted the reality that their husbands and sons were different in this regard. Men would stray because that was their nature, as thriving centers of prostitution in Alabama cities made abundantly clear. In return for women’s order, piety, and devotion, husbands paid them verbal homage, placed them on pedestals, proclaimed of¤cial Mother’s Day (sponsored nationally by Alabama congressman Thomas He®in), provided for them ¤nancially, and conceded their supremacy within appropriate spheres of child rearing and domestic arts. Men gladly provided whatever limited education women might need to function effectively within this circumscribed domain. Their children called them “blessed,” and so, on occasion, did their husbands. Although recent historians generally have been unkind to Victorians, it seems unlikely that their families were more dysfunctional, their children more stunted, their wives unhappier, their husbands more licentious, or their collective family ambitions less realized than ancient or modern families. Indeed, a host of sociological studies suggest that end-of-century American families had not earned the right to be thought of as normative or as the best examples of how the family unit ought to operate. Women might be more liberated. Whether they were happier in 2001 than in 1901 is quite another question. That many women were content with the way Victorian Alabama society functioned is beyond debate. Many white women agreed that men had the right to govern if they exercised that right humanely. They perceived the social order as an example of the survival of the ¤ttest whatever they might believe about Darwinian evolution. They did not seek the right to vote, work for a salary outside the home, serve on juries, or speak to male assemblies. Working hard in the shadows of male authority posed no threat to their identity. A servanthood role dominated both their religion and their psyches. In fact, they often considered women who were discontent with their appropriate spheres or inclined to public protest or iconoclastic personal behavior much as their husbands did: at worst, such women made themselves ridiculous; at best, they were wrongheaded and proper objects of pity (especially pity for the husbands or parents of such misguided


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women—women, not “ladies,” a category reserved for females who properly understood and complied with societal norms). When organized at all, traditional women honed their parliamentary and fund-raising skills on behalf of foreign missions, stable church ¤nances, and local philanthropies. Later many of them also organized against the woman suffrage movement. Whether out of contentment with the social status quo or because they seldom contemplated any alternative, they accepted male ministers, male civic of¤cials, and male oversight. Among their leaders were women of no small accomplishment, notably Marie Bankhead Owen, daughter of one of the century’s most in®uential political families, wife of one of its most distinguished educational and cultural ¤gures, as well as a professional woman, historian, and writer of no small accomplishment herself. Throughout the century, conservative women would produce one generation after another of articulate opponents of woman’s liberation, however de¤ned, and would make the notion of universal female “sisterhood” a hollow and meaningless cliché. Nor were men and parents of one mind about the social revolution abrewing. Individual biographies of Alabama’s female pioneers who fought for social change reveal a remarkable pattern of supportive or at least indulgent parents and spouses. Rebelling at the same time against oppressive social conditions and hostile family networks could be a lonely and depressing business. Few women managed two revolutions at once. So the most enduring and successful revolutionaries tackled only one enemy at a time. Nourished by husbands who applauded or parents who expressed pride in them and their causes, women often launched their reform ®eets into choppy waters but from tranquil harbors. Women who were discontent with the world as it was came from a variety of backgrounds. Many de¤ed Victorian stereotypes, which hardly suited their actual life situations anyway. Black and white women with alcoholic or abusive husbands did not pledge submissiveness. Women who worked long hours at whirling looms inside sti®ing textile mills, or cleaned hotel rooms, or took in washing and ironing, or kept someone else’s house, or chopped weeds and picked cotton while bearing large numbers of children, would have laughed at Victorian notions of separate spheres had they ever heard of them. Populist women who participated actively (even if not


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as fully as in some other states) in the 1890s insurrection were under no illusions about why life was so hard. God had not willed it so. Bourbon politicians had fabricated it so. And their political cosmology easily separated deity from demon. They might not be able to vote, but they could make speeches, prepare meals and signs, sing and pray, and generally raise hell as well as cotton and kids. The ordinary lives of most Alabama women in 1900 did not extend far beyond home, ¤elds, church, and the limited occupations available to them: teacher, secretary, nurse, beautician, seamstress, cook, maid, and washerwoman. No one beyond a certain age likes to be ignored or patted on the head and condescendingly dismissed. And when women began to organize in the 1890s (to protest child labor and inhuman conditions, challenge deacons who ignored women’s intent about how to distribute the money they raised for foreign missions, or denounce politicians who defeated their efforts to control the sale of alcohol or the spread of brothels), men in positions of in®uence often dismissed them as if they were infantile and aspiring to roles beyond both their social sphere and intellectual capacity. Such treatment proved to be a serious mistake. Social Reformers Although the generation of Alabama women born in the 1870s and ’80s could have contentedly occupied their rari¤ed Victorian world, many did not. A variety of sources explained their discontent. Middle-class parents afforded many of them learning incompatible with the quiet, reserved roles they were expected to play. Their personal belief systems rooted in Christian theology made them restive at what they perceived as widespread social injustice. Budding social networks created a sense of sisterhood among female reformers. And male opposition simply bonded women more ¤rmly. Knowledge of a wider world of women reformers in the United Kingdom and the northern United States emboldened Alabama women. Although reform did not fully emerge until after 1900, it smoldered during the 1890s. Women organized an Alabama chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1884, the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1895, and the Alabama Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1899. Because women and children so often became the victims of alco-


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hol abuse, the temperance cause quickly gained their support. Rooted in evangelical Christian churches, temperance not only attracted the support of reformers such as Julia S. Tutwiler but also won the loyalties of traditional Victorian women convinced that demon rum imperiled the home, which was woman’s proper domain. However rooted the prohibition cause may have been in conservative churches and Victorian separate spheres, it was radical in one important respect: it moved thousands of women from private to public arenas. And the national organization most identi¤ed with this reform—the WCTU—also endorsed woman suffrage, free kindergartens, an eight-hour maximum working day for women, federal aid to education, and vocational training for women. Although Alabama’s WCTU did not endorse woman suffrage until 1914, it soon became obvious to one and all that enfranchising women would speed the prohibition cause. Men of the Anti-Saloon League assumed leadership of this reform, but women still provided the shock troops for legislative and city council debates. The WCTU tapped Julia Tutwiler to lead its prison reform efforts, a job she performed with rigor for three decades. Her reforms passed the legislature one after another: night literacy courses for convicts; heating in and sanitary inspections of prisons; separate prison facilities for women. Another WCTU activist, Martha L. Spencer of Birmingham, lobbied the city on behalf of the poor. She served for half a century on the board of the city’s Mercy Home (which cared for poor women with tuberculosis, pregnant girls, orphans, transients, and delinquents) and raised money to operate it. Women’s clubs served as a second launching pad for reform. Literary clubs such as Mobile’s Reading Club, Tuscaloosa’s Kettle-Drum Club, Montgomery’s Twentieth Century Club, and Birmingham’s Cadmean and Highland Book Clubs offered a forum for well-educated, af®uent women to read books, study public issues, present papers on controversial topics, debate, and mobilize efforts toward reform. Though less controversial than temperance societies and woman suffrage associations, women’s clubs still led women away from domestic spheres and into the public arena. Elizabeth Johnston “Johnsie” Evans of Birmingham (who organized the Highland Book Club and served as its president for more than a quarter century), taught Sunday school at the Pratt Coal Mine convict camp, tried unsuccess-


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fully to establish a home for young male convicts, and led a successful effort to establish an industrial school for orphaned and troubled boys in East Lake. Lillian Milner Orr and Nellie Kimball Murdock of Birmingham led the crusade to abolish child labor, as did Lura Harris Craighead of Mobile to improve public education. In 1895 the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs (AFWC) became one of the ¤rst umbrella federations, combining 130 women in six clubs. By 1915 the Federation included 153 clubs with 4,250 members. Black women formed a similar federation (AFCWC, Alabama Federation of Colored Women’s Club) four years after whites. Although the AFWC did not endorse woman suffrage until 1918, AFCWC did so nearly a decade earlier, and both moved quickly from primary attention to ®owers, drama, books, music, and art, to addressing civic and community problems. AFWC did endorse improved teacher education, higher quali¤cations for school superintendents, anti-illiteracy programs, higher local taxes for schools, kindergartens, libraries, vocational education for women, women on school boards, and scholarships to allow needy women to attend college. After Lura Craighead (wife of the editor of the Mobile Register) was elected AFWC president in 1899, she organized school improvement associations, which became agents of reform and spread to 300 Alabama communities by 1908. They are credited with pushing a number of educational reforms through the 1915 legislature. Julia Tutwiler, a longtime AFWC leader, persuaded the University of Alabama to open its doors to women in 1893 when the school admitted 10 women. When coeds shortly won four of the six major academic awards, it seemed to con¤rm Tutwiler’s premise that women were essentially smarter than men. Supported by such agents of traditional values as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of 1812, and local school improvement associations, Tutwiler also lobbied successfully to build women’s dorms at the university. AFWC leadership represented a broad spectrum of middle- and upperclass Alabama women. One survey of 20 federation leaders found that all came from business and professional families, more than half were born in states other than Alabama and had attended college (4 graduated from women’s colleges, 2 from Judson, and 2 others from Peabody). Virtually all were married with children, and few worked for a salary.


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The preeminent reform for women’s clubs of both races was abolition of child labor. Although rooted ¤rmly in the traditional Victorian sphere of family and children, reforming conditions nonetheless required mobilization of women on behalf of a political crusade. Alabama’s business community had no intention of accepting legislative restrictions on their labor force without a ¤ght. And women gave them a ¤ght worthy of the cause. The social worker Nellie Kimball Murdock served as chair of the Alabama Child Labor Conference, which harnessed women’s political power. Born in Boston and one of the founders of the Birmingham Equal Suffrage League, Murdock’s husband was a respected community leader. British social reformer Irene Ashby, who came to Alabama to work on behalf of the American Federation of Labor, also recruited women to the cause. Murdock and Lura Craighead organized successful efforts to lobby the legislature in 1903, 1907, 1915, and 1919, effectively using the compelling photographs of documentary photographer Lewis W. Hine in a book published by them (Child Welfare in Alabama, 1918). This legislation steadily raised the age at which children could be employed and regulated conditions of labor as well. Women’s reform efforts reduced the rate of child labor in textile mills from nearly half of all workers in 1900 to a quarter by 1920. For many women, suffrage was a natural extension of their reform efforts. By swelling the ranks of reform voters with women, they believed they could overwhelm recalcitrant male politicians. Believing that women inherently possessed greater moral awareness and ethical sensibility, they assumed that women, fully enfranchised, would speedily improve public schools, end child labor, banish prostitution and the convict lease system, enact prison reforms, and care better for the poor. For other women, the right to vote was an elemental human right in a democratic society. Rather than a means to an end of reform, it was the object of their activism. Angry that Alabama extended a limited franchise to African Americans, criminals, and the insane, but not to them, women resented the patronizing assumption that politics was either too complicated or too corrupt for their full participation. Suffragists multiplied during the 1890s, partly due to divisive debates between Populists and Democrats. Ellen Stephens Hildreth and Frances A. Grif¤n began equal suffrage clubs in Decatur and Verbena in 1892. Other clubs followed in Calera, Gadsden, Huntsville, and Tuskegee. The clubs


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combined into a statewide suffrage organization in 1893 and began a woman’s column in several state newspapers. Initial suffrage leaders came from a variety of backgrounds. Schoolteacher Frances Grif¤n of Verbena graduated from Baptist-af¤liated Judson College and excelled as an orator and the ¤rst secretary of the statewide suffrage organization. Ellen Hildreth of Decatur had lived some years in Colorado where women could vote in state elections. After moving to Decatur, she began the town’s ¤rst kindergarten and woman’s club. A devoted wife and mother, Hildreth was also a talented artist and sculptor who did fancy needlework and wrote a book. Suffragists elected her president of their new statewide federation in 1893. Virginia Clay-Clopton, who served as president of the Huntsville suffrage club, was one of Alabama’s most respected women. Widow of U.S. senator Clement C. Clay and a talented writer in her own right (she authored one of the ¤nest autobiographies of an antebellum southern woman, A Belle of the Fifties), Clay-Clopton had remarried after her husband’s death. David Clopton served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, affording his wife an unassailable platform of respectability and in®uence. Unfortunately this bold triumvirate could not sustain enthusiasm for woman suffrage through the national depression of 1893–1897, the Populist uprising, and the Spanish-American War. After a short-lived attempt to enfranchise women in the 1901 constitutional convention failed, they were barely able to keep the movement alive. Then in 1910 a new generation of leaders pumped life back into woman suffrage. Three of the notable newcomers—Pattie Ruffner Jacobs, Lillian Roden Bowron, and Nellie Murdock—worshiped together in the newly established Independent Presbyterian Church. Independent’s founding pastor, Henry Edmonds, was a theological liberal and a social gospel advocate. Murdock’s father had been president of the Atlanta Board of Education, and he had provided his daughter a ¤ne education in Massachusetts. Pattie Jacobs also was an outsider. A native of West Virginia whose notable family had fallen on hard times, Jacobs arrived with her mother in Birmingham in the 1890s. They left Pattie’s father behind in Nashville for reasons that are not entirely clear to live with Pattie’s newly married older sister. Pattie kept a revealing diary of her childhood years, and it was not ®atter-


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ing to males. Apparently disappointed in her father, she seldom mentioned him. Desiring a ¤ne education at a prestigious northeastern university, she discovered that her wealthy male relatives considered such an expenditure wasted on a female. She applauded her Louisville sister’s decision to divorce her husband, con¤ding to her diary that the more she observed marriage, the less willing she was to enter such a demeaning relationship. In too many marriages, the wife became a “drudge whose life and circumstances are . . . narrowed and the gulf [between spouses] widens till they are separated in thought, spirit, aims, hopes, and ambitions, no union [remaining] save a physical one.” Women tended to cling to marriage, men to “draw apart.” Marriage often became an “assertion of man’s supremacy over woman,” ignoring her individuality. Women must obtain equality, not by “fettering the man but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the woman.” Yet young Pattie’s emancipation was ambivalent and incomplete. Every woman, she recorded in her diary, was by nature a nurturing mother: “I think a woman is never complete, her character unformed til she is wife and mother. It is certainly meant by God to be a blessed thing—but so few people are really mated and united.”1 Suspended between the traditional world of Victorian marital expectations and the new naturalistic world of women’s sexual freedom and female equality, Pattie was fortunate: she married Solon Jacobs, a wealthy Birmingham businessman and native Kansan, who gloried in her independence and civic activism. He surrounded her with servants, cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, and nurses, funded her suffrage activities, and took pride in her growing celebrity. The birth of two daughters provided more inspiration than hindrance, and Pattie emerged as the state’s preeminent suffragist. In describing her conversion to suffragism, Pattie exercised a selective memory. She never mentioned the issues recorded in her diary: sexual selfidentity, demeaning marriage relationship, the submersion of woman’s identity, deplorable conduct by her father or brother-in-law. Instead she invariably cited two incidents. She had presented a petition signed by 400 women asking the Birmingham city commission to sponsor musical performances in public parks. City politicians cavalierly dismissed her request, convincing Jacobs that had she represented 400 potential voters instead of that many unenfranchised women, the commission would have treated her differ-


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ently. The second episode involved politicians who ignored demands to correct the horrors of child labor. As a West Virginia native, Pattie Jacobs paid no homage to the states’ rights doctrines that caused most southern suffragists to insist that only states should extend women the right to vote. Federal initiative on suffrage threatened to reopen the issue of African American voting, a 30-year nightmare for Alabama whites only just terminated by the 1901 constitution. As a founder of the Birmingham and Alabama Equal Suffrage Associations (AESA), auditor of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and one of the architects of the 1915 strategy to gain the vote from Alabama’s legislature, Jacobs was careful not to trample southern traditions. She rejected the idea that black women should be included in the vote and paid lip service to states’ rights. But as soon as male legislators defeated woman suffrage in 1915, she moved quickly to support a federal suffrage amendment, leading her Alabama cohorts in a direction quite different from other southern states. Nor was the army Jacobs commanded inclined toward compromise. Amelia Worthington began her suffrage career as a 19-year-old schoolteacher. She later edited a suffrage column for the Birmingham News. Though a nominal Episcopalian, Worthington was described by a friend as a materialist, socialist, and devotee of pure reason. Bossie O’Brien Hundley, daughter of Birmingham’s mayor from 1908 until 1910, was a Catholic graduate of a Kentucky convent school and the wife of a federal judge and a power in the state’s Democratic Party. As chief strategist in the 1915 lobbying effort on behalf of enfranchising women, she sat in the gallery while one legislator after another quoted Scripture to justify denying women the vote. Hundley ¤nally located a proof text of her own, Psalm 116:11: “All men are liars.” Another Jacobs lieutenant, Mollie Dowd, a native of Huntsville, came from a different background. After moving to Cincinnati as a child, she returned to Alabama, where she worked at a department store before resigning because of poor health. Many department stores had no toilets or lounges for women, and Jacobs opened an equal suffrage of¤ce downtown where clerks could rest, eat their lunches, use toilets, and read suffrage literature. Dowd became a convert and carried her convictions into a later ca-


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reer as organizer of the city’s ¤rst local of the National Women’s Trade Union League. Maud McLure Kelly grew up in Anniston, then moved to Birmingham with her lawyer-father. While clerking for him, she studied law and tested for admission to the law department at the University of Alabama in 1907. She scored so high that professors placed her in the senior class, where she graduated in a year with highest honors, third in a class of 33. In 1908 she was the ¤rst woman admitted to the Alabama Bar. Six years later, she became the ¤rst southern woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. She helped Jacobs organize both Birmingham and Alabama suffrage associations. A fervent Baptist, she also taught Sunday school and presided over the Business and Professional Women’s class at Southside Baptist Church. Although all these women worked hard for suffrage, they were not of one mind or temperament. Some favored state enactment; others despaired of Alabama legislators and looked to the federal government for relief. Pattie Jacobs and Amelia Worthington were lighthearted, often giggling like two schoolgirls about the supercilious Bossie O’Brien Hundley, who took herself so seriously that both her friends attributed a different meaning to the name “Bossie.” They poked fun at Hundley’s pompous pronouncements and self-importance. Though they welcomed Catholic and Jewish women into their circle, their disparaging racial pronouncements were as rooted in southern culture as their feminist views transcended it. Mobile’s Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont ¤nanced the outer fringes of the woman’s movement. Born in 1853 to wealthy parents (her father made a fortune as a cotton merchant), Alva Smith attended school in Paris. She married William K. Vanderbilt but divorced him in a scandalous 1895 case, charging him with adultery. Within months of her divorce decree, she married millionaire businessman O. H. P. Belmont and became a dominant ¤gure in New York City social life. After her husband’s death in 1908, she plunged into the suffrage movement, bankrolling the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), the most radical wing of the movement, which advocated an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She also funded the Woman Citizen to publicize women’s


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causes. The NWP hired Sara Haardt to lobby the Alabama legislature in 1919 on behalf of the 19th Amendment. Many suffragists blamed their 1915 legislative defeat on reactionary male legislators. But the issue was more complicated than that. It is true that male politicians such as U.S. senator Oscar W. Underwood and Congressman J. Thomas He®in opposed woman suffrage (He®in dismissed suffragists as “restless, dissatis¤ed products of unhappy homes”). Many churches and Alabama newspapers also ridiculed suffragists. Rufus Rhodes, founder and editor of the Birmingham News, could not bring himself to endorse so radical a cause. Neither could most evangelical men, arguing that suffragists hardly represented the submissive woman of biblical injunction. Rev. H. C. Hurley, pastor of Jasper Baptist Church, penned a 25-page pamphlet arguing that women should stay home and keep quiet. More galling to suffragists was opposition from Marie Bankhead Owen, who helped organize and lead the Southern Anti-Suffrage Association. The proud and shrewd Owen mobilized a formidable array of arguments: woman suffrage would reopen the question of whether blacks could vote; if justi¤ed at all, woman suffrage should be enacted by state legislatures, not by Congress; traditional southern women had no desire to socialize with uncouth male politicians. Many Alabama women rallied to Owen’s organization, giving antisuffrage politicians all the cover they needed. Simple gender divisions did not characterize either side. Oscar Hundley, Solon Jacobs, and leading Baptist spokesmen W. B. Crumpton and L. L. Gwaltney endorsed woman suffrage. Although Alabama women were deeply divided, antisuffragists quickly availed themselves of the vote once it was available to them. Suffrage did not magically transform the lives of Alabama women, but it did open doors previously closed tightly to them. Some historians believe that the decade following the battle over suffrage was the most enlightened and welcoming of the century. One could certainly make such a case in Alabama. The possibilities open to women in the 1920s seemed limitless. Pattie Jacobs and her associates transformed the equal suffrage organization into the Alabama League of Women Voters (ALWV). She served as secretary of the national league and as legislative chair of the state af¤liate. The league’s ¤rst effort, a massive drive to register women to vote, succeeded beyond her most optimistic dreams: 124,000 Alabama women reg-


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istered to vote by November 1920, 23,000 in her home county of Jefferson alone. Women cast one-third of the statewide vote that month, putting to rest once and for all charges that women did not desire the right to vote. Building on this triumph, the ALWV organized 57 local leagues by the end of 1920 and endorsed an impressive agenda of educational and civic reform. Members urged women to run for of¤ce, helped elect the ¤rst woman to the legislature in 1922 (for good measure, she defeated a male antisuffrage incumbent from Selma), and provided key support in the decadelong struggle to end the convict lease system. Their carefully developed agenda addressed nearly every concern reformers had battled over for a decade: censorship of violence and sexual content of movies; establishment of a maximum eight-hour day and minimum wage for labor; illiteracy; lynching. The Birmingham league’s campaign against legalized prostitution led to a sweeping reform victory in the 1921 city commission elections. The ALWV also monitored administration of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, the ¤rst major federal legislative victory after enfranchisement. The act improved health and nutrition for women and children throughout Alabama but had a particularly salutary effect in rural areas. Jacobs’s longtime service did not go unrewarded. The state Democratic Party tapped her as its ¤rst National Democratic Committee Woman. She also served on the national party’s platform and executive committees. She was elected vice president of the National League of Women Voters in 1927 and became one of four Birmingham women named to Who’s Who in America. Gov. Bibb Graves named her Alabama’s outstanding woman that year. She headed the effort to repeal prohibition in Alabama in 1933, and Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt also appointed her head of the Woman’s Division of the National Recovery Administration. Jacobs’s allies in the suffrage cause also ®ourished in the expansive atmosphere of the 1920s. Loraine Bedsole Bush Tunstall became ¤rst director of the state’s Child Welfare Department. Her protégée, Loula Friend Dunn, played an equally pivotal role in the social welfare community, succeeding Tunstall as commissioner of the renamed Alabama State Department of Public Welfare during the 1930s before becoming director of the American Public Welfare Association in 1949. Religion also afforded women new opportunities. Sti®ed for decades


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by ministers citing biblical proof texts to keep women in secondary roles, Southern Baptist women had organized a separate and organizationally independent Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) in the late 19th century. The WMU selected Kathleen Mallory in 1912 to head the organization, which was headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Kathleen was born into a prominent Selma family; her father was an attorney and reform-minded politician who had run for governor in 1910 on a platform supporting prohibition and woman suffrage. He had provided a ¤ne education for his daughter, capped by a degree from Goucher College in Baltimore, a highly regarded woman’s college where Mallory majored in Latin and history. After a brief stint as a teacher in Demopolis and the death of her ¤ancé, Mallory became director of WMU work in Alabama. Her enthusiasm for missions and organizational skills led to her selection as head of national women’s work. Among her duties were reports to the Southern Baptist Convention where many male delegates resented a female appearing as speaker. She ignored their protests. In 1921 she moved national WMU headquarters to Birmingham, where it remained for the rest of the century. By Mallory’s retirement in 1948 after nearly four decades as head of the agency, WMU contained nearly 50,000 local church organizations that raised more than $2 million annually for missions worldwide. As WMU’s most celebrated leader, Kathleen Mallory’s name was chosen for the denomination’s home mission offering. Family welfare and religion seemed familiar terrain even for Victorian women, but other women’s endeavors broke new ground. Dixie Bibb of Hope Hull married her ¤rst cousin Bibb Graves, worked for woman suffrage, became president of the ALWV, chaired the state’s literacy commission, and became the state’s ¤rst female U.S. senator when her husband appointed her to ¤ll an unexpired term. Anna Lola Price of Cullman had to drop out of college to care for siblings after her parents died. After taking a business course, she found employment as secretary for two Birmingham lawyers. She began reading law as well, and in 1928 was admitted to the Alabama Bar through examination, the only female to accomplish that feat among 32 who tried. She began to practice law in her hometown. Neighbor James E. Folsom appointed her as the governor’s assistant legal adviser in 1947, the ¤rst woman to hold that position. Four years later, Folsom appointed her to the Alabama Court of


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Appeals, where she became the ¤rst woman to serve on either of the state’s appellate courts. Ruth Robertson Berry of Clayton in Barbour County also lost her physician father when she was young. Devoted to the Baptist church and inspired by a great-aunt, Martha Foster Crawford, who had been a pioneering missionary to China, Ruth decided to become a medical missionary. After college at Judson and the University of Alabama (where she became the only female in her medical school class and only the second woman to graduate from the Medical College of Alabama), she entered Tulane University, receiving her M.D. in pediatric medicine in 1928. She married a professor who had taught her in Tuscaloosa, and they planned to join a clinic in Wichita, Kansas. But when the clinic refused to accept a woman physician on staff, they opened a practice in Birmingham instead. Her husband, Ivan, fed, bathed, and bedded their three infants while she visited sick children across the city. During the 1940s she taught biology at Howard College and pediatric medicine at University Medical College. Active in her profession, she served a term as president of the Alabama Pediatric Society and was named a fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics. When her husband died in 1957, Dr. Ruth began a long-delayed second career. She sought appointment through the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board as medical missionary to Nigeria. Working from a hospital in Ogbomosho, she established clinics throughout the bush, specializing in children’s nutritional diseases and leprosy. Tending to an average of 200 patients a day led to a heart attack and a long convalescence back in Barbour County. Soon bored and anxious to return to work, Berry became public health of¤cer for Barbour, Macon, and Bullock Counties, conducting clinics in one of Alabama’s poorest regions. After a brief return to Nigeria in 1972, she ¤lled out her life as a public health physician in the Alabama Black Belt. As impressive as Berry’s career was, the penultimate life experience belonged to Helen Keller. Born in Tuscumbia in 1880, Keller lost both sight and hearing to meningitis when she was 18 months old. Aided by her teacher and con¤dant Anne Sullivan, she learned to recognize words, sign, and even to talk. A voracious reader, Keller enrolled at Radcliffe, one of the nation’s premier women’s colleges, in 1900. In addition to taking the regular courses there and graduating with honors, Keller also wrote and published


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her autobiography while attending Radcliffe. Settling with her teacher in Wrentham, Massachusetts, Keller became a crusading socialist, opposing militarism and U.S. involvement in World War I, favoring birth control and woman suffrage, and opposing child labor. She also became the foremost activist on behalf of blind and handicapped people worldwide. Among other accomplishments, one of her speeches inspired Lions International to make eyesight conservation a major focus of its work. Nor did she allow personal tragedy to stunt her life. She hit golf balls in Scotland, rowed a boat guided only by the scent of grasses along the bank, performed in vaudeville and movies. She wrote 12 books that were translated into more than 50 languages, which sold millions of copies. Following her death in 1968, Keller became part of American legend. Paradoxically, a state that doggedly fought women’s rights and provided formidable barriers to their realization produced two of the century’s most in®uential women, Helen Keller and Rosa Parks. At the beginning of the 21st century, a Republican congressman with Libertarian principles proposed replacing one of the two of¤cial Alabama sculptures in the U.S. Capitol rotunda with a statue of Helen Keller. (In October 2002 the state announced that the federal mint’s new quarter celebrating Alabama statehood would feature the likeness of Keller, becoming the ¤rst U.S. coin minted with a braille inscription.) As decades passed, Alabama women continued to demolish barriers. Virginia Foster Durr used her husband’s residence in Washington, D.C., during the New Deal to launch her own campaign against the poll tax. In 1939 Dorothy Trabits of Mobile graduated from Vassar College. Granddaughter of a Confederate of¤cer, daughter of a wealthy timber baron, socialized in lily-white Mardi Gras royalty, the heritage didn’t take. Instead Trabits became an animal rights activist and a paci¤st, was arrested for trespassing on a Trident nuclear submarine base in Tacoma, Washington, raised a black child as her foster daughter, tried to enroll the girl in an allwhite Mobile school in 1956, and suffered Ku Klux Klan harassment. Near end-of-century Anita Armstrong Drummond became director of the Crime Victims Compensation Commission. She discovered to her horror that in Alabama rape victims had to pay for their own medical examinations, the only crime where the victim was charged for providing medical evidence in a criminal investigation. She learned that Alabama was the only


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state that had not applied for federal money to cover such exams. And she launched a crusade to change policy. The legacy of social protest also mobilized black women. Although their exclusion from the equal suffrage struggle had been a bitter blow, they simply constructed parallel reform organizations: black suffrage and women’s clubs; black reform movements on behalf of children, convicts, poor women, the mentally ill, and public schools. Ultimately their protests blended into civil rights activities that produced Jo Ann Robinson, Zecozy Ausborn Williams, and Rosa Parks.

The Social Rebellion of Youth For women born between the Civil War and the beginning of the 20th century—Loula Dunn and Loraine Bedsole Bush Tunstall, Pattie Jacobs and her AESA allies, Kathleen Mallory, Helen Keller, Dixie Graves— activism found natural expression in institutional reform. For women born at the end of the 19th or early in the 20th century, many of the old social norms and institutional involvements seemed irrelevant and antiquated. Their rebellion was more rooted in personal liberation than in social change. Especially for urban women, American society was in ®ux. Technological improvements—electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing, new kitchen appliances, store-purchased prepared foods and clothes, commercially baked bread—transformed lives and provided unprecedented freedom and leisure. Wider use of condoms and other birth control devices lowered birth rates; in 1900 married women had an average of 3.5 children, half the 1800 ¤gure. Greater af®uence and wider access to higher education allowed young middle-class women to employ servants who performed time-consuming housework and cared for smaller numbers of children. That, in turn, freed women to participate in mission and temperance societies, book and garden clubs, and to conduct political lobbying of local of¤cials and civic uplift. The increasing tendency of young women to avoid marriage as a social convenience in favor of “companionate marriage,” where they were considered equal partners in a mutually ful¤lling lifetime relationship, or simply to forgo marriage altogether, further eroded conventional patterns. Intellectually, the spread of Darwinian and Freudian ideas, the secularization of so-


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ciety, the erotic stimulation of cinema, pulp magazines, and novels, the lessened fear of pregnancy, the tumultuous effect of the First World War on religious certainty, the in®uence of existentialism and modernism, even the anonymity and privacy afforded teenagers by the newly perfected automobile, all combined to create a generation of youth unusually restive against inherited teachings and parental authority. It is therefore no surprise that the same generation that produced national iconoclasts such as Gertrude Stein, Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, and Alice Toklas produced Alabama reformers such as Helen Keller, Dixie Bibb Graves, Pattie Ruffner Jacobs, Kathleen Mallory, Loraine Tunstall, and Maud Kelly. Many married. Half of these six did not. Nor is it much of a surprise that the next generation (which produced modernists such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald) should also have produced Alabama iconoclasts such as Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Tallulah Bankhead, Sara Haardt Mencken, and Sara May¤eld. That Zelda, Tallulah, and the two Saras all called Montgomery home is one of the ¤ne ironies of Alabama history. A city consumed by politics, dominated by traditional values, and run by elite families who could trace their genealogy at least as far back as Jefferson Davis’s brief residency in the “capital of the Confederacy,” Montgomery was an unlikely incubator of social revolution. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young army of¤cer from Minnesota stationed there in 1917, described the city in legendary prose: “a languid paradise of dreamy skies and ¤re®y evenings . . . and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.”2 Not all the girls, it turned out, were soft voiced. And for them, money, fame, fun, and adventure mattered more than memory. Sara Haardt’s parents worked their way into the aristocracy, coming from a family that had ®ed Europe in the 1840s for the freedom of the American frontier. Though Episcopalian by religion, they joined that denomination primarily because it did not “interfere with people’s religion or their politics.”3 The Haardts were essentially freethinking liberals, a skeptical and tolerant family who bequeathed their values to their bookish, well-behaved daughter. Never enamored of the syrupy Lost Cause romanticism saturating Montgomery, Sara Haardt later used her ¤ction to debunk the city’s moral pretensions and hypocrisy. In the capital of a dry state, she wrote, one could always acquire any amount of scuppernong, dewberry,


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dandelion, or peach wine, especially during the season of church bazaars. She recalled old Captain Faulkner loitering near two Confederate cannons ®anking a long ®ight of steps leading up to the capitol entrance where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated ¤rst president of the Confederacy. Perched near the cannon as a child, she listened to Faulkner’s dramatic accounts of Pickett’s charge across the wheat ¤eld at Gettysburg. He must have known, Haardt mused, that Pickett had hidden behind a barn while his men charged. How like the South the omissions were; how irreconcilable. As soon as she could escape “this cloying, sickish, decadent land,” Haardt headed for Baltimore and Goucher College where a history major substituted honest research for her hometown’s mythic romance. At Goucher, her critical historical essays gave way to equally critical short stories. After a brief stint back in her hometown lobbying the legislature for the National Woman’s Party and equal suffrage, she taught several years at an elite private school, then ®ed the city for good. Returning to Baltimore to teach at Goucher and work on a Ph.D. in psychology, Haardt joined Sara May¤eld, her childhood friend from Montgomery, in a rari¤ed intellectual circle that included H. L. Mencken. Mencken—muckraking journalist, publisher of the Smart Set and American Mercury magazines, scholar of the English language—assumed the role of high priest of American intellectual iconoclasts during the Jazz Age. Debunker of fundamentalist religion, southern culture, American universities, and especially traditional marriage, Mencken found a soul mate in Haardt. Like him, she considered marriage a form of slavery and belittled the institution in essays published in American Mercury. Mencken knew all four of Montgomery’s femme fatales: Haardt, May¤eld, Sayre, and Bankhead. Their ®amboyant disregard for convention and Confederate tradition charmed and delighted him. But his affection for Haardt deepened beyond admiration to love. After a seven-year courtship, they married amid much good humor at their expense. The August 18, 1930, New York Times jibed: “Elected: Henry Louis Mencken, babbitbaiting editor of The American Mercury, to honorary membership in the Kiwanis Club of Montgomery, Ala., hometown of Miss Sara Haardt who he last fortnight engaged to marry.”4 Grover Hall, acerbic editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, congratulated Sara for bringing down and taming “the great rogue elephant of Mt. Celi-


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bate.” Though Sara’s tragic death of meningitis in 1935 cut short their nearidyllic marriage, a mellower couple belatedly rediscovered the charms of Montgomery even if they did not budge from their criticism of Alabama’s romanticism and unreality. Sara Haardt Mencken was two years senior to Zelda Sayre, and the families lived only seven blocks apart. Though the cerebral Sara attended an elite private girl’s school and Zelda the new public Sidney Lanier High, their paths often crossed socially. Beyond physical proximity and similar rebellious streaks, they had little in common. Two articles that appeared on the same page of the Montgomery Advertiser’s society column captured the differences: Zelda announced her engagement to F. Scott Fitzgerald; Sara was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Zelda’s family was better connected politically than Haardt’s (Anthony D. Sayre—son of a former Montgomery newspaper editor and nephew of the man who built the Confederate White House—had served in both houses of the legislature, had authored one of Alabama’s early laws to disfranchise blacks, and had been elected to the supreme court). But Zelda’s artistic and independent-minded mother, an avid reader and would-be actress, named her daughter for a gypsy queen from one of her favorite novels. Raised in a tree-lined neighborhood of lovely homes that outsiders referred to contemptuously as the province of the “elite and sanitary,” Zelda experienced a secure, adventurous, and spoiled childhood. Biographer Sara May¤eld described her as a “wild grapevine grafted onto the traditional stock in a Confederate vineyard, and one with a rare, intoxicating ®avor of its own.” Zelda described herself less complexly: “I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.” Caught up in the zaniness of the war years, Zelda (May¤eld and other friends nicknamed her “Baby”) was a rebel and an exhibitionist who smoked, drank, bobbed her hair, raised her hemlines (moralists raged that “we get our styles from New York, New York from Paris, and Paris from hell”), danced the shimmy, Charleston, and Black Bottom, paraded through town in a shocking ®esh-colored knit bathing suit, persuaded all her senior high school classmates to play hooky, and scandalized her parents with her “boodling” (necking) and numerous ®irtations. Never did a high school yearbook better capture the spirit of a student. The editor wrote beneath


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her senior picture: “Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let’s only think of today, and not worry about tomorrow.” Though Zelda never lacked for beaux, being the object of primary affection for ¤ve Auburn University football players at one time, the war brought hordes of new admirers. Aviators from Taylor Field buzzed her house and dropped ®owers. Of¤cers from Camp Sheridan swarmed dances at the country club, hoping to dance with her. (One rival remembered that when Zelda appeared at a dance, “the Birmingham girls just went on home. No more hope for a dance that evening.”) One biographer wrote simply: Zelda “lived on the cream at the top of the bottle.” A month after graduation from Sidney Lanier, Zelda met young Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, Minnesota native, and aspiring novelist. Sara May¤eld contends the Jazz Age began that July night in 1918 at the Montgomery Country Club. Their iconoclasm, like that of the Menckens, seemed to stimulate and complement each other. Following a stormy and irregular courtship (including Zelda’s refusal to marry her lover until he successfully published his ¤rst novel), they married in April 1920. Their lives during the 1920s pretty much de¤ned “®aming youth.” They became the characters in Fitzgerald’s novels. They drank to excess, spent money as if there were no tomorrow, dove in fountains fully clothed in evening attire, became expatriates to France, and engaged in continuing ®irtations. Back in Montgomery for a visit in 1921, Zelda attended a masked ball with a Hawaiian theme where she stole the show. One anonymous dancer turned her back to the audience, lifted her grass skirt over her head to reveal her pantied posterior, which she gave an extra wiggle for good measure. A murmur swept through the crowd: “That’s Zelda!” And so it was. Literary critic Edmund Wilson described Zelda as “a barbarian princess from the South.” Despite her adolescent escapades and deepening mental problems, Zelda was a talented dancer, artist, and writer in her own right. Not only did she publish short stories and an autobiographical novel (Save Me the Waltz), more importantly she faithfully recorded observations in a journal that became a major source of information for her husband. Scott used entire passages from her diary and letters in his novels (Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned). Her husband, she wrote laconi-


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cally, “seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” One of Zelda’s biographers even suggests that she played such a major role in her husband’s literary production that she became in essence an unrecognized coauthor. As the couple’s lives descended into adultery, alcoholism, and self-destructive narcissism, Zelda veered toward born-again religion and ethereal art. Increasingly abandoned by Scott, she wrote movingly, “I don’t need anything except hope, which I can’t ¤nd by looking backward or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to shut my eyes.”5 Finally institutionalized because of her erratic behavior, she died in a ¤re in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. Sara May¤eld was half a decade younger than Zelda and seven years younger than Sara Haardt, but admired both women. Like Zelda’s, her father was an erudite and respected member of the state supreme court. Like Sara Haardt, she moved to Baltimore where she joined H. L. Mencken’s social circle. She became a newspaper reporter, a close observer of the intellectual elite, and a ¤ne biographer of her two older Montgomery friends. Zelda was a hell-raiser who in the end repented of her past and became a born-again Christian. To anyone’s sure and certain knowledge, Tallulah Bankhead never repented of anything, remaining without question one of the most uninhibited and ®amboyant women of the 20th century. Born in Huntsville, Tallulah was blessed with a famous last name but cursed with a dysfunctional family. Her mother died two weeks after her birth, and Tallulah’s alcoholic father packed his two daughters off to his family in Jasper. There Tallulah attended school, terrorized her grandmother and aunt, and developed what she called her “mezzo-basso” voice, the result of childhood illnesses and a tonsillectomy. After Tallulah ¤nished the fourth grade, her Jasper relatives sent her to live in Montgomery with her aunt Marie Bankhead Owen. The capital city proved no more capable of containing her exuberance than had Jasper. In 1917 Tallulah (or “Dutch” as her friends called her) won a movie magazine contest. Her prize—an all-expense trip to New York City, a weekly salary of $25, and a chance to act—proved irresistible to a stagestruck adolescent. So at age 16 Tallulah left Alabama to live in the Big Apple, chaperoned by her chronically frustrated aunt Louise, who despaired of controlling the strong-willed teenager. She had already discovered what everyone close to Tallulah would learn: “I do not believe any human on earth can control her.”6 When Tallu-


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lah ¤nally won a small part in a play, Marie Bankhead Owen, fearing her young niece would scandalize the family, telegraphed the budding starlet: “Remember you’re a Bankhead.” The message became garbled and arrived: “Remember You’re a Blockhead.”7 Tallulah was amused by it all. The Bankhead family found little amusing in Tallulah’s subsequent career. At wit’s end, Aunt Louise gave up. She returned to Jasper, leaving Tallulah in a suite at the Algonquin Hotel, the unof¤cial literary capital of New York during the Jazz Age. As chaperone Tallulah had her French maid. It was not an ideal arrangement, although at age 20 Tallulah proclaimed herself still a “technical virgin”—a technicality that her years in London would eradicate. That “technicality” allowed women subscribing to the New Freedom considerable latitude. Her friend Sara May¤eld observed that “from the Confederate point of view, the sin was in the saying.”8 Tallulah left for London in 1923, where she spent the ensuing eight years. She appeared in a dozen plays, won critical acclaim, earned a fanatical following among London women (especially from the working class), and achieved notoriety for highly publicized sexual liaisons with both men and women. When Tallulah returned to America in 1930 under contract to Paramount Pictures, she was touted as the next Marlene Dietrich. But the fame that attached to Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes eluded her. She starred in a succession of poorly directed ¤lms with uniformly dreadful plots. Her one brush with immortality (David O. Selznick considered her for the lead role in Gone with the Wind) evaporated when her screen test revealed Tallulah to be a bit too old and worldly-wise to carry off the antebellum scenes of a teenage Scarlett O’Hara. (She might have done better as the older and wiser Scarlett, money-grubbing, amoral, and sexually liberated.) Undaunted by her failure, Tallulah returned to Broadway where she originated the starring role of Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, a play by Lillian Hellman, inspired by the playwright’s Jewish ancestors in Demopolis, Alabama. The role won Tallulah the coveted Variety magazine’s award for best performance by an actress. She won a similar award from the New York Drama critics in 1942 for her striking performance in The Skin of Our Teeth. Two years later, fame struck again when the New York Film Critics


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best actress award went to Tallulah for her role in the movie Lifeboat. In all, she starred in 50 stage plays, 20 movies, and numerous radio and television dramas. Professional success never ¤lled the insecurity that propelled her life toward self-destruction. When she returned from London, she had already perfected the persona that would make her famous: cigarette clasped ¤rmly between the ¤ngers of one hand, glass of bourbon in the other; deep voice belting out an undiscriminating “dahling” to whomever she met, whether longtime Alabama friend or brand new acquaintance; substance abuse; theatrical exhibitionism. Gretchen Gray Weinstein, a Jasper native and Birmingham News reporter, sought an interview with Tallulah in the summer of 1942. Fresh from rave reviews for her performance as Regina Giddens, Tallulah could not have been more gracious when Weinstein requested an interview. The reporter’s dilemma was what to wear when interviewing such a famous person. She need not have worried. When she arrived at the Bankhead home in Jasper, a houseman greeted her, carrying a tray with two drinks. “Miss Tallulah is expecting you. She’s out in the garden,” he announced. He led her to the garden where Tallulah was indeed present, naked as the day she was born, sunbathing. She made no attempt to cover herself during the interview as the embarrassed and obviously overdressed reporter sipped her drink and took notes for the article. Tallulah summarized her own life (she died of complications from emphysema at age 66 in 1968) better than any biographer: “Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.” Work Of the many forms of liberation offered women in the 20th century, none was more important than the opportunity to earn their own living. Often made dependent by the death of parents or husbands or the stinginess and abuse of spouses, most women had neither educational nor vocational skills that allowed them to cope. When women were married to men who believed in biblical principles of mutual submission, who were generous and supportive of their stay-at-home wives, who respected and assisted them in caring for children, or who performed housework when their help was needed, economic dependency was only a dreaded future possibility. When


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such marriages were not the case, or for single, widowed, separated, or divorced women, life could be hard indeed. Myrtle R. Rockett of Birmingham, a 29-year-old mother of three who had been married seven years, wrote ¤rst lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934 describing an imperfect marriage. Her mother was critically ill with tuberculosis and living with her sister, whose income was not even suf¤cient for her own needs. Rockett’s 14-year-old sister could not afford to attend school. Rockett’s husband—an “old fashioned Lord and Master type” male —refused to give her an allowance. Though he owned a business and provided ample food, clothes, and education for his own children, he refused ¤nancial help for his in-laws. Myrtle Rockett could not seek employment because of her three children, the youngest only 2 months old. The birth of four children (one apparently had died) in seven years had left her exhausted. She offered to do domestic work in their eight-room house— including laundry, cooking, and sewing then performed by a maid—if her husband would give her the ¤ve dollars a week he paid their servant. She could, in turn, use this money to help her mother and sister. He would not consent to this arrangement either. She had considered divorce, but it was “quite a moral responsibility to deprive the children of a natural home life if it is possible to keep it intact.”9 And besides, Alabama granted divorces only on grounds of cruelty and adultery. What should she do? A later generation would have lots of answers to that question. Grounds for divorce were less complicated, jobs for women more accessible. For Rockett’s generation, resolution was dif¤cult. And it was in the intersection of gender and work that so many similar life dramas unfolded. The world of woman’s work contained a multitude of layers, from unpaid house and family work such as that negotiated by Myrtle Rockett to CEOs of businesses. When the 20th century began, Alabama listed 3 female lawyers among 1,600 attorneys (apparently none of them members of the state bar), 18 of 2,230 ministers, 16 of 2,113 physicians. More than two-thirds of employed women worked on farms, most as tenants or sharecroppers, many as heads of families. White women composed nearly half of all textile workers, though they earned far less than their male counterparts. By 1929, the First World War and the suffrage movement had unlocked many doors of opportunity, though most women still labored in traditional women’s jobs. In Montgomery, 4,000 women earned salaries: 28 percent


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worked in factories and mills, 25 percent as secretaries, 21 percent as professional women (physicians, journalists, nurses, teachers), and 20 percent as store clerks. Professional women included Zelda Sayre’s older sister, Rosalind, who became one of the ¤rst women from a prominent Montgomery family to earn a living in an occupation other than teaching. When she became a teller at First National Bank, local legend recounts, men formed a queue outside the bank to stare at her through the windows. Many elite residents of Cloverdale scolded her father for allowing his daughter to enter such a crass occupation. Marie Bankhead Owen was another Montgomery woman who took advantage of newly expanded opportunities. There is no small irony in her story. Despite her ¤erce opposition to woman suffrage, no woman used the new freedom to greater advantage than the legendary “Miss Marie” (pronounced “Mair-ee”). Happily married to her lawyer-archivist husband until his sudden death in 1920, Marie then pro¤ted from 1920s style liberation. Her unprecedented political connections didn’t hurt any. (Her father and older brother were U.S. senators and her younger brother became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives during the New Deal.) Miss Marie was a formidable lady in her own right. Though often jovial and soft-spoken, those who crossed her soon discovered how she earned the nickname “Tiger Lady.” Deportment mattered to southern ladies. But there were limits. On one occasion she ran into a truck on the way to her Wetumpka farm. A split tongue and busted knee sent her to the hospital. The tongue rendered her mute and generated a frantic written message to the attending physician: “To hell with the kneecap, Doctor, but a Bankhead without a tongue is no good to the State of Alabama.”10 At age 53 Marie used both her natural talents and political connections to have herself named to replace her husband as head of the state archives. For 35 years thereafter, until her retirement in 1955 at 85, she remained synonymous with Alabama history. She completed her husband’s un¤nished History of Alabama, then began an ambitious writing career of her own. But her greatest contribution may well have been the use of her famous brother’s political leverage to obtain $600,000 in Federal Emergency Relief Administration funds to build a magni¤cent new state archives building across the street from the state capitol. Ironically, the reformist Loraine Tunstall and


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the conservative Marie Bankhead Owen became the ¤rst women to head state agencies within little more than a year of each other. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created another new category of professional women. More familiarly known as the farm extension act, SmithLever created a cooperative extension service designed to transmit knowledge from land grant universities to working farms. Male county agents served that function for male farmers. Female home demonstration agents worked with wives, daughters, and some women heads of families. When organized in January 1921 at a conference in Auburn, the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation was designed as a nonpolitical organization to lower production costs and to market crops better. But from the beginning, the symbiotic relationship between Auburn’s cooperative extension program and the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation dominated all aspects of extension work. Evidence for this conclusion could be found on every hand. Annual meetings of the Alabama Council of Home Demonstration Clubs coincided with the Farm Bureau state convention (wives of Farm Bureau leaders often served as of¤cers of home demonstration clubs). County Farm Bureaus often paid a portion of salaries for county agents. As a result, home demonstration agents submitted their programs to county Farm Bureau of¤cials for consideration. Following adoption, the County Home Demonstration Council decided how to implement programs approved and funded at least partly by the Farm Bureau. The president of the State Home Demonstration Clubs Council became an ex-of¤cio member of the executive committee of the Farm Bureau. Not surprisingly given these relationships, home demonstration during the 1920s functioned essentially as an agency that assisted planters and well-to-do commercial farmers. Mary Wigley, one of the ¤rst home demonstration agents in Cullman County, described in her diary how the Farm Bureau helped recruit female members for her clubs. County merchants, who pro¤ted from the crop lien system that impoverished tenants and small farmers, opposed her work and demanded that Auburn University send the county “a home demonstration agent who can make biscuits and cake and can’t make a speech.”11 Another agent, Gladys Tappan, even meddled with gender relations in 1924, urging the Montgomery County Farm Bureau to elect women farmers to bureau membership and organize a women’s bu-


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reau to coordinate demonstration work. She had already accomplished the reforms in Dallas and Perry Counties. Although Alabama Farm Bureau was soon immersed neck deep in Alabama politics on behalf of conservative candidates, its support of home demonstration work multiplied professional opportunities for rural women. Most white female agents had at least a few years of formal education at Auburn (black agents usually studied at Tuskegee University, which served as headquarters for black cooperative extension work). By 1930 27 white home demonstration agents held bachelor’s degrees; 3 had master’s degrees; and only 13 lacked a college diploma. Their annual salaries ranged from $2,445 to $4,300, not small amounts in the ¤rst year of the Great Depression. Black agents received average annual salaries of only $1,200 a year, a discrimination that would lead to years of litigation. Female agents of both races came mainly from farm families and successfully tapped into a market of farm women. The number of white home demonstration clubs increased from 232 in 1923 to 438 in 1930, black clubs from 111 to 272. With the coming of the Great Depression, the home demonstration agenda began to change. Many agents were genuinely appalled at the rural poverty and plummeting fortunes of small landowners. To help struggling families, demonstration agents began programs to train farm women to produce supplemental income. They taught them to make pinestraw baskets, provided canning machines for surplus fruits and vegetables, and began urban curb markets where women could sell farm products and crafts and at the same time socialize with one another. By 1927 there were 18 curb markets generating $313,000 in additional farm income. By the late 1930s the Farm Security Administration (FSA) utilized county agents to work with tenant farmers chosen for FSA assistance. And FSA urged its female clients to join home demonstration clubs. Federal extension service policies during subsequent decades mandated greater interest in blacks and poor whites, and ACES (Alabama Cooperative Extension Services) began a ¤ve-year pilot project among low-income rural Alabamians during the 1960s. Suits by black agents also moved ACES toward more equitable salaries and desegregated administration. Though progress was painfully slow and Auburn often dragged its feet on implementation, ACES gradually turned more attention to community development in poor counties, reduced and sometimes eliminated disparities be-


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tween black/white, male/female agents, and hired women for top-level administrative positions. Such progress mirrored glacial changes in Alabama society. Labor unions hired skilled women organizers such as Eula McGill, a tall, gregarious Gadsden textile worker who went to work in the mills at age 14 in 1925. When the mill cut her wages to six dollars a week at the beginning of the Depression, she moved to a Birmingham mill, joined the Women’s Trade Union League, and was promptly ¤red when owners discovered her af¤liation. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union hired her as an organizer, and she traveled throughout the South, recruiting members for nearly half a century until her retirement in 1982. Although no union organizer had an easy time during those decades, she recalled that women had an even harder time because of sexual harassment and company attempts to “frame her.” Not all opposition came from companies. In 1979 Laurie Thrasher became 1 of 16 women coal miners among 600 male colleagues at Concord Mine run by U.S. Steel. A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a degree in art from the prestigious state university there, Thrasher came to Birmingham hoping to work as a potter. When no art work materialized, she went to work as a coal miner. Harassed by male miners and largely ignored by company supervisors, Thrasher became president of the Association of Women in Industry, a group of 50 Birmingham-area women employed in traditionally male industrial jobs. The group encouraged union membership, fostered unity among black and white women, and combated male harassment. That same year, parties unknown burned cars belonging to Sara Jean Johnston and Geraldine Lattimore, both Birmingham coal miners who had distributed copies of a Socialist Workers Party newspaper, the Militant, to fellow miners. The paper had criticized safety conditions at the Jim Walter Resources coal mine at Brookwood where the women worked. The incident occurred on August 16, 1979, one day after the Birmingham Post-Herald article about Laurie Thrasher. Such harassment was not unusual for women trying to open doors long closed to them. Bessie Ibsen, who became Mobile’s ¤rst female police of¤cer in 1962 (and allegedly the ¤rst policewoman in state history), complained nearly 40 years later after her retirement that she had been relegated to a menial desk job, denied permission to take an examination required


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for promotion to sergeant (the exams, she was told, were for policemen, not policewomen). She threatened to sue in federal court and ¤nally was allowed to take the exam. Nor were white-collar professions much better. Alexander City lawyer Elizabeth Johnson Wilbanks wrote an article in 1951 detailing the way senior members of the Alabama Bar discriminated against female attorneys. Historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, arguably the state’s most proli¤c and respected historian during the 1970s and ’80s, detailed her own nightmarish odyssey into academia. Despite full-time work as a journalist and family responsibilities involving her husband and children, Hamilton began commuting 120 miles a day to the University of Alabama, the nearest location of a Ph.D. program in history. The all-male faculty during the 1960s offered scant encouragement. One faculty member con¤dently predicted that her dream would end in failure, and another refused to direct a dissertation on the Scottsboro rape case, arguing that the topic was inappropriate for a woman. Forced to conform to university residency requirements, Hamilton had to sleep a few nights each week in a graduate women’s dormitory only an hour’s drive from her home, a dorm that contemptuous male students sometimes referred to as “Lesbian Hall.” When Hamilton became the second female student to receive a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alabama in 1968, she entered a profession not kindly disposed to her. In a chilling recitation of discrimination against other distinguished pioneer Alabama historians—Hallie Farmer, Lucille Grif¤th, Frances Roberts—Hamilton detailed a record of salary discrimination, preference for males in administrative jobs, and general lack of academic recognition. Commerce operated a lot like academe: with barriers, pitfalls, and even animosity toward aggressive females. Traditional corporations moved ponderously to incorporate women into higher management. By 2001 women occupied only 25 of 432 board seats on 42 publicly traded companies legally based in Alabama (a minuscule 6 percent). A Women’s Fund survey of 15 Birmingham-area companies revealed that of 250 board members, only 3 percent were women. The Women’s Fund of Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham reported in 2000 that Alabama ranked dead last among all states for women in management and professional occupations. Women did gain some beachheads in upper management, especially


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in banking. Maria Bouchelle Campbell became executive vice president and general counsel of AmSouth Bank corporation. Ann Dial McMillan, daughter of a prominent Birmingham businessman, won her own place of in®uence as vice president and director of community affairs for SouthTrust Bank. McMillan’s position in community affairs was often open to women, but men traditionally occupied Campbell’s post. With top corporate jobs unavailable, women found more opportunity starting their own companies. June Collier of Montgomery became CEO of National Apparel Inc., the largest manufacturer of chemical warfare protective clothing to the military, and National Industries Inc., one of the world’s 10 largest producers of automotive wiring systems. Joan Perry and Theresa Harper-Bruno hit dead ends with Birmingham advertising ¤rms before joining forces to establish their own business. Kimberly Oden-Webster served as CEO of a human resources consulting ¤rm in Leeds. Carlena Bray became president of Human Resources Services in Homewood, and Linda Geiss published the Women’s Exchange, a Birmingham area business directory. She also helped plan an annual Women’s Economic Summit, a two-day gathering to lubricate the passage of women into better entrepreneurial opportunities. Ironically, the same report that placed Alabama last among women managers and professionals placed that state above the national average in the growth rate of women-owned companies. Perhaps Alabama’s most fascinating and original women’s startup company was one that traded on regional distinctiveness. Deborah Faye Ford grew up in the Tennessee Valley community of Elkmont, daughter of a sharecropper. She chopped and picked cotton until age 12, and her mother taught her how to sew. She gave up cotton picking but mastered the sewing. A college degree in sociology and physical education, work as a juvenile probation of¤cer, counselor, teacher, and women’s volleyball coach, sandwiched around marriage, childbirth, and divorce, provided too little income to survive. So she bought old chenille bedspreads at garage sales and supplemented her income by making unique clothes. Harsh life experiences, strong selfidentity and regional pride converged at a 1995 “hen party” where likeminded female friends gabbed about the special qualities of “girls raised in the South.” A ®ash of inspiration provided Ford a marketable acronym: GRITS. She immediately screen-printed 15 volleyball shirts for her girls’ team,


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birthing a multimillion dollar enterprise. The mothers of team members wanted shirts. So did their friends. A trip to the Atlanta Apparel Mart widened the market beyond Birmingham; she returned with $65,000 worth of orders. In 2000, sales topped $1 million. “Southern women are more different than any other group in the world,” Ford explained, and her marketing proved it.12 GRITS chapters sprouted in all sorts of unlikely places, even in Seattle, Washington. Seasoned GRITS designated “Grandmothers Raised in the South.” “Girls Raised in Tennis Skirts” took the slogan in the direction of Southern Living’s image of southern womanhood. If anyone doubted it, Deborah Faye Ford proved conclusively that steel magnolias not only existed in the Heart of Dixie, they also knew how to market a product and make a buck (or millions of them). Successful women cautioned that Alabamians often resented them in corporate leadership roles. Good old boy networks, usually originating at birth to prominent families and cultivated by fraternity systems at the state’s universities, made upward mobility for ambitious and capable women unnecessarily dif¤cult. The network often allowed women into lower echelon management, then excluded them from golf courses, athletic events, and cocktail circuits where real deals were made and careers launched. Such exclusion partly explained why the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 2002 ranked the state in the bottom third nationwide in every indicator of women’s well-being. The tragedy of such realities for Alabama was the dawning realization that female CEOs often modi¤ed corporate culture in important ways: Studies indicated that businesses run by women tended to be more inclusive, more inclined toward teamwork, more concerned with reliable and safe child care for employees, and more interested in health, education, child, and quality of life issues within the communities where they located. Education Surprising as it may seem, colleges were not much more welcoming of females than corporations. Virginia Hamilton discovered that the hard way in graduate school. So did many other women. After Julia Tutwiler began lobbying for coeducation in the late 19th century, Auburn became, in 1892, the ¤rst state university to admit women. A year later the University of Ala-


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bama followed suit. Howard College and other private denominational colleges opened their doors to women about the same time. Admission did not necessarily mean inclusion. At Auburn, professors seldom called on women in class. That was often just as well because many coeds were reluctant to state their own opinions in the presence of mostly male classmates. By 1920 only 18 women were enrolled in a student body of 1,000 (1.7 percent female). That same year the University of Alabama enrolled 293 women among its 1,600 students (17.6 percent). Not until 1961 did Auburn coeds represent a quarter of the student body. And even on the Tuscaloosa campus, coeds complained about male rudeness. Auburn president Spright Dowell, who would later be forced out as president because of insuf¤cient support for the football program, led Auburn’s integration of females during the early 1920s. He made resources available to strengthen home economics, improved training for home demonstration students, converted a dorm to campus housing for women, and appointed the ¤rst dean of women. In 1920 women graduates also helped organize one of the ¤rst female organizations, the Co-Ed Club, to improve the social and academic life of female students. A women’s athletic association appeared on campus, and a women’s basketball team played intercollegiate games. Coeds organized the Auburn Women’s Student Government Association in 1922. The next year its president received her degree in electrical engineering, the ¤rst female to take a degree from that college. Not all problems were resolved so easily. Requiring women to wear full skirts around dangerous equipment could be hazardous to health and modesty. One coed’s skirt was caught in a dynamo that simply cut it off. The professor, legendary Dr. Charles Isbell, calmly tied two aprons around the horri¤ed student and sent her back to her room to change clothes. Nor did the emancipated 1920s or the depressed 1930s alter hostile male culture. As late as 1940 a condescending male columnist in the Auburn Plainsman complained how rare it was to meet a woman at Auburn “who has even the scrap of an independent intellect”; but “Pop always said that women weren’t made to think anyway.”13 With such opinionated males about to ship off for war, women assumed most leadership roles, including the ¤rst females to edit the Plainsman or serve as president of the senior class. In 1942 the dean of women, her entire staff, all dormitory heads, her secretary, and the president of the Women’s


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Student Government Association resigned over the president’s intervention in a discipline case involving a coed. The campus was soon in an uproar, with coeds supporting the dean and males backing the president. Too bad the 1940 Plainsman editor had graduated. He would have met enough independent female intellects to rethink his earlier opinions. Auburn had no monopoly on independent-minded women. The state women’s college in Montevallo produced generations of such leaders. Born in Indiana, Hallie Farmer graduated from Indiana State University before enrolling at the University of Wisconsin where she earned a Ph.D. in history in 1927. She chose to teach at the women’s college of Alabama in Montevallo. Her mother and sister came with her to the small, underfunded campus and begged her to return home for better opportunities. Farmer stayed. And from 1927 until her retirement in 1956 she modeled citizenship to a generation of female students. She authored the de¤nitive Legislative Process in Alabama, explaining how ordinary citizens could in®uence legislation. She advocated adding women to juries, abolishing the poll tax, ending arbitrary tests that registrars administered to prospective voters, banning the use of whips on state convicts, establishing a School of Citizenship to teach women how laws were passed, establishing a state merit system and a pardon and parole board. Practicing what she preached, Farmer became the ¤rst woman elected to the city council. She also held national of¤ces in the American Association of University Women and state of¤ces in the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. After leading the college faculty for two decades and serving under a series of male administrators, Farmer turned down the trustees’ offer of the presidency. “It’s too late,” Farmer responded: “I don’t have the strength for that job now.”14 Farmer’s failing strength resulted from a lifetime of plowing a barren ¤eld where many female successors would harvest abundant crops. During the ¤nal third of the century, Judy Merritt emerged as one of Birmingham’s signi¤cant leaders. Merritt became vice president of Florida International University in Miami in 1975. Four years later, she was appointed president of Jefferson State Junior College, one of the few women presidents chosen to head a junior college in a system renowned for its good old boy cronyism and Montgomery political connections. Merritt, who held a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama and had been an administrator at Jefferson State


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in the 1960s, promoted the campus into a major community resource of more than 7,000 students. And honor followed honor: Exxon Foundation selection as one of the nation’s most effective college presidents; selection as one of the nation’s top 50 community college administrators by researchers at the University of Texas; Birmingham Woman of the Year (1983); Boss of the Year (1985). The University of Alabama at Birmingham, the least traditional and hidebound of the state’s major universities, was predictably the ¤rst to select a female president. After a stormy tenure by the strong-minded W. Ann Reynolds, UAB made it two women in a row when trustees selected the gentler Carol Z. Garrison as president at the beginning of the 21st century. Garrison, who held a specialized nursing degree from the university, had risen rapidly in the expanding world of women administrators and had her pick of several university presidencies. Her choice of UAB placed a woman in charge of the state’s largest research institution, a rarity at the time. Religion For the most part, education by century’s end was far more hospitable to female leadership than religion. Here and there (sometimes where one least expected it) women freely and quietly exercised the ministries to which they believed God had called them. Early in the century, the most likely congregations to welcome women ministers consisted of those on the margins of religious life: churches such as the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, the Assemblies of God, Nazarene, or Holiness. As decades passed and the women’s movement won support in mainline denominations, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians encouraged women to prepare for ministry (though they were often less willing to employ women or promote them to the status of senior pastor than to wish them Godspeed on their way to seminary). Baptists, the state’s dominant denomination, was also the most reluctant to af¤rm women ministers. And in this regard black Baptists differed little from whites. During the 20th century only a single white Baptist woman found a church willing to accept her as pastor. But that one exception proved quite a story. Ruby Welsh Wilkins joined Antioch Baptist Church near Wadley in east central Alabama in the 1940s when the exodus of rural people had reduced


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church membership to only two. She worked hard to attract new members, and in 1948 felt called to preach. Her Baptist deacon father supported her; her husband and pastor did not. She deferred her call through various male pastoral tenures, none of them successful in terms of growing church membership. In 1970 the church licensed her to preach, considering the risk worth taking since the dwindling congregation had nothing to lose. Or so it thought. The Tallapoosa Baptist Association promptly expelled Antioch, and no male pastor would participate in Wilkins’s ordination. But miraculously, the church prospered. Members reworked the basement, installed new lights, replaced windows and pews, and began weekly services. Wilkins preached a revival, baptized new converts, and performed funerals. As a bivocational minister, she worked full time as a sewing machine operator at a mill in Wadley. She also kept house for her husband and children. As a child of the Great Depression, Wilkins had been unable to attend college. Believing her ministerial duties required such preparation, she enrolled at Southern Union Community College and graduated with a perfect 4.0 average at age 72. Though Baptist fundamentalists condemned her career choice and tried to sabotage her church, she endured, believing that God was not ¤nished with Antioch church: “Nadir may yet widen to apogee; the phoenix may rise again. However that may be, we shall continue our labor of love.”15 Baptist women did better in denominational employment. National and state WMU staffs consisted mainly of women; state Alabama Baptist Convention CEO Earl Potts hired a woman as his chief assistant; and the denomination’s historical society employed the historian Frances Hamilton as its full-time director. But these were exceptions in a denomination usually apathetic or hostile to women preachers and leaders and determined that the proper biblical role for women was submission to the authority of men. By end-of-century disagreement over the role of women had become a major factor in the division of Baptist and Presbyterian churches into moderate and conservative camps. Politics Politics proved an equally frustrating venue for women. In this dimension of state life, Alabama women were only marginally more disadvantaged


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than their regional cohorts. In 1995 only 1 of 8 female U.S. senators was a southerner, only 11 of 48 female congressmen. Southern state legislatures lagged behind other states in selecting women (4 percent of southern legislators in 1975 were women, only 14 percent 20 years later). Florida led all southern states in 1995 with 31 women lawmakers. Alabama ranked last nationwide with only 6. The evolution of women’s political power in 20th-century Alabama was glacially slow. The tiny Lawrence County community of Hillsboro, population 250, elected a woman mayor and six female aldermen in 1940. None of them made any promises or articulated any platform. Voters explained that they ¤gured the women couldn’t be any worse than the men. Where women won, this refrain was common. Nina Miglionico and Angie Proctor, one the daughter of Italian immigrants and the other a daughter of a federal judge, were elected to Birmingham’s city council in 1971. By voting with the council’s two black councilmen, they split the body between reformers and conservative white male segregationists. Four years later, the ¤rst black woman elected to the council, Bessie Estelle, gave reformers a permanent majority. In 1972 Elizabeth Bullock Andrews won a seat in Congress to replace her husband who had held the post for nearly 28 years before his death. She was a University of Montevallo graduate who took seriously Hallie Farmer’s admonitions of active citizenship. Andrews’s victory proved ephemeral. No other woman was elected to Congress during the century. And in 2000 only 1 of Jefferson County’s 13 cities had a female mayor. Women held only a ¤fth of Jefferson County’s 107 county commission and city council seats. They occupied the same ratio of 239 state public board positions statewide but less than a seventh of the state’s circuit and district judgeships. Between 1922 and 1983 19 women served in the state legislature; until the 1970s no more than 1 served in any single session, an extreme example of isolation and marginalization. Between the single term of Hattie Hooker Wilkins in 1922 and Sybil Pool in 1936, no woman was elected to the legislature. But Pool won reelection in 1938 and again in 1942, beginning a 34-year political career that included elected terms as secretary of state, state treasurer, and as a member of the Public Service Commission. Also a graduate of the University of Montevallo, Pool believed Hallie Farmer when


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the professor assured her she could become whatever she chose to be. Of course, Pool was an unusual woman for her time, preferring hunting to sewing and cooking. If Alabamians gave preference to a woman, it tended to be one who knew how to handle a ri®e or shotgun. After Pool, no woman sat in the legislature until Clara Stone Fields from Mobile in 1962. An honors graduate of the University of Alabama with a degree in chemistry, Fields did not ¤t the traditional pro¤le of successful women politicians. Nonetheless, her colleagues selected her one of three outstanding freshmen legislators. But she lost a race for Congress in 1964 and her house seat in 1970. Several women served in the 1970s, two at the same time in 1977 (a ¤rst in Alabama history) and three together in 1978. By the end of that year, ¤ve women lawmakers tended state business, including two black women. Among them were a pair of the legislature’s ¤nest and most respected members, both from Mobile: Democrat Mary Stephens Zoghby and Republican Ann Bedsole. After a single term in the house, Bedsole served 12 years in the senate, resigning to run for governor in 1994. Male senators expressed their displeasure at having a woman in their ranks; the ¤rst meeting of the educational committee to which she was assigned met in the men’s toilet in order to keep her from attending. But colleagues grudgingly came to respect her, and they often needed her vote. Her gender was also a factor in the Republican gubernatorial primary, where opponents echoed arguments rampant in the party’s religious right wing. Bedsole sought to redress women’s political disadvantage by helping form the Alabama Solution, a bipartisan political action committee to encourage women candidates at all levels of state government. During the early 1990s three such groups sprang up: Hope Chest in Mobile, the Alabama Solution in Birmingham, and Focus 2020 in Huntsville-Decatur. Because each expressed the same objectives—to attract women candidates and help fund their campaigns—they merged in 1993. During the next two years, Alabama Solution raised $140,000 to support 30 female candidates in both parties. Their efforts made little difference. The 1993 legislature contained 8 women; the 1999 body, 11. At century’s end, the state still ranked last in the number of women of¤ceholders. But some women had served suf¤ciently long to have mastered the leg-


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islative ropes: they were charged with ethics violations for taking bribes. Others made a difference in both legislative decorum and policies. State senator Vivian Davis Figures of Mobile insisted that women staffers be allowed to wear pantsuits. An unof¤cial bipartisan women’s caucus helped pass laws requiring that insurance companies cover mammograms and prohibiting so-called drive-through deliveries of babies that forced new mothers out of hospitals within 24 hours of giving birth. They helped rewrite domestic violence laws, and all this despite chairing only 2 of 47 standing legislative committees. They also complimented male colleagues for treating them courteously and with respect, a far cry from the way legislators had treated newcomer Ann Bedsole two decades earlier. As candidates, women learned what men already knew: it was hard to win ¤rst time out or without adequate funding. The more females ran, the better their chances of winning. And the more females who ran, the more likely their numbers were to increase. In 2000, women at least possessed a powerful potential base of support. In another of the state’s ironies, Alabama had a higher percentage of females registered than all but 4 states, and women voted at higher rates than in all but 11 states. On the stump, women learned survival strategies. When asked repeatedly how a southern lady would handle political controversy, former teacher and AEA of¤cial Nancy Worley responded that no political controversy she had seen matched the intensity of selecting high school cheerleaders. When Carolyn Gibson nearly gave up her political aspirations in frustration, her eight-year-old daughter kept her in politics by repeating a simple theology: “Mama, it’s the Lord testing you.”16 One Alabama woman did hit the jackpot. Voters elected Lurleen Wallace governor in 1966 without a runoff against a ¤eld of 11 male candidates. But of course that was no typical election. A stand-in for her husband who was constitutionally prohibited from serving a second term, Lurleen allowed George Wallace to make speeches for her, and he promised to be her “number one adviser.” Though Lurleen swept the Democratic ¤eld, Republican Jim Martin played the gender card for all it was worth in the general election. His advertisements cast the issue directly: “Jim Martin: Yes, a he-man, a battler, and a winner in the United States Congress”; “Lurleen Wallace: Yes, a nice wife, trying to do a man’s job in Montgomery.”17 The ploy might have worked absent George Wallace. But with him, the “nice


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wife” overwhelmed the “he-man.” In of¤ce, Lurleen was largely an extension of her “number one adviser” despite her interest in mental health and state parks. And the reoccurrence of ovarian cancer early in her term cut short a promising career. She died halfway through her term, provoking an unprecedented outpouring of public affection and grief. Indomitable Montgomery feminist Virginia Durr pondered the meaning of Lurleen’s career to a friend: “The fact that she upheld her husband in all of his vicious racism and politics means nothing at all. She seemed to symbolize to so many people all they think a ‘Southern Woman’ should be: pretty, dainty, a good mother and certainly an obedient wife, brave under suffering and doomed. . . . Their highest ambition, it seems to me, is to be known as a ‘brave sufferer.’ I hate it.”18 Community Development Denied access to the highest echelons of business, education, politics, and religion, women rarely emerged in the 20th century as community leaders. Women might well carve out signi¤cant spheres of power within domains reserved for them or where they could elbow their way to the table. But at the highest level of community in®uence, they were only beginning to emerge when the century ended. The most promising venue for them was in community leadership organizations. With long experience listening instead of talking, deferring to others when honors were passed around, taking turns speaking, acting inclusively, their skills exactly matched the post– civil rights evolution of community groups dedicated to reason, tolerance, inclusion, and problem solving, as opposed to histrionics, close-mindedness, exclusion, and ideological partisanship. Sheila Blair and Odessa Woolfolk established the pattern with Leadership Birmingham. Barbara Larson transported the model statewide with Leadership Alabama. In between, most large communities and even some counties and regions welcomed similar styles. Leadership classes were chosen by carefully con¤gured boards to represent blacks and whites, men and women, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, labor leaders and entrepreneurs, trial lawyers and businesspeople. Women worked remarkably well within such a framework where they usually represented about half the participants. But these


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emerging leadership networks worked slowly. And lists of the top 10 or dozen leaders in major cities seldom included the names of women. Birmingham, the state’s largest and most diverse city, furnishes an excellent case study. Newspaper studies in 1984, 1988, 1990, and 1995 identi¤ed the city’s top 10 leaders. In the 1980s and early ’90s 7 were businessmen, 2 were college presidents, 1 was a mayor. Two were black. All were male. Frustrated by the total absence of women, editors of the 1995 list singled out the 10 most in®uential women. None cracked the list of civic movers and shakers. But they did represent a signi¤cantly different career trajectory: 4 were academics, 3 politicians, 1 headed a philanthropic board, another directed the YWCA, and only 1 owned a business. Community service rather than ¤nancial or political power characterized the careers of 8 of the 10. Only 1, Odessa Woolfolk, was African American. A number of the leaders were related in one way or another to philanthropy. Sheila Blair, a transplanted New Yorker who had demonstrated her considerable talents as organizer and ¤rst director of Leadership Birmingham, honed her skills as executive director of Greater Birmingham Foundation. She tied city native Odessa Woolfolk in the poll as the city’s most in®uential woman. The ultimate example of a leader convinced that surrendering the spotlight to others always leaves enough illumination for everyone’s talents, Blair embodied a simple principle of leadership: a woman who demonstrates by her own prodigious service how much she cares for a community is hard to turn down when she asks a favor. By the early 21st century Blair and her successor at Greater Birmingham Foundation, Kate Nielsen, had made the foundation one of the seven largest in the Deep South. Odessa Woolfolk epitomized similar skills as state chairwoman of National Conference of Christians and Jews, ¤rst black president of Operation New Birmingham, director of UAB’s Center for Urban Affairs, a founder of Leadership Birmingham, and board president of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. With a bachelor’s degree from Talladega College in history and political science, a master’s in urban studies from California’s Occidental College, and additional graduate work at the University of Chicago and Yale, Woolfolk made her way from Birmingham’s segregated public schools to its inner circle of leadership. It was a long, arduous journey and few followed in her path.


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Such credentials were impressive enough to earn both Blair and Woolfolk glowing reviews by Birmingham’s power brokers. Nevertheless, such credentials were insuf¤cient to land either on the magical list of top power brokers. And that was a pretty good summary of the outcome of a century’s herculean efforts by women for full inclusion in Alabama society.


Alabama Counties, County Seats, and Geopolitical Regions. Map by Robert Stroud, Engineering Media Services, Auburn University.


South Alabama planters pose for an Auburn University photographer from the Cooperative Extension Service during the 1920s. Left to right: J. W. Oliver, Jack Taylor, Mr. Doster, Mr. Wadsworth, and Mr. Alexander. Courtesy Auburn University Special Collections and Archives.


All the delegates to the 1901 Constitutional Convention were, of course, men. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


Justice Hugo Black of Clay County and Birmingham served from 1927 until 1937 in the U.S. Senate and after that as one of the most in®uential associate justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


Virginia Durr and Rosa Parks changed Alabama politics as fundamentally as any governor or congressman, Durr by her lifelong crusade against the poll tax and Parks by her pivotal role in launching the civil rights movement. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


A Brewer supporter wrote editorial comments on this Wallace campaign smear sheet for the 1970 gubernatorial runoff before sending it to Albert Brewer. Courtesy Brewer Gubernatorial Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History.


Extension of train track in the Wiregrass region and southwest Alabama expanded jobs in the timber industry. Narrow-gauge logging railroads such as this one met the caralogs (two-wheeled carts) that dragged logs to rail junctions. Courtesy University of South Alabama Photographic Archives.


Gov. George C. Wallace, Dr. Wernher von Braun, and Mr. James E. Webb view model of new rocket engine test stand, with mathematical performance speci¤cations in the background. Huntsville, June 1965. Courtesy George C. Wallace Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History.


Italian coal miners lived on what native whites called Dago Hill, near no. 9 slope, Wenonah, TCI Village. Courtesy Harper Collection, Samford University Archives.


Urbanization transformed Alabama’s physical landscape during the 20th century. Here, automobiles crowd the streets of Mobile during the 1920s. Courtesy University of South Alabama Photographic Archives.


Proud students pose in front of the Pinson rock school in the mid-1920s. They and their parents built the school with rocks from Turkey Creek when the Jefferson County Board of Education had no funds for construction. Courtesy Marinelle Pettus, Pinson, Alabama.


These African American students attend school in a black church. Black Belt, 1938. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy Library of Congress.


Mrs. W. A. Kirkland of Henry County operates a John Deere tractor on a 58-acre farm while her husband recuperates from a broken leg. Changing technology altered women’s roles in the economy. Photo by Lewis Arnold, Alabama Cooperative Extension Service. Courtesy Auburn University Special Collections and Archives.


Helen Keller holds the hand of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


Carrie Tuggle, welfare worker, newspaper publisher, teacher, and founder of Tuggle School, was one of Birmingham’s most signi¤cant social reformers during the ¤rst decades of the 20th century. Courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives.


Booker T. Washington was renowned for his aphorisms about “useful living.” The Tuskegee Institute founder and educator became the nation’s most in®uential African American leader before his death in 1915. Unrelentingly optimistic, Washington wrote, “I believe that any man’s life will be ¤lled with constant and unexpected encouragements if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life; that is, if he tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure unsel¤sh, useful living.” Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


The 167th Infantry Regiment victory parade marches in front of the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery. The band following the regiment may be from the Auburn ROTC. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.

This railroad car from Mobile is crowded with south Alabama recruits bound for the U.S. Army in 1917. Graf¤ti on the car says, “To Hell Mit the Keiser” and “Mobile to Berlin.”


Five airmen and a ®ight instructor from the ¤rst graduating class of the Advanced Flying School, Tuskegee, walk across the tarmac. Left to right: G. S. Roberts, B. O. Davis, C. H. DeBow, R. M. Long (instructor), Mac Ross, and L. R. Custis. Courtesy NAACP Records, National Archives.


Tom Daniels of Randolph County, Auburn’s placekicker, kicks a ¤eld goal against Alabama in their ¤rst football match. The game was played at Lakeview Park, Birmingham, on February 22, 1893, in front of 4,000 fans. Auburn won 32 to 22. Daniels had played the previous year for Duke. Note the referees’ fancy attire. Wearing topcoats and hats, and carrying walking sticks, they intently study the trajectory of the football through the goalposts. By the rules of the day, touchdowns were worth 4 points; extra points, 2; and ¤eld goals, 5. Courtesy Duke University Archives.


This Scott Stantis (Birmingham News) cartoon “Pucker Up!” depicts Bobby Lowder’s control over Auburn University and its athletic program. Courtesy Scott Stantis and Copley News Service.


Religion does not seem to be much fun to this austere congregation of Calvinistic Primitive Baptists posed in front of their church on Sand Mountain. Looks can be deceiving. Such churches forged strong community bonds and rigid moral values. Courtesy Samford University Archives.


Worshipers at the Fairmont Baptist Church, Red Level (Covington County), tent revival gather for a group picture, ca. 1925. Conversion at a revival became the pivotal event in the religious lives of generations of Alabamians who thereby became born-again believers. Courtesy Samford University Archives.


The novelist Harper Lee signs copies of her famous book, To Kill a Mockingbird, at the March 1983 Eufaula History and Heritage Festival organized by the Auburn Humanities Center. Courtesy Maggie B. Harmon.


Hank Williams and the Driftin’ Cowboys pose for a picture in 1938. Back row, left to right: Smith Adair, Braxton Schuffert, Irene Williams, and Hank Williams. Front row: Carolyn Parker, unidenti¤ed member, and Freddie Beach. Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History.


7 Counting behind White Folks African Americans

I believe that any man’s life will be ¤lled with constant and unexpected encouragements if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life; that is, if he tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure unsel¤sh, useful living. —Booker T. Washington, “Useful Living”

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, HBO television network prepared a ¤lm and commissioned a symposium on the event that symbolically launched the modern civil rights movement in America. The symposium, appropriately enough, met on the campus of Alabama State University on February 15, 2001. The university had been the epicenter of much of the struggle. Juanita Abernathy began the introductions by reminding the audience that she, Coretta Scott King, and Mrs. Andrew Young were all natives of Perry County in the Alabama Black Belt. “Alabama,” she boasted, “produces great people.” So it does! Helen Keller. Rosa Parks. Three strong-minded wives of towering ¤gures in the civil rights movement. But Abernathy’s extemporaneous comments that February afternoon seemed to originate at a more profound level. It was as if her mind had drifted to a distant memory deeper in the past: Alabama produces “a great people,” a race, a distinctive way of life that de¤ed the odds and turned the world upside down. Before there was a revolution, there was a people.


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Jim Crow’s World The overthrow of Republican rule and the return of conservative whites to power in 1874 put an end to the short-lived experiment in democracy known as Reconstruction. Now the top rail was back on top, and to white folk the fence looked just ¤ne. Politics, the economy, society had not been “reconstructed” after all. Whites had restored their power by a combination of political chicanery, economic intimidation, and physical violence. These same instruments would serve them well in the quarter century that followed. They allowed black voters to continue on the rolls but in many places manipulated their votes on behalf of white planter interests, especially in the Black Belt. Periodically whites lynched blacks to punish them for heinous crimes, real or imagined, to liquidate their most independent and strong-minded political leaders, or to sti®e their economic, social, and educational aspirations. During the 1890s Alabama’s lynchings led the nation. They occurred disproportionately in predominantly black population counties. Between 1889 and 1921, Dallas County led in number of lynchings, with Montgomery, Jefferson, Mobile, and Butler Counties next. Fathers of the 1901 constitution offered their work as a “reform” because they proposed to do with legislation what politicians and white terrorists had done with corruption and violence. With the new constitution enacted, white religious and civic leaders increasingly condemned lynching. At the 1901 constitutional convention, former governor Thomas G. Jones called for the removal of sheriffs who failed to prosecute lynchers, and that same year a Wetumpka court convicted three white men of lynching an African American. In 1913 the Southern Law and Order Commission that included Alabama Baptist layman Harwell Davis (who would later generate much of the impetus to end the convict lease system when he served as Alabama’s attorney general) sent an antilynching petition to all southern governors and legislatures. Elimination of Negroes from voting and growing white antilynching sentiment combined to reduce the violence of the 1890s. During the decades from 1889 to 1921, the number of lynchings declined from 177 to 67 to 58. Periodically over the next century, incidents such as the Scottsboro case (a 1931 incident in which two white women of dubious credibility ac-


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cused nine black teenagers of rape) occurred, oftentimes with murderous consequences. But the formalized rise of Jim Crow, as the South’s system of legalized segregation came to be known, tended to reduce the irregular, spontaneous violence of earlier decades. Jim Crow’s world might be less violent than what preceded it, but it was no more just or humane. The 1901 constitution not only stripped the ballot from black men but also prohibited interracial marriages and required separate schools for blacks and whites. Local custom as well as ordinances insisted that mental institutions, TB sanatoriums, prisons, reform schools, public transportation, and hospitals also be racially segregated. Local municipalities complied with these expectations by isolating blacks within their own neighborhoods. Industries and unions sometimes excluded them, and when they were allowed, generally separated them from whites. Black Life inside the Jim Crow World Labor was central to black life. Because of limited education, blacks had to sell their bodies. As a result, they ¤lled an important niche in Alabama’s 20th-century economy, which was constructed for the most part on cheap, unskilled physical labor. With their numbers initially concentrated in the Black Belt, African Americans experienced two economic revolutions over the course of the century. The so-called New South constructed a world of tenant farming that dispersed the slave quarters to individual 20–40 acre plots. Control of land replaced control of labor as the central element in the new order. The tenant was no less dependent economically on his land owner, but he was freer from direct supervision. By 1910 Alabama had the second highest number of tenant plantations in the South. Low-skill industrial jobs in or near cities (steel and iron foundries, coal and coke operations, iron ore and coal mining) absorbed many blacks ®eeing tenancy. Rural industry (pulp wooding, sawmills, turpentine camps, railroad construction) provided employment to others. The second revolution began in the 1930s when the newest of the New South’s displaced tenant farmers triggered massive population and economic dislocation. The number of tenant plantations in Alabama declined rapidly. Successful plantations mechanized and modernized. Unsuccessful planta-



tions, usually run by absentee owners, disappeared. The appearance of a strong, biracial labor movement (United Mine Workers, Congress of Industrial Organization—UMW, CIO) more sympathetic to black workers disrupted traditional work patterns. Political radicalism, notably the small Communist Party cadre headquartered in Birmingham, challenged the entire Jim Crow system. Regional labor markets became more integrated into national patterns. New Deal laws set wage, hour, and health standards, which (even if not vigorously enforced) moved southern industry closer to national norms. The traditional Black Belt world of tenancy locked African Americans into rural isolation. A black tenant in Hale County remembered the early 1930s: “Back then . . . there were no cars. There was no place to go to be segregated out of, ’cause you couldn’t get away. You ride mules, you go only to the grist mill, haul cotton.”1 Within their rural world of drafty, cold, tumble-down shacks and unpainted fences, a third of their houses had neither indoor nor outdoor toilets. And as late as century’s end, such counties contained more than 50 percent rates of child poverty, double-digit unemployment, and median incomes half to three-fourths of the national average. Poor health, lack of hospitals and physicians, underfunded schools, and low test scores conspired to make the former plantation belt, once America’s richest land, its poorest. Consciousness of race came to each person differently. Eric Lincoln (later in life, William Rand Kenan Jr., professor of religion and culture at Duke University) grew up in Athens, Alabama. Athens had no high school for black children, so Lincoln attended an excellent private school operated by the Congregational church and staffed by an interracial faculty of Christian women who mainly came from Massachusetts and Connecticut. But the teachers could not shield him from his racial differentness. The summer he was nine years old, young Eric went to the county health of¤ce for inoculations. Having swum, played, ¤shed, and fought with white children, he thought nothing about standing in line with them as he waited for shots. A scowling white nurse taught him his initial lesson in black “placeness”: “Boy! Get back in line! Get all the way back there. All you niggers have to wait.” The lesson was direct and brutal, but it was not violent. The violence came later. Eric paid his $27 yearly tuition at Trinity High School by hauling horse manure from his granddad’s stable and by picking



cotton. At age 13, he carried a sack with 40 pounds of cotton to the town gin. The ruddy-complexioned, cigar-chomping manager offered him 9 cents a pound but paid him only a quarter. The teenager stood before his adversary alone, ashamed, humiliated, and afraid. Desperately needing the correct payment of $3.60 for tuition and books, he forced himself to speak, using the quick mind his northern teachers so often praised. Courteously, as required by the prevailing racial ethos and by his parents and grandparents, he spoke: “Excuse me, sir, but I think you made a mistake. I had forty pounds of cotton and that was just a quarter you gave me.” The white man got to his feet and bolted the door. Walking to the boy, he exploded: “Nigger done come ra’chere in my of¤ce an’ done called me a lie ra’chere to my face!” Knocking Eric down with his ¤sts, he then stomped his head and kicked him in the face and stomach. As he cursed and raged, he repeated the same litany over and over: “Ain’t no nigger can count behind a white man!” The lesson cost Lincoln a tooth, a bloated, bloody face, a ruptured stomach, and a mouth full of scar tissue. The beating left many questions. If the white man’s math could not be trusted, could his politics, law, art, music, theology, or ethics? As Lincoln returned home bleeding and battered, he remembered Langston Hughes’s poem “Who but the Lord”: O Lord if you can save me from this man Don’t let him make pulp out of me But the Lord, He was not quick And the man raised up his stick And he beat the living hell out of me.2 That day began a tortuous journey inward to the roots of his own spirituality and launched the career of one of America’s premier historians of religion. Within the black community there was help for farmers like the Lincoln family. Thomas M. Campbell, who graduated from Tuskegee University, became the nation’s ¤rst Negro demonstration agent in 1906. The college president Booker T. Washington had already developed the Jesup Agricultural Wagon as a “college on wheels” to carry information to black farmers. Campbell used the wagon to conduct farm conferences and agri-



cultural fairs. Passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 created a structure for his cooperative extension work. By the 1920s Campbell had replaced the Jesup Wagon with a Ford truck (called the Booker T. Washington Movable School on Wheels), purchased with small donations from 30,000 black and white farmers. The Farm Bureau allowed black farmers to join, and Campbell earned white respect by his competent direction of a substantial staff of black county agents and his organization of the ¤rst conference of black and white extension agents at Tuskegee in 1920. He used radio, black newspapers, and black ministers to publicize his work. During his 47 years at Tuskegee, Campbell made black extension much more thorough and extensive in Alabama than it was in other southern states. By midcentury more militant black leaders criticized Campbell for approving racially segregated 4-H Club camps. But Campbell also tried to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture to equalize funding for Negro extension work and complained about federal inequities. Blacks ®eeing rural poverty found conditions little improved in north Alabama’s mineral district. The state’s impressive industrialization differed markedly from patterns in the Northeast and Midwest. Carrying antebellum patterns of race and work relations into the city, white industrialists exploited black workers much as they had slaves and sharecroppers earlier. Low wages, wretched working conditions, and squalid housing became the rule. Rigid patterns of social segregation further marginalized newly arriving black workers. Birmingham became, in the words of one historian, “America’s Johannesburg.” Willie David Jenkins grew up in the Black Belt and learned to work hard to compensate for his lack of education. He arrived in Birmingham, illiterate, in 1949 to drive a truck for a construction company. Unable to ¤nd his way through Birmingham’s winding, hilly streets, he walked the bewildering maze of asphalt to gain his bearings, then began driving a welding truck to construction sites. Gaining con¤dence by learning to read numbers on highway signs and carrying cans of gas so he would not have to use the credit card the company gave him (he could not write his name), Jenkins began to venture beyond Birmingham. White friends made maps pointing the way to destinations in new cities. Finally, at age 64, he learned to write.



Some labor unions tried to organize and assist transplanted migrants such as Jenkins. Others excluded people of color. Whether union racial policies owed more to racist views of white unionists or was a pragmatic response to industrialists who sought to divide workers along color lines is a never-ending debate among labor historians. Each side mobilized convincing evidence for its point of view. At any rate, Birmingham, which contained the largest concentration of black industrial workers of any city in the United States by the teens, became a case study of interracial unionism. The seemingly endless supply of cheap black labor depressed wages for all workers and swelled white resentment. At the same time, any effective resistance by workers required racial solidarity. And Alabama history offered ample precedent for interracialism in the Greenback-Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, the United Mine Workers, and the Populist Party. Such incidences of interracial cooperation owed more to economic and political pragmatism than to racial tolerance, but it was cooperation nonetheless. Although blacks never dominated these movements, whites did allow them (and blacks demanded) leadership positions. The absence of women coal miners created economic space where interracial unionism could thrive. Issues such as miscegenation, racial amalgamation, and rape obtained greater urgency where white women were present (notably in textile mills). As a totally male sphere, coal miners resisted efforts to interject gender issues in order to split workers. Labor leaders, in turn, eschewed broader concerns about racial equality in order to focus exclusively on workplace issues, where black and white workers shared common grievances. Such male space explains the comment of one veteran white miner who told a Birmingham labor newspaper that “the white miner is treated bad enough . . . [but] the Negro as a general thing simply catches ‘hell’ in the big way.”3 Mine owners, he added, hired the lowest, most inhumane white men who were notorious for their violence to supervise black miners. Black UMW organizer Leon Alexander agreed. His father had been blacklisted for union activities in 1922. National Guardsmen had removed all their worldly possessions from a company house and left the family to starve. “Captive unions” organized by companies to replace the UMW forced black and white miners to meet separately. Alexander called such



unions “Popsicles” because of a July 4 incident. A coal company staged a picnic for company unionists, but a gang of UMW members invaded the celebration and ran off with the company-provided tub of Popsicles. When company of¤cials used racial arguments to persuade whites not to join the UMW, Alexander countered that “our ¤ght is not with each other, our ¤ght is with the company.”4 He found strategies to reach across racial barriers. When U.S. Steel provided separate hydrants for black and white miners, he secretly took the handles off so men couldn’t use the hydrant for blacks; all had to drink from the “white hydrant.” When Alexander tried to register to vote, the Jefferson County registrar balled up his application and threw it in a wastebasket. When informed of this treatment, the white president of UMW District 20 called Gov. Jim Folsom, who threatened to ¤re the registrar and forced Alexander’s registration. As a religious man, Alexander used Christian principles to appeal to white workers. The approach sometimes worked. In Tuscaloosa, the wives of white miners baked him cakes and pies for Christmas and were kind to him. Some even invited him to eat with their families. Many black organizers remembered that they had less to fear from white fellow workers than from black middle-class businessmen, preachers, and professionals. Such middle-class blacks were as likely as whites to betray black workers to the white power structure. Although biracial unionism did exist, especially during the 1930s and ’40s, too much can be made of that fact. Throughout the century, white workers often refused to work cooperatively with blacks. Birmingham’s white electrical linemen struck in 1901 because they refused to work beside black linemen hired by the company. The following year a Knights of Labor District Assembly refused to elect a black man as district master workman because “it is well known that a negro, no matter how capable, cannot accomplish anything under the circumstances.”5 The head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) inquired in 1903 if the Alabama State Federation would accept a black organizer, only to be told that such an appointment was not acceptable. Biracial unionism within the UMW lasted from 1894 until 1908 when it was shattered by a failed strike. During World War I unions pro¤ted from labor shortages, and a UMW organizing drive recruited 26 percent of the state’s coal miners. But when miners struck the industry in 1920, 76 percent of strikers were African



Americans. Among strikers, an unusual degree of biracial cooperation developed, and both races violently resisted the importation of black or white strikebreakers (“scabs” as they were contemptuously called by strikers). During the 1930s both the New Deal and the CIO promoted biracial unionism, but with limited success. Pragmatic restrictions abounded. Black union of¤cials had to negotiate with white company of¤cials who used their biracialism against unions. Even some whites who accepted the need for blacks to be elected union of¤cers often believed such elections weakened the union among white workers. Communist efforts to organize biracial unions in Birmingham stoked antiunion violence as well. Whites often used their seniority within unions to block the advancement of African American workers. As a result, the black proportion of workers declined in most industries: in 1910, blacks held 75 percent of jobs in Birmingham’s iron and steel industry; by 1930, the ¤gure had dropped to 54 percent. Black coal miners represented 62 percent of the labor force in 1930, 47 percent in 1950, and only 39 percent in 1960. The black percentage of iron ore miners dropped from 70 percent in 1930 to 49 percent in 1950. Black steelworkers declined from 37 percent in 1950 to 32 percent in 1960. Between 1953 and 1963 TCI essentially stopped hiring black workers. The total black industrial workforce in Jefferson County declined from 54 percent of the total in 1930 to 33 percent in 1970. As the industrial workforce became whiter, it also became more conservative. Industry attacks on labor’s political radicalism alarmed white workers. Growing civil rights activism deepened the racial divide among the rank-and-¤le. Some white workers became active in the Ku Klux Klan. Many more supported the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 and George Wallace during the 1960s and ’70s. Race-conscious unionism slowly replaced classconscious unionism. Even after federal court desegregation rulings and congressional legislation during the 1960s, conditions improved only marginally. In the state’s highly unionized pulp and paper mills, blacks sometimes taught to whites job skills they were not allowed to perform themselves. Skilled white workers used the muscle of their unions to pressure local managers not to promote blacks to skilled jobs. Scott Paper Company’s Local 423 in Mobile did not admit black members until 1972. As a result, angry blacks, many of them World War II veterans, used Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act pro-



hibiting racial discrimination in employment to sue companies and unions. Pro¤ting from that activist experience, a number of black paper mill union of¤cials became important civil rights leaders within their local communities. Ironically, Alabama industries and labor unions ¤nally lowered the barriers against African Americans at the very time the South’s economy entered the postindustrial era. Beginning in the 1950s and with accelerating speed afterward, mechanization and globalization of America’s economy reduced industrial jobs and union membership. Within the world of work, life was as racially in®exible at the top as at the bottom. Not until 1934 did a black man, Arthur D. Shores, earn a law degree and practice law in Alabama. For three years he was the state’s only licensed black lawyer. As late as 1972 80 percent of African American candidates for the bar failed to pass the June bar examination, including some with degrees from Harvard Law School. In 1974 Charles Price became the state’s ¤rst black district attorney. Oscar W. Adams Jr. was appointed to the state supreme court in 1980 and won a full term two years later, the ¤rst black to be elected to a statewide of¤ce. Despite occasional high-visibility successes, only 18 of the state’s 318 district, circuit, probate, and appellate judges were African Americans in 1998. Within the business community, the story was only marginally better. A. G. Gaston paved the way for Louis Willie and other black businessmen. But oftentimes, Alabama exported its entrepreneurs as it did its black athletes and musicians. Stanley O’Neal, a native of Roanoke in Randolph County, became president and then CEO of Merrill Lynch and Company, America’s largest securities ¤rm, at the beginning of the 21st century, and was given credit for returning the lumbering ¤nancial giant to pro¤tability. Although blacks had little control of their work, they managed to carve out spheres for themselves. Onnie Lee Logan, the 14th of 16 children, learned midwifery as an apprentice to her mother, who helped deliver babies for black and poor white women in Marengo County. As a second generation midwife, she practiced widely for 40 years while working for a wealthy white Mobile family. Not only did blacks assist in birthing and providing health care for their own, they sometimes were able to establish separate community space. Fiercely loyal to the place of their birth and kin, they returned in unprece-



dented numbers for family reunions, even after they had migrated to other regions. Some returned to all-black communities. Hobson City in Calhoun County was incorporated as Alabama’s ¤rst all-black municipality in 1899 by 125 blacks who withdrew from Oxford. They named their new town for a white Black Belt progressive and SpanishAmerican War hero Richmond Hobson. From the beginning, poor residents struggled to attract businesses and pay for city services. But municipal freedom was worth the sacri¤ce, and neighborliness compensated for inconvenience. Despite all the disadvantages of underfunded schools and constant ¤nancial struggles, the tiny town of 850 could boast by century’s end having birthed and educated U.S. surgeon general David Satcher. Had Hobson City boasted a functional public library, it would have been one of the few in Alabama open to blacks. In the rare event that libraries for blacks did exist, they usually received books discarded by white libraries. By 1918 the Birmingham Public Library had established a black branch. Montgomery did not get around to doing so until the late 1940s. Mobile peacefully opened its library to blacks in 1961, but library of¤cials in Montgomery waited for a federal court order and then removed the furniture so the races could not sit together. As late as the mid-1960s the state archives asked white patrons who sat down at tables with black researchers to leave or be arrested. In 1963 Miles College students staged read-ins to desegregate Birmingham’s Public Library. Black women found other social outlets. By 1904 they had formed 26 women’s clubs and a state federation. Margaret Murray Washington pioneered this movement, organizing the state federation, serving as president of the National Association of Colored Women (1914–18), and editing the national women’s club journal. The clubs taught black children African American history and lobbied for juvenile reformatories, prison reform, better public schools, temperance, and neonatal care. And they were much more inclined than white clubs to become interested in poverty. Clubwoman Adella Hunt Logan, a professor at Tuskegee University, led the state federation’s black woman suffrage movement. The prominence of Washington and Logan in the club movement suggested how central educators and education were to black society. To a degree hardly conceivable within the white community, which generally took



public schools for granted, blacks placed incredible faith in formal learning. Teaching became the highest aspiration for many black college students. Even when white con¤dence in public education lagged toward the close of the century, blacks maintained their ¤erce belief that a high school diploma or college degree would transform their lives. Acquiring education often required herculean efforts. Wilcox County did not assume responsibility for educating black children until the 1930s, and as late as 1965 nearly half the county’s black children attended a private school operated by the United Presbyterian Church of North America. In fact, scattered throughout the state, remnants of Reconstruction-era American Missionary Society schools furnished perhaps the best education available to blacks fortunate enough to live near them. Not only were black public schools underfunded, they were often taught by poorly prepared teachers. As a consequence, the education obtained there was often inadequate. Gunnar Myrdal, in his classic treatise on race, An American Dilemma, questioned students in a black school in 1939. No student knew who was president of the United States nor even what a president did. None had heard of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) or knew what the U.S. Constitution was. One student named Booker T. Washington Williams could not identify his namesake nor could any of his classmates or his teacher. Within black colleges, presidents engaged in agonizing tradeoffs. They could moderate their agenda, mute their resentments, and restrain their students in order to gain resources from white legislators and philanthropists. Or they could boldly champion justice for their race and watch resources dry up and schools close. Twenty-twenty hindsight furnished lots of civil rights–era critics of black teachers and administrators. But the critics were not required to make the wrenching decisions. Men such as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, whatever their limitations of science, learning, or policy, kept hope alive and made generations of young blacks believe in themselves. They were not Uncle Toms who accommodated themselves to racism. They were racial moderates forced to conform to a world neither of their making nor of their preference. As black college students increased—12,000 in 1928, 37,000 in 1941, 74,000 in 1950—so did black militancy. And many of these supposedly accommodationist colleges provided racial forums for militant speakers such



as W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Langston Hughes. As late as the 1960s tensions continued within the black community over educational direction and leadership. No better example exists than Alabama State University and its president, H. C. Trenholm. A seedbed of black protest, the school produced students such as Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph David Abernathy, and teachers such as Jo Ann Robinson. But when they became prominent in Montgomery civil rights activities, Gov. John Patterson ordered Trenholm to dismiss Lawrence Reddick, a history professor, and to expel 31 students. Although Trenholm at ¤rst resisted, he ¤nally ¤red Reddick and suspended some students. This decision subjected the president to a barrage of black criticism for cowering to Patterson. Yet Trenholm de¤ed state authorities on other occasions, quietly supported the local bus boycott, and worked tirelessly for black education. To save his college, he may have compromised his convictions. But such calls are easier to make for those who bear none of the responsibility for the consequences. Walter M. Cavers of Autauga County, born in 1910 some 20 miles from Selma, spent lots of time dreaming about attending college. But the public school he attended operated only three months a year and was some distance from his rural community. When he made the mistake of sharing his dream of attending Tuskegee Institute with the white owner of the land Cavers’s family sharecropped, the white man cursed Booker T. Washington and struck Cavers. The boy ®ed home in fear for his life. Earning his way north by picking cotton for 50 cents a day, he reached Anniston, where he jumped a freight train for North Carolina. Similarly bereft of white support, blacks took educational matters into their own hands. Carrie A. Greggs was born in Eufaula in 1858, where she grew up and married John Tuggle. The couple became parents of four children and moved to Birmingham in search of better opportunities. Tuggle became a mail carrier, and the family assumed an active role in Saint John AME Church. Carrie Tuggle became a welfare worker and proponent of separate penal facilities for juveniles. She established a black newspaper, the Birmingham Truth, in 1902 and edited it until 1910. In 1903 she opened Tuggle Institute primarily for youthful offenders and orphans. White support, especially within Birmingham’s small Jewish community, allowed her to expand the school into a multibuilding campus open to all black stu-



dents. After Tuggle’s death in 1924, the institute continued another decade until hard ¤nancial times threatened its survival. At that time, the Birmingham City Board of Education purchased the property and changed the name to Carrie A. Tuggle School in honor of its founder. Alumni of the original school included businessman A. G. Gaston and legendary musicians John T. Whatley and Erskine Hawkins. In its later manifestation, the school also produced Communist activist Angela Davis. Davis remembered the elementary school with mixed feelings. Lessons about Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, as well as full-throated singing of the “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson, afforded Davis a strong sense of black identity. But she also criticized precisely the values that Carrie Tuggle struggled so hard to produce in her students: patience, forbearance, respect, competition, and individualism. Tuggle assumed that blacks would operate within the world of Jim Crow, not seek to rip it apart. Angela Davis was a ripper, not an accommodator. On the other hand, Tuggle School prepared her well for a quite different kind of black struggle. The same could be said of James A. Welton. Born the son of slaves at Mount Meigs east of Montgomery, Welton graduated from Alabama State University before seeking a new kind of educational experience at all-white Albion College in Michigan. Entering Albion in 1904, Welton was elected class of¤cer and orator, and became essayist for the school newspaper and yearbook. He was the school’s ¤rst black graduate. He returned to Alabama in 1905 to teach and coach at his alma mater. After moving his wife and ¤ve children to Birmingham, Welton served as principal of Patterson School in Woodlawn until his death in 1929. Both Patterson and Tuggle schools led their students to Industrial High School, founded by Arthur Harold Parker. Some educational historians consider that institution the South’s most famous black high school. The school especially excelled in music. John T. Whatley introduced one of the ¤nest band programs to be found at any school within the region. The school already had obtained an enviable reputation performing Negro spirituals being popularized by the Fisk University singers. On one occasion, white Birmingham school superintendent John H. Phillips expressed concern over Parker’s request for an orchestra instructor for his school. As an enthusiastic fan of spirituals, Phillips feared that more attention to classical



or orchestral music might diminish interest in traditional Negro music. Parker reassured his boss that if he approved the new position, the principal would guarantee that the songs from slavery days so popular among white audiences would remain in the repertoire. Survival took many forms during Jim Crow days, obsequiousness being chief among them. Integration of schools often made conditions for black principals, teachers, and students worse rather than better, at least initially. Black principals typically became vice principals or had to return to the classroom. Black teachers were often transferred to formerly all-white schools some distance from their neighborhoods. Black students often entered hostile, mainly white schools where they were harassed and ridiculed. Ironically, students quickly found that integrated schools were strati¤ed as much by class as by race. One careful study of language skills among eighth graders in east central Alabama discovered that upper- and middleclass black and white students used less nonstandard English than lowerclass black and white students. Language variations between races were narrow; differences between classes were enormous. Religion represented another critical aspect of black identity. Despite class differences between individual congregations, the black church was a central community institution, providing af¤rmation of blackness, alternative forms of worship, leadership opportunities for women, political and economic leadership for the black community, and essentially de¤ning life for most African Americans. When Ann Pointer, one of six children who grew to maturity on a Macon County tenant farm, described her family’s deprivation, she remembered most her mother’s pride. Her uncles in New York sent the family trunks full of used clothes. Her mother would mend them, always careful to replace the armpits on each garment. During the 1930s her mother once ironed 35 shirts in one day for ¤ve to ten cents a shirt. Pointer explained: “Even though we were poor as church mice, God still blessed us with a brain”; “God knows what to do for you”; and “mama being the type person she was, she didn’t drop her head even though she didn’t have nothing.”6 At the root of the Pointer family’s self-perception were theological assumptions: they were children of the immutable God; they could not know his ways, but his ways were best; as objects of God’s grace and concern, their worth could not be measured in material ways but in spiritual qualities available to all, to the poor as much as to the wealthy.



Whether or not Angela Davis was disappointed with such evangelical religion or found it an opiate to the black masses, it nonetheless preserved the dignity of countless Alabama blacks and allowed them to make sense of their cosmic predicament during the reign of Jim Crow. And such religion would ultimately become a powerful weapon for physical as well as for spiritual liberation. Despite the coherence of black families, schools, and churches, vast numbers of Alabama blacks migrated during two great uprootings, the ¤rst between 1916 and 1930, the second between 1940 and 1960. An estimated 400,000 blacks left the South between 1916 and 1918 alone, and an additional half million departed between 1921 and 1925. In 1910 some 7 million blacks resided in the South, less than a million in all other regions. By 1960 about half of America’s blacks lived in the South, the other half elsewhere. Numerous factors triggered the migrations: the boll weevil’s assault on cotton; mechanization of agriculture and coal mining; disfranchisement; the imposition of segregation; the First and Second World Wars, which cut off immigration, creating labor shortages in northern industrial cities; active recruitment of black workers; the promise of greater social and educational opportunities elsewhere. The role of paid recruiters in the migration varied. At ¤rst, labor agents from northern industries played a signi¤cant role. Later, family and friends who had migrated did more to recruit friends, kin, and former neighbors from back home. Some service agencies such as the Urban League helped. So did black newspapers in northern cities such as the Chicago Defender. The migration usually occurred in three stages. The initial migration pulled blacks off rural tenant farms and into southern cities, where they learned industrial jobs and urban survival skills. Oftentimes, the ¤rst stop for rural Alabama blacks was in Birmingham. Work in Birmingham’s coal mines, coke ovens, iron foundries, and steel mills equipped them for a second migration to the central Appalachian coal¤elds of Kentucky and West Virginia, where blacks could vote and attend racially mixed schools. From spring of 1916 through the end of the following year, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Division of Negro Economics estimated that 75,000 blacks, or more than 8 percent of Alabama’s 1910 Negro population, emigrated to points north. Black labor agents from West Virginia received $10 per recruit (but if caught, paid a $500 ¤ne and served



a year in jail under the state’s restrictive labor agent licensing act). Between November 1916 and May 1917, Birmingham and Bessemer train stations sold 7,780 tickets on ¤ve railroads for Kentucky and West Virginia coal¤elds. Once in the upper South coal region, blacks banded together, considering West Virginia’s African Americans haughty and unhelpful. Although they seemed to take “pride in being ‘bad’” and sometimes inspired fear among local blacks, nearly three out of four of the new immigrants were Baptists, and they carried their churches with them. But there is no doubting that many black workers—veterans of bitter strikes, gun battles, forced evictions, and labor militancy—could be tough. Sol Dacus, a native of Lawrence County, ¤rst migrated from a rural farm where he became a political activist to Mobile’s shipyards during the First World War. From the port city, he moved to Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he became a union organizer for the biracial Brotherhood of Timber Workers in a violent face down with the Great Southern Lumber Company. The third stage of migration carried blacks outside the South. In 1900 nearly half the state’s people were black; by 1930 only 36 percent were African American; two decades later, the percentage had declined to 32; by end-of-century, to only 26 percent. For many black emigrants—Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays—the North became the promised land, ®owing with milk and honey. So many moved to Detroit and Chicago that they could reconstitute a small version of Montgomery’s First Colored Baptist Church. Within Birmingham’s black community, there was a saying that every African American in the city had a cousin in Chicago or Detroit. Because those who left were usually younger, better educated, and more daring than those who stayed, they often did well in their new homes. By the Second World War, Chicago’s South Side had replaced Harlem as the capital of black America. Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of the world and the most famous black man in America, lived there. So did Mahalia Jackson, the premier black singer. South Side boasted the only black congressman, the most in®uential newspaper, and the largest black congregation (J. H. Jackson’s Olivet Baptist Church). Many of South Side’s most famous residents traced their origins to Alabama. In addition to Joe Louis, Nat “King” Cole came to Chicago with his minister father from Montgomery when he was ¤ve. Mae Jemison, the ¤rst



black female astronaut, was born in Decatur before her family moved to the Windy City. Marva Collins, a no-nonsense, nationally renowned educator, was born in Monroe County and graduated from Escambia County Training Schools. Eugene Sawyer, a Greensboro native, served a long term as city alderman and brie®y as Chicago’s interim mayor. Eunice Johnson, founder of Ebony Fashion Fair and wife of the publisher of Ebony magazine, was a native of Selma and a Talladega College graduate. Oscar De Priest, a Florence native, became the ¤rst black to be elected to Congress from the North in 1928. The Republican De Priest lost his seat in 1934 to Arthur Mitchell, the ¤rst black Democrat to serve in Congress. Mitchell was a native of Lafayette who had attended Tuskegee University. Carol MoseleyBraun, the ¤rst black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, was born in Chicago of grandparents from Bullock County. It is unlikely that any of these successes would have been possible had they remained in Alabama. But these were rare triumphs among the tide of humanity pouring out of Alabama. In the urban North, new immigrants discovered the same discrimination they sought to escape by leaving Alabama. First-generation immigrants more frequently wound up in lowpaying, unskilled jobs in Chicago’s stock yards and packing plants. Their salaries were only marginally higher than in the South, and white workers resented them just as much. Industries used blacks as strike breakers, and housing patterns forced them into segregated neighborhoods. Detroit and Chicago were not the only destinations. So many Alabama blacks settled in Cleveland, Ohio, that residents began calling the city “Alabama North.” Southern black culture shaped the way in which the migrants encountered Cleveland, and class differences became more important in their new home than racial solidarity. Rooted in southern working-class culture, the immigrants clashed sharply with native white workers. In Cleveland, the large number of Alabama-born newcomers found solace in religion, forming churches as nearly as possible like the ones they left behind in Alabama. The raw edges of midwestern industrialism inspired Tuskegee University to dispatch Thomas Campbell in 1923 to report on conditions of southern blacks who had moved there. Migrants mostly told Campbell they had left Alabama because of discrimination by white landlords and bosses, but



few praised conditions in their new home. Campbell concluded that black land owners would do well to stay in the South. As decades passed, many black migrants agreed. By the 1970s the exodus had slowed to a trickle, and during the following decade more blacks returned to the South than left. By the 1990s net black migration into Alabama exceeded out-migration by 75,000, a ¤rst for the state since the Civil War. Hayward and Arthur Stanford were two of the returnees. Born in Eufaula, they left for Boston ¤lled with hopes for better lives. Despite high expectations, the reality of northern racial prejudice drove Arthur and his new wife and child back to Eufaula where they built a house on family land. Though they lived only slightly above the poverty line, compensations of supportive kin and community afforded them enough satisfaction to keep the Stanfords down-home in Alabama. World War II and the Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement de¤es precise dating. Although many trace its origins from the famous 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, individual and collective acts defying Jim Crow began much earlier. A chronology dating back early in the century especially disturbed many whites who preferred to believe that outside agitators ended decades of harmonious race relations when they arrived in Alabama with radical ideas rooted in Communism and other foreign ideologies. Frank W. Boykin, who represented Alabama’s First Congressional District for 28 years, ¤lled his correspondence with such mythology. In a 1959 letter to Vice Pres. Richard Nixon, Boykin described successful black businessmen and harmonious race relations throughout the state: “We are not having trouble with our darkies and we haven’t had since the Reconstruction days. This Negro in Montgomery, who claims you are behind him, Martin Luther King, claims a lot of things, but he hasn’t done anything but cause trouble. I understand that he has been to Russia, studying up on some of their doings. . . . I want you to see all of our people here—white and colored—who are getting along wonderfully well together.” In a 1960 letter to Harry Truman, the congressman offered to hire the former president to



“try and keep the great and good cordial relationship that has existed between our races.” In a 1964 letter to the chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court, Boykin recounted anecdotes about his beloved African American family cook who had raised the Boykin family children and grandchildren, and the faithful black caretaker of the family hunting lodge at McIntosh. Citing the Bible as the de¤nitive source for segregation, Boykin assured the justice: “In Mobile, Alabama, we are living together in peace and friendship, vote in the same voting machine, have the identical educational advantages in public schools minus the irritation of a forced integration.” To his friend J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boykin asserted: “you know that if you go [to] the leaders of any city in the South, and especially Mississippi and Alabama, you will ¤nd that the leading white people there and the leading colored people, too, are working hand in hand and have no trouble getting along.”7 The fact that most white Alabamians ¤ercely and honestly believed such mythology did not make it true. Alabama blacks had played multiple roles for years: cooperative, smiling “Sambos” in the presence of powerful whites who could do them harm; angry, sullen, sometimes violent revolutionaries in their own communities. In 1900 Montgomery enacted a city ordinance requiring segregated public conveyances. The legislation provoked a black boycott of city trolley lines through the summer that ended only when the city council amended the ordinance to forbid compelling anyone to vacate a seat unless another was available elsewhere in the trolley. A year later, Booker T. Washington mobilized black opposition to disfranchisement. In 1921–23 black and white leaders in Tuskegee struggled over control of a new Veterans Administration hospital built in the town. Whites wanted the facility but insisted that the staff be all white. Dr. Robert R. Moton, president of Tuskegee University, used his in®uence with national Republican of¤cials to ensure an allblack staff. Despite threats by the Ku Klux Klan and pressure from white elites, the VA sided with Moton. During the following decade, the sociology professor Charles Gomillion led a voter registration drive, and in 1941 he organized the Tuskegee Civic Association to instill civic pride and political activism in local blacks. In Selma, blacks organized the Dallas County Voters’ League during the 1930s. Throughout these decades a small number of sympathetic whites en-



couraged black aspirations however they could. The Alabama Committee on Interracial Cooperation grew out of a South-wide initiative begun in 1919. Alabama contained ¤ve local chapters with slightly more than 100 members by 1944, most of them white ministers and teachers. By 1947 the organization was moribund. Methodist ministers and laywomen, along with some others, resurrected it as the Alabama Council on Human Relations, a branch of the liberal Southern Regional Council. Endorsed by populistic governor James E. Folsom, the Alabama Council had grown to seven associations with more than 300 members by June 1955. That year, the Montgomery Council was the only biracial group in the city and included among its members the new minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. To the north of Montgomery, Charles F. Zukoski Jr. lived in Mountain Brook without becoming part of its conservative ethos. A native of Saint Louis with a Harvard law degree, Zukoski moved to Birmingham to work for First National Bank. Using a pseudonym, he began publishing a regular column in the Shades Valley Sun in 1948 challenging segregation. In addition to being a cofounder of the Birmingham Council on Foreign Relations, the Birmingham Symphony, the Birmingham Music Club, the local mental health association, and a state chapter of Planned Parenthood, Zukoski helped organize a biracial institute on school desegregation at BirminghamSouthern College following the Brown decision. The conference drew a thousand people, half black and half white, and went off without a hitch. The Unitarian Zukoski found a curious ally in Mountain Brook neighbor and Baptist businessman James Head, owner of a prominent of¤ce supply company. Founder of the local chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, ¤nance chairman for John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign in Alabama, a member of the Civil Rights Commission and the liberal Young Men’s Business Club, he had resigned from the Downtown Club when it refused to admit a Jewish applicant. Less isolated than his friend Zukoski, Head retained some in®uence within Birmingham’s business community, especially through his leadership of the in®uential downtown Rotary Club. Virginia Foster Durr grew up in a prominent Presbyterian minister’s family astride a mountain overlooking Birmingham to the north and Mountain Brook to the south. Her sister married New Deal senator Hugo Black,



and she married New Deal lawyer Clifford Durr, who headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s banking division during the 1930s. He also served on the Federal Communications Commission, where he helped Alabama establish the ¤rst statewide system of public television stations. The Durrs were instrumental in mobilizing pressure to end the poll tax during the 1930s and befriended Rosa Parks during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After Clifford’s death, his outspoken wife made their Montgomery home available to civil rights activists. Her liberal causes—she was a founding member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—drew so much FBI attention that her ¤le reached 600 pages (overkill that caused her considerable amusement after the hysteria of the McCarthy era passed). Charles M. Nice never enjoyed the national celebrity of the Durrs, but he occupied a place in the Alabama House of Representatives as a lone sentinel for reason during an irrational time. In 1956 Birmingham legislator Albert Boutwell introduced a bill to close Alabama’s public schools rather than integrate them. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, few white legislators dared resist this largely symbolic de¤ance. But when the clerk took roll, the vote was 98 to 1, with Nice the only representative in dissent. He also cast the lone vote against a resolution condemning the Supreme Court for the Brown decision. At Auburn University, Bud R. Hutchinson, an assistant professor of economics, publicly disagreed with the student newspaper’s negative articles about New York’s integrated public schools. In May 1957 the school’s board of trustees unanimously ended his employment at the university. More ominous were threatening telephone calls and admonitions to white dissenters that would become increasingly frequent during coming decades: if they didn’t like Alabama’s Jim Crow system, they ought to get out of Alabama for some more hospitable state. Zukoski, Head, Nice, and the Durrs stayed. Hutchinson took the unsolicited advice and left. So did large numbers of the state’s brightest young people, black and white, leaving a leadership cadre more comfortable in the 19th century than in the closing decades of the 20th. For many black Alabamians, World War II was as much a catalyst for change as the Brown decision. Military service promoted pride in their patriotism and a broader commitment to democracy. National revulsion at



Nazi doctrines of Aryan racial superiority not only eased the way for racial change in America, it even pricked the conscience of many Alabama whites, who returned from war with a different attitude toward darkerskinned fellow citizens who were denied rights that even German POWs received while imprisoned in the state. The GI bill resulted in a 90 percent increase in the number of African Americans with at least one year of college, and education made them both more con¤dent in their own ability and less willing to tolerate second-class citizenship. One such veteran, Henry Hooten of Tuskegee, had volunteered for the U.S. Army and soon found himself in England under the authority of a white company commander from Mississippi who acted as if the unit was still in the Deep South. He refused to issue passes to his black company to attend a dance in Birmingham (England) because only white girls would be present. The black soldiers went anyway; all were arrested and con¤ned to quarters. Back home, Hooten continued his efforts against Jim Crow. Some Tuskegee parents pooled resources in 1949 to purchase a secondhand bus to take their children ¤shing at the Gulf of Mexico. On their way, they stopped at Evergreen for diesel fuel. The 45 children were hungry and over®owed the black section of the restaurant, spilling into the area reserved for whites. The owner called the police and threatened to have them arrested if they did not leave immediately. Hooten, as unbowed as he had been in England, told the station owner to stop pumping fuel, that he would buy diesel somewhere else where his children could eat. The owner quickly pondered the loss of 150 gallons of diesel at 25 cents a gallon and changed his mind about feeding the children. He of¤cially “closed” the restaurant, persuaded the three remaining white customers to help him, and as quickly as possible served meals to the children and sped them on their way. This chance encounter led to a typically southern informal arrangement. Every year when Hooten took Tuskegee’s children to the Gulf, he would stop at the same service station–restaurant on both legs of the journey. He gave the owner advance notice so he could “close” his business and serve food to black children in both sections of the café. Perhaps Hooten’s hutzpa was part of Tuskegee’s wartime culture. A new pilot training program resulted in signi¤cant construction projects by black



contractors. And numerous brash young black men unaccustomed to the South’s Jim Crow system descended on the town. As soon as the war ended, Charles Gomillion ¤led suit against the county board of registrars, seeking to sign up more black voters. One of the plaintiffs in the case was Daniel L. Beasley, a Macon County native and Tuskegee University graduate, who had been stationed at the Tuskegee Air Field and who went to work at the local VA hospital after leaving the army. Another plaintiff in the case, Otis Pinkard, explained his participation in the landmark case in a refrain common to many black veterans: “After having been overseas ¤ghting for democracy, I thought that when we got back here we should enjoy a little of it.”8 Similar clashes occurred elsewhere, some more physical than legal. Pinto Island was not in the South Paci¤c, but Americans did ¤ght for control of it. It was home to a Mobile shipyard belonging to the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company (ADDSCO). The racially mixed labor force of 30,000 was separated according to job skill, with whites holding nearly all well-paying skilled jobs and blacks con¤ned to low-paying, nonskilled work. Employees from both races joined the CIO, but many whites newly arrived from rural areas resisted black pressure for better job opportunities. ADDSCO hired a number of white women to avoid hiring more black men, which added the issue of sexuality to the unfolding drama. Many white workers agreed with Mobile’s congressman Frank Boykin who wrote, “The point I am trying to make is that the Negroes . . . are after the white women like the foxes are after the rabbits, or the bobcats are after my turkeys down on my game preserve at McIntosh, Alabama. . . . It’s a terrible thing.”9 Black, union, and civil rights pressures ¤nally convinced a reluctant ADDSCO to upgrade Negro workers. That action triggered a riot in May 1943. Prominent among white rioters were young women frightened both by unsubstantiated rumors of rapes and more realistic concerns that black men might take some of their well-paying jobs as welders. More than 50 workers were injured before U.S. troops could restore order. Despite opposition from local civil rights leaders, the federal government reluctantly allowed segregation so long as blacks were allowed upgraded jobs on racially separate ways. Local 18 of the CIO continued to hold integrated meetings, elected black of¤cers, and represented 90 percent of ADDSCO employees,



less than half of whom were white. But at white insistence, union organizers who had sided with blacks were removed from Mobile. One black man working on Pinto Island was Charles Smith. Limited to a ninth grade education by labor on the family farm in Lowndes County, Smith had found work in the shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, before moving to ADDSCO. Although he had never seen the ocean much less a ship before World War II, he learned to read blueprints and gained other skills at Pinto Island that changed his perspective on life. Returning to the family farm in Lowndes County, he eked out a living farming, supplemented by occasional construction jobs. Blessed with some degree of economic independence, he helped organize and lead the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. Later blacks elected him the county’s ¤rst black county commissioner. World war also exacerbated tensions in Birmingham. Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor wrote President Roosevelt in August 1942, complaining that federal of¤cials from the National Youth Administration, U.S. Employment Service, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) “preached social equality and stirred up strife” in the city: “When the downfall of the doctrine of white supremacy is advocated and taught by agitators and federal of¤cials, who know absolutely nothing about the negro problem in the South, what happens? Negroes become impudent, unruly, arrogant, law breaking, violent, and insolent.”10 Connor pronounced venereal disease rather than lack of social equality to be the chief problem of the Negro race. Connor received a curt reply, noting that federal agencies could not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color. FEPC was concerned about nondiscriminatory employment, not social equality. A chilling secret FBI analysis of racial unrest in Birmingham, dated September 24, 1943, made it clear that not all federal agencies shared the concern of the FEPC. The report found little un-American activity among blacks, but blamed what unrest existed primarily on the NAACP, CIO, Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the state’s small Communist Party. The organizations were abetted, the report contended, by national speakers at the state’s black colleges, black soldiers from the North stationed in Alabama, federal of¤cials who spoke in the state about racial issues, and black newspapers. The FBI’s Birmingham Field Division included a report



by “a Northerner who, for over a period of eighteen years, has been closely connected with the colored people . . . in and around Birmingham.” Quoting their northern informant, the FBI noted: The Negro . . . is believed generally in this area to be . . . even below normal intellectually, while the average Negro is considered not to be susceptible to work and . . . is slow, lazy, happy, carefree and irresponsible. In further describing the Negroes in this area, he stated that they are to some extent methodical in nature, that they originally do things in a set way and thereafter follow the same procedure in future attempts. . . . On the other hand, . . . there is a portion of the Negro make-up that makes him quick to take advantage of a situation. He stated that for that reason, in dealing with Negroes, it is necessary that their status be considered and that they be handled accordingly. He stated that once Negroes are allowed a privilege, they expect that such treatment will be continued and for this and other reasons the South has maintained its color distinction, insisted on segregation, and has especially insisted that the racial situation there is not one to be handled by misinformed outsiders. This source . . . further advised that Southern Negroes, as a group, are not mistreated and that those who realize their position and maintain their place in the social strata in which they exist, are well treated, well cared for and can generally rely on receiving proper treatment.11 Bull Connor clearly had a ¤rm northern ally within the FBI information system. With such explosive and contradictory assumptions circulating within black and white communities, only the fuse was missing. At ¤rst, the Brown case seemed unlikely to ignite the ¤restorm. Perhaps unconvinced the courts would enforce the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, white Alabamians reacted with surprising calm. Gov. Gordon Persons pronounced integration “unthinkable,” but also counseled against ill-advised legislative action. Ira F. Simmons, superintendent of Jefferson County schools, warned against “hotheaded” decisions. The two major Birmingham newspapers made little editorial comment, though both appealed for calm. The Bir-



mingham World, the city’s black newspaper, applauded the long-overdue Supreme Court decision. Dr. W. H. Jernigan, president of the National Baptist Sunday School and Baptist Training Union, which met in Birmingham in June 1954 only weeks after the Brown decision, warned that “we must not expect segregationists to meekly surrender.” He prophetically predicted that blacks would have to exert blood, sweat, and tears to implement desegregation. White churches fell silent on the most critical ethical issue of the century. One white Birmingham minister predicted accurately that the “Country Club and the Christian church” would be the last institutions to admit blacks to full membership.12 Alabama’s political leaders had seen the tendency in court rulings for a decade before Brown and had tried desperately to improve education for black children in order to implement the 1890s Supreme Court standard of separate but equal. By the 1955–56 school year the salary gap between black and white teachers had been reduced to only six dollars. Black teacher salaries soared 212 percent between 1939 and 1951, and funding for black students increased 310 percent during the 1940s alone. But faced with the new Brown standard, the legislature raced toward a different solution. In 1955 legislators passed the Alabama School Placement Law that allowed students to be assigned to schools based on academic preparation, type of academic program they preferred, availability of school buses, and other considerations that favored continued segregation. The 1956 Boutwell Amendment allowed a local board to close schools and negated the 1901 constitutional requirement that Alabama provide every child an education at public expense. Voters rati¤ed the Boutwell Amendment 104,000 to 68,000, with opposition centered in the white hill counties. One consequence of the Boutwell Amendment was increasing disparity between schools in wealthy and poor counties. Fanned by divisive gubernatorial races in 1958 and 1962, white racial positions outside the legislature hardened as well. The Brown decision hastened a realignment of state politics around race rather than class. Alabama’s resistance, in turn, forced the federal government and federal courts into a more interventionist mode. Brown also reversed the state’s half century apathy toward politics. Southern Democratic primaries between 1920 and 1946 enlisted an average participation of only 19 percent of eligible adults. In 1953 only 10 percent of Birmingham’s eligible voters actually cast



ballots. In ¤ve working-class white suburbs, only one in ¤ve adults voted that year. Primaries between 1954 and 1966 saw turnout rise to 44 percent. The Republican Party was the major bene¤ciary of changing racial allegiances, as white blue-collar workers deserted the national Democratic Party over its increasingly liberal racial policies. Some 30,000 white AFL-CIO members left the state labor organization in the years following the Brown decision. By way of compensation, 250,000 additional blacks registered between the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act (triggered by events in Selma) and the 1968 presidential election. Put another way, as black liberation and enfranchisement swelled Democratic Party ranks, white racial conservatives poured out of the Democratic Party and into Republican ranks. Wallace temporarily stemmed the exodus by his independent campaigns (he carried 62 of Alabama’s 67 counties in his 1968 presidential bid and received 66 percent of the popular vote). But with Wallace slowed by health problems after a 1972 assassination attempt, the white exodus from the Democratic Party accelerated, particularly among working-class and rural whites. A more ominous reaction to Brown tapped into stronger and more violent passions. Whites organized the ¤rst Alabama chapter of the White Citizens’ Council in Selma. Its founder, while renouncing violence, warned that whites controlled the money in Dallas County, and the new organization would make it dif¤cult for any black resident who advocated desegregation to ¤nd a job, obtain credit, or renew a mortgage. It was a timehonored, well-honed Black Belt strategy for controlling blacks, which had defeated Populism and won passage of the 1901 constitution. Most Citizens Council leaders statewide were Black Belt politicians, including Walter C. Givhan and Samuel M. Engelhardt. Givhan warned a Council rally in Marengo County that the NAACP aimed “to open the bedroom door of our white women to the Negro.” Other Citizens’ Council leaders picked up that refrain, and the debate about protecting white women from rape soon swept more rational arguments aside. By 1956 Citizens’ Councils claimed a statewide membership of 80,000. Montgomery judge Walter B. Jones had emerged as the organization’s leading tactician and turned his Alabama Lawyer, the of¤cial organ of the Alabama Bar Association, into a forum for segregationist ideology. Meanwhile in 3 Black Belt counties, 16 of 29 blacks



who had petitioned for their children to be admitted to white public schools were ¤red from their jobs. For a violent, psychopathic fringe of whites, the Council’s strategy was too tepid and moderate. Between 1940 and the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, 33 racially motivated bombings occurred in Birmingham (or Bombingham as the national press increasingly referred to the city). Terrorists bombed the home of attorney Arthur Shores and Bethel Baptist Church, the congregation pastored by Fred Shuttlesworth, 3 times each. They also bombed the A. G. Gaston Motel, Gaston’s home, and the home of A. D. King, Martin Luther King’s brother. None of the bombings were solved during the civil rights era, though Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley later vigorously prosecuted both white supremacist J. B. Stoner and the perpetrators of the 16th Street church bombing that murdered four black children. At the time, city and state of¤cials suggested that blacks were bombing their own houses, churches, and businesses. Birmingham’s white community, cowed by attacks on whites who dared raise a voice of protest against the violence, largely stood silently on the sidelines. Convictions of terrorists late in the 20th century and early in the 21st raised troubling moral questions. Many were poorly educated working-class whites well connected to the all-white Birmingham police force or to prominent mine owners and industrialists. Some had long records of violence against labor organizers and Jews, although others had been active unionists themselves. Some historians suggested that Birmingham’s white business and political elites had fostered this subterranean cadre of thugs and psychopaths for purposes of controlling black activists, Communists, and other dissenters during the 1930s and ’40s, then lost control of them in the 1950s and ’60s. Watching from the sidelines in horror, elite whites discovered that they had created Frankenstein’s monsters they could no longer control. When events in Birmingham spiraled into chaos, threatening the city’s economic viability and their very industrial survival, the Big Mules ¤nally acted, but even then only timidly and ineffectively. Racial resistance varied widely in the years between 1954 and 1970. Huntsville and Mobile charted one course, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma a different one. Huntsville steered clear of con®ict for lots of reasons: large numbers of well-educated non-Alabama natives without strong ra-



cial antipathies; economic ties to Washington rather than Montgomery; moderate white political leadership. As national black pressure on the federal government grew in the 1960s, federal of¤cials delivered a blunt message to the city’s white leadership: federal moneys would not be available to build the space program in Huntsville if blacks were ¤ghting in city streets for basic constitutional rights. Local leaders heard the message loud and clear. With few political ties to the state’s economy anyway, they knew who paid the bills for Huntsville’s prosperity. When unrest began, blacks could not attend parks, bowling alleys, public libraries, or other public accommodations, and black schools had no gymnasiums, cafeterias, or laboratories. Alabama A&M University furnished a cadre of black civil rights activists, and local boycotts succeeded. Well-trained city police treated arrested protestors decently. City fathers rushed to stay ahead of demands, and schools opened to blacks in 1963 with little fanfare except for George Wallace’s ham-handed interference, which further soured local political support for him. In Mobile, postman John L. LeFlore, president of the local NAACP chapter, made common cause with an unlikely ally, white legislator Joseph N. Langan. During the war, LeFlore had aided FEPC’s investigation at ADDSCO and after the war had used a combination of legal challenges and appeals to federal agencies to chip away at Jim Crow. His support came not so much from the black masses as from a middle-class elite of ministers and other black professionals. Polite pressure on local businesses in 1964 resulted in integration of lunch counters, making unnecessary the sort of direct action that occurred in Birmingham. Langan grew up in a working-class, racially mixed neighborhood. A Catholic descended from Irish immigrants, Langan shared the typical racial views of most white Alabamians until military service during World War II transformed his attitudes. After the war, unequal treatment of black Americans smacked to him of Nazism. Elected state senator from Mobile in 1946, Langan lobbied for abolition of the poll tax and better support for education. He also became a ¤rm ally of populistic governor James Folsom. In 1953 he won a place on the 3-person city commission with the help of LeFlore’s Non-Partisan Voter’s League (NPVL). Announcing publicly that he was pleased to accept the support of voters of any color, he was reelected with the of¤cial endorsement of the NPVL in 1957. In 1953, the year Lan-



gan won a post on the commission, Mobile became the ¤rst city in Alabama to hire black policemen. Three years later, Mobile’s mayor appointed a committee of 15 whites and 13 blacks to assist him in all phases of city government. Although both the mayor and Langan became targets of Citizens’ Council and KKK harassment, they retained much support within the white community. Meanwhile, NPVL voter registration drives swelled black registration in Mobile County from 543 in 1946 to 11,366 in 1963, strengthening white moderates. With LeFlore exercising a moderating in®uence within the black community and Langan playing a similar role among whites, Mobile was spared the tragedy befalling her 3 neighbors to the north. Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma shared three important characteristics. Despite internal differences of class and strategy, black residents were united in their determination to change the way they were treated. White political leadership in each city had fractured as a result of divisive battles over class issues and the best way to deal with black aspirations. Also in each city, strong local black leaders had created vigorous protest movements before Martin Luther King, NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arrived. This fact alone contradicts the assumption that the civil rights movement began when King came to town. In actuality, one of the most important human rights movements of the 20th century had indigenous roots within all three cities. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955, but its roots went much deeper. Alabama State University’s 200 faculty and 2,000 students furnished many leaders to the movement. English professor Jo Ann Robinson had organized the Women’s Political Council, and labor leader E. D. Nixon had headed the state’s NAACP. Before King arrived at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Vernon Johns had served a stormy pastorate there, pressing his congregation to be more assertive. Within Montgomery’s white community, the old political order so ef¤ciently constructed and tightly run by Mayor William A. Gunter Jr. until his death in 1940 collapsed. Folsomite disciple Dave Birmingham won a seat on the city commission in 1953 with black support and repaid his debt to black constituents by hiring black policemen. This bold initiative played no small role in his 1955 defeat and the subsequent bus boycott. Rosa Parks, a seamstress respected by whites as a responsible black woman, was also an



active member of the NAACP and chose to test the local ordinance that required blacks to give up their seats when whites entered a crowded bus. On a cold December day in 1955, Parks refused to move when a white male bus driver ordered her to do so. She was arrested. Fred Gray and Clifford Durr negotiated her release from jail, and the incident triggered a remarkably successful, yearlong boycott. In a city where the median income for blacks was $970, whites averaged $1,730. Only 1,800 blacks were registered to vote. With limited economic and political power, African Americans found themselves often insulted by bus drivers and other service personnel despite the fact that the bus company derived 70 percent of its revenue from black customers. Blacks organized the Montgomery Improvement Association, selected the newcomer King to head it, and mobilized through black churches. At Holt Street Baptist, First Colored Baptist, and other churches, movement leaders were able to mobilize the black masses in a holy crusade rooted in evangelical Christian values of justice and equity. Long before black activists sang “We Shall Overcome” in front of the Lincoln Memorial, they sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in Montgomery churches. A year after the boycott began, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court order striking down Montgomery’s segregation bus ordinance. On December 21, 1956, King, Abernathy, and Nixon treated themselves to an early Christmas present: they rode a desegregated city bus through city streets. Ominously, the victory was punctuated by white terrorist attacks against black leaders, churches, and residences in Montgomery. During the boycott, local blacks had received judicial encouragement from a Winston County native and Republican federal judge, Frank M. Johnson Jr. Named a federal judge by Pres. Dwight Eisenhower in 1955, Johnson’s 40 years as a judge of the 11th U.S. circuit court of appeals corresponded to the most contentious time in 20th-century legal history. Beginning with his ruling in the Montgomery bus boycott, Johnson used the federal bench to restrain attacks on Freedom Riders, desegregate Alabama schools, permit the Selma-to-Montgomery march, order changes in the state’s mental health system, force desegregation of state troopers, and mandate sweeping improvements in state prisons. He so infuriated George Wallace that the governor publicly prescribed a “barbed-wire enema” for the



judge. Privately Wallace backed down in every confrontation. One of the most respected judges of the century, Johnson was later awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. honor awarded to civilians. The drama of the Montgomery Bus Boycott ®owed seamlessly onto a much larger stage. A wave of white terrorism swept through Montgomery and Birmingham in December 1956 and January 1957. On Christmas Eve, ¤ve white men beat a 15-year-old black girl at the Montgomery bus station. On Christmas night, 15 sticks of dynamite demolished Fred Shuttlesworth’s parsonage in Birmingham; miraculously, he was not killed. Back in Montgomery, snipers ¤red at integrated buses, hitting a pregnant black woman. In the early morning hours of January 10, terrorists bombed four churches and two homes in Montgomery, destroying Hutchinson Street Baptist Church and the basement of First Colored Baptist Church. Paradoxically, that same day the pastor of First Baptist, Ralph Abernathy, was with M. L. King in Atlanta, meeting with 60 preachers from 10 southern states at Ebenezer Baptist Church. The nucleus of their new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came from Alabama: in addition to King and Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth attended, as did Mobile Methodist minister Joseph E. Lowery. Although SCLC did not elect of¤cers until a February meeting in New Orleans, the informal discussions that led to its creation began in Montgomery during the boycott. For a while, academics such as Tuskegee’s C. G. Gomillion attended SCLC meetings, but as the only nonpreacher in the group, he ¤nally dropped out. Joseph Lowry believed Gomillion found the group too “preacheristic.” A 33-member board governed SCLC, 8 of them from Alabama. Most were Baptist ministers and graduates of either Morehouse College in Atlanta or Alabama State. Organization of SCLC proved a vital link in civil rights history. Black preachers were least vulnerable to white ¤nancial power, possessed the respect of their communities, spoke persuasively to large audiences, and had access to their congregations three times a week, allowing them to mobilize masses of people quickly. Especially in smaller towns without black radio stations or newspapers, churches became strategic communication networks and the key to organizing a mass movement. After Alabama political leaders persuaded the judicial system to ban the NAACP from the state, Shuttlesworth organized the militant Alabama



Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in 1956. Based in Birmingham, ACMHR became one of 85 local organizations af¤liated with SCLC. Conservative black ministers feared ACMHR’s radicalism and refused to join. As late as the spring 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, only some 20 of 400 black city ministers actively participated. Shuttlesworth —though less well educated, more fundamentalist theologically, and less compromising than other black ministers—moved into leadership because of the timidity of others. Within Birmingham’s white community, opinions were also hardening. Initially the 1954 Brown decision was only an abstract threat to Jim Crow, some distant peril that seemed to cause trouble in Virginia and other border states but barely stirred the waters of Birmingham’s racial pond. Various white moderates, including in®uential white Baptist minister John Buchanan, tried to join conservative black leaders in the centrist Interracial Committee (albeit one led by whites). Militants on both sides of the racial divide rejected such attempts to end violence and remove Bull Connor as city commissioner while still maintaining a Jim Crow social system. Unfortunately, segregationist businessmen and lawyers—attorney Hugh Locke, Hugh Morrow (of U.S. Pipe), construction executive R. Hugh Daniel, banker F. B. Yielding, and realtor Sidney Smyer—formed the American States’ Rights Association in opposition to the Interracial Committee, demonstrating to both black activists and white terrorists how divided was the city’s white business establishment. Outside ownership of many important Birmingham industries further fractured white leadership. Many owners lived in Mountain Brook; others, in Pittsburgh. Connor’s reelection in 1957, despite a widely publicized adulterous affair, polarized the white community even more, with Connor sweeping working-class white neighborhoods and his moderate opponent running equally well in upper-class white neighborhoods along Highland Avenue. White working-class churches proved as strong a bastion for bigotry as similar black congregations did for liberation. Ferrell Griswold, pastor of Minor Heights Baptist Church, became spiritual leader of the United Americans for Conservative Government and made his church hospitable for Ku Klux Klansmen. Robert Chambliss, the Klansman later convicted of bombing 16th Street Baptist Church, dropped out of 35th Avenue Baptist Church because his pastor visited the black congregation Chambliss would later bomb



and invited members to visit the white church. Chambliss and three Klan brothers paid a call on the white pastor and warned him he was under scrutiny as a potential Communist. Woodlawn Methodist Church became a Sunday battleground, pitting a courageous young pastor, John Rutland, against parishioner Bull Connor. Such pressures built steadily in Birmingham over the decade following the Brown decision. White terrorists kidnapped and castrated Judge Aaron, a hapless black man who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. In April 1960 the New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury infuriated local residents with a perceptive essay in his newspaper about racial conditions in the Magic City. “Fear stalks the streets of Birmingham . . . fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police, and many branches of the state’s apparatus.” “Every inch of middle ground” had been occupied by hate. The Birmingham News, ever civic booster and seldom community conscience, sputtered with rage against carpetbagger journalists. Salisbury’s report, the News editorialized, included “an amazing recital of untruths and semitruths . . . maliciously bigoted, noxiously false, viciously distorted. . . . This Birmingham of ours is a lovely place. It is a city in which fear does not abide. What Harrison Salisbury reported, we all should know, is in substance untrue.”13 Never did a staff eat more crow than did editors of the Birmingham News over the following months. On Mothers Day 1961 one busload of Freedom Riders was attacked in Anniston, where their bus was burned while policemen watched. When a Trailways bus with Freedom Riders aboard reached the Birmingham station, Klansmen (who had received word of the riders’ plans from Birmingham policemen) beat them, together with local blacks unlucky enough to be in the Trailways station. Birmingham police, who had agreed to allow the Klan a quarter hour of mayhem, ¤nally crossed the street from their headquarters to the Trailways station 15 minutes after the riot began. City detectives called that evening to congratulate the Klan on a job well done. Unfortunately for the Klan, photographs by a Post-Herald photographer identi¤ed the Klansmen, and detective Melvin Bailey, a respected future Jefferson County sheriff without Klan ties, won indictments. White juries acquitted the most violent participants. This 1961 police cooperation with



the Klan and jury acquiescence virtually guaranteed that worse incidents would follow. Connor, who had known beforehand of the planned attack, blamed the violence on “out-of-town meddlers.” The city’s crisis quickly escalated. In 1961 Connor ordered all city parks and golf courses closed rather than integrate them. Miles College students began a selective buying campaign against Birmingham stores in spring 1962. City commissioners retaliated by cutting off appropriations of surplus food to needy families, a move that further solidi¤ed the black community. The boycott that united blacks further divided whites. Shuttlesworth posed the issue dramatically to his congregation at Bethel Baptist Church by urging every member to register to vote: “I said I didn’t want any deacon wearing out the carpet on the ®oor praying to the Lord who wouldn’t get up and walk to the polls.”14 The boycott persuaded city merchants to eliminate some Jim Crow features in downtown stores, and blacks agreed to delay demonstrations. But Connor and Mayor Art Hanes ignored the agreement and restored the offensive segregation signs. At that point, after nearly a decade of local civil rights efforts led by Shuttlesworth, he invited King and SCLC to come to Birmingham to help. King brought a national reputation and much media attention, and he galvanized many black pastors of more elite churches who had been cool to Shuttlesworth’s authoritarian methods and confrontational style. King arrived in the spring of 1963 just at the end of a change-of-government election in which moderate whites had won suf¤cient support from conservative businessmen nervous about their economic future to turn Connor and Hanes out of of¤ce. The Birmingham News, which had pronounced the city free of fear years earlier, now wondered whether that was so. Connor denounced the “bloc vote,” and the “Mountain Brook controlled Chamber of Commerce,” all to no avail. In a runoff where an incredible 75 percent of registered voters cast ballots, moderate segregationist Albert Boutwell won 29,600 to Connor’s 21,600. Connor and Hanes refused to vacate their of¤ces until courts resolved their legal challenge to the new city government; meanwhile King arrived to begin demonstrations. One wit proclaimed that Birmingham was the only city in the world with two mayors, a king, and a parade every day. Some moderate ministers denounced King’s timing for demonstrations; King replied with his magisterial “Let-



ter from the Birmingham Jail.” Their criticism of his timing, King wrote around the margins of a newspaper, his only available writing material, failed to acknowledge the injustice that had brought him to Birmingham. “We know through painful experience,” King reminded, “that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” “Justice too long delayed,” he quoted, “is justice denied.”15 And 340 years was long enough for Negroes to wait for freedom. Disrupted by Connor’s arrest of demonstrators and frustrated in their attempts to recruit adults who knew that arrest could cost them their jobs and livelihood, organizers turned to schoolchildren. Demonstrators, including a seemingly endless stream of children, ¤lled local jails and forced Connor to seek a different strategy for ending street marches. He unleashed powerful ¤re hoses and snarling German shepherds on the children, a disastrous public relations gaffe. Newspapers around the world captured the drama unfolding at Kelly Ingram Park and around the staging ground of 16th Street Baptist Church. In some ways, Birmingham never fully recovered from that image despite nearly four decades of moderation and desegregation that followed. In®uential business leaders, even conservative ones such as Sidney Smyer, deserted Connor. Fearing the collapse of the local economy, they began to negotiate with King. They agreed to desegregate lunch counters, remove Jim Crow signs at water fountains, and hire black clerks. Although the volatile Shuttlesworth nearly derailed the agreement at the last moment, a bargain was struck, and King headed elsewhere to the great relief of local whites. White terrorists reacted to what they considered a sellout by pragmatic businessmen segregationists with a wave of bombings that provoked counterviolence from some blacks and occupation of the city by Al Lingo’s state troopers. However much historians have ®ayed white businessmen for their reluctant compromise, it is worth noting that businessmen accepted the inevitable before most white ministers or educators raised frightened heads or unloosed paralyzed tongues. In a city with few white heroes, pragmatic white businessmen came as close to adopting a course of good sense as anyone, albeit out of concern for their material well-being rather than from any moral sensibilities about the wrongness of their cause. Governor Wallace poured gasoline on the smoldering ¤re with his June 7, 1963, “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama. In a



charade carefully orchestrated by Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, the Justice Department, and Wallace, the governor denounced federal intrusion, then stepped aside as Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the last bastion of Jim Crow higher education. The following September, after a summer ¤lled with mass white rallies addressed by ®amboyant politicians and preachers, Birmingham prepared to integrate public schools. President Kennedy, forewarned of trouble, federalized the Alabama National Guard. But administration of¤cials expected the crisis to play out in front of schools, as in Little Rock and Tuscaloosa. They were unprepared for a terrorist attack on a Sunday school. On Sunday morning September 15 the 16th Street Baptist Church was conducting its annual Youth Day. Common to Baptist churches of both races, Youth Day celebrated the passing of the torch from an older generation to a younger one. Adolescents dressed in their nicest clothes and assumed the roles of church leadership. Four young girls, eagerly anticipating the day’s event, excitedly primped in the church’s basement restroom. Above them on the upper ®oor, parents and elders poured over the theology of that day’s Sunday school lesson about grace, entitled “The Love That Forgives.” As they chatted, a loud explosion shook the church. Schoolteacher Maxine McNair hurried downstairs, only to encounter her father carrying a white shoe that had belonged to the McNair’s only child, Denise. The child was dead, he sobbed, along with three of her companions. Firemen and ambulance drivers sifting through the debris found a kindergarten lea®et with the day’s prayer: “Dear God, we are sorry for the times we were so unkind.”16 Al Lingo returned to the Magic City, which seemed to have lost its magic, to lead an investigation worthy of Connor’s earlier efforts. His inquiry resulted in the arrest of Chambliss, an outspoken Klansman with close ties to the Birmingham police department, but Lingo’s botched work, assisted it turned out by the KKK, essentially made it impossible for the FBI to make a stronger case. J. Edgar Hoover, who had wiretapped King and planted informants within the Klan, chose not to prosecute the bombers for fear of exposing his spies and strengthening King. Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley reopened the case in 1977, resulting in the conviction of Chambliss. Following the integration of Birmingham schools in September 1963, the



movement shifted its focus to Selma. As in Montgomery and Birmingham, local blacks had organized long before King arrived. The Dallas County Voters League, dating from the 1930s, and J. L. Chestnut Jr., Selma’s only black attorney, led the drive to register black voters. Chestnut, son of a Selma grocer and member of the second graduating class from the city’s black high school, was admitted to the Alabama bar in 1959, the 17th black attorney to gain that distinction. The presence of Craig Air Force Base also brought to town black airmen unaccustomed to Black Belt racial discrimination and unwilling to acquiesce to Jim Crow harassment. As in Montgomery and Birmingham, growing black unity and militancy paralleled growing white disunity and confusion. A political machine of prominent business people, allied to Dallas County sheriff James G. Clark Jr., had run the town. But in 1964 a new coalition led by Joe T. Smitherman challenged their leadership. Born in Selma in 1929, Smitherman grew up in a poor white neighborhood. His father died only months after his birth and his mother died 12 years later. His six older siblings took money from their own meager earnings as supermarket clerk, taxi driver, and waitress to send Joe to high school. After a stint in the army, he returned to Selma to work in an appliance store. In 1964 Smitherman joined city police chief Wilson Baker to topple the machine that had run the city. Ballots cast by 240 black voters constituted nearly half Smitherman’s mayoral victory margin. Those voters represented most of the city’s 320 black voters (2 percent of eligible black adults). Selma contained some 28,000 people in 1962, 49 percent of them black. More than 9,000 whites were registered (65 percent of those eligible). Dallas County registrars utilized the full range of disfranchisement strategies contained in the 1901 constitution. The registrar’s of¤ce opened only 37 days a year and processed a maximum of 30 applicants per day. A quali¤ed voter had to vouch for each applicant. Literacy tests included questions about words required on U.S. coins, the place where electors cast their ballots for president, and whether U.S. ambassadors could be named by the president without the approval of the Senate. Applicants passing the test could still be excluded for spelling or pronunciation mistakes. A high school graduate and U.S. Air Force enlistee was rejected for mispronouncing “construe.” One black schoolteacher tried to



register 10 times, always unsuccessfully. The black Baptist minister L. L. Anderson, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, also failed the literacy test a number of times. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Selma, Sheriff Clark expanded harassment to include arrest of SNCC organizers for vagrancy and loitering. Despite the June 1963 beating of a black man, long lines of African Americans still queued in front of the registrar’s of¤ce during the rare days when it was open. The ¤rst student demonstrations began in September 1963, led by John Lewis, a young Baptist minister born in Pike County near Troy. Lewis mobilized Selma’s black youth with his emotional rallies at Selma’s black churches and persuaded black celebrities such as James Forman, the comedian Dick Gregory, and the novelist James Baldwin to visit and encourage voter registration. As out-of-towners arrived, Sheriff Clark ratcheted up the harassment. He pushed and shoved applicants, and raided SNCC headquarters. Still the lines formed throughout the summer of 1964. In July deputy sheriffs attacked blacks leaving a church registration rally, injuring several. An injunction ¤led against the activists ¤nally ended the 1964 effort. Early in 1965 King and SCLC members arrived to begin a new voter registration drive. SCLC and SNCC put aside differences to confront Clark with a solid front. Smitherman and police chief Wilson Baker tried unsuccessfully to circumvent Clark, and the sheriff ’s increasingly erratic and violent reactions mobilized teachers and other middle-class blacks who had generally avoided the con®ict. In February, Clark began arresting everyone in sight, sometimes as many as 500 in a single day. A federal judge intervened to force voter registration of 100 per day and struck down part of the literacy test. At that point, the focus of Black Belt protest shifted to Marion in Perry County. Demonstrations there triggered attacks on journalists, photographers, and demonstrators, including one 82-year-old black man, his daughter, and his grandson, who was shot to death trying to protect his mother from assailants. The killing precipitated protestors to vow to carry the body to George Wallace in Montgomery, and they began making plans for the Selma-toMontgomery march. Wallace ordered the marchers stopped at the end of the Edmund Pettus bridge over the Alabama River. There Sheriff Clark



and his deputies, many mounted on horses, charged into the marchers, ®ailing away with billy clubs and ¤ring tear gas. Film crews from national television networks ¤lmed while skulls cracked, limbs broke, and ribs fractured. Once again an Alabama community became indelibly framed by televised violence that within hours traveled to the remotest parts of the globe. King called on people of good will to descend on Selma by the thousands, and they came: politicians, celebrities, teachers, college professors, ministers, priests, nuns, rabbis, union leaders, and ordinary citizens. The next crowd to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge came 1,500 strong, reinforced by the nation’s moral indignation and the world’s scorn for Selma. That night, white terrorists beat to death a white Unitarian minister, triggering protest marches in Chicago, New Haven, and Kansas City, and swelling the ranks pouring into Selma. One Brooklyn minister ®ew in, marched, ®ew out, then told his New York City congregation that “Alabama is a hell come to earth” threatening to lead America “down to the abysmal depths of a demonic society.”17 Events in Selma provoked Pres. Lyndon Johnson to appear on national television to call for an end to segregation and announce major legislation to eliminate barriers to voting. He ended by paraphrasing the anthem of the movement: “And we shall overcome.” White Selma residents and Governor Wallace responded with outrage. They accused demonstrators of sexual orgies and Communist af¤liations. Wallace refused to guarantee the safety of marchers, causing President Johnson to federalize the state National Guard. The Selma to Montgomery march began with 3,200 participants on March 21, 1965. King sent them on their way with a long-remembered peroration: “Walk together, children, don’t you get weary, and it will lead us to the promised land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.” On March 25, King led 25,000 up Dexter Avenue, in front of his old pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Three hours of speeches followed. Governor Wallace borrowed a pair of binoculars so he could read a sign held by one demonstrator which read, “God is the answer.” An aide commented sardonically: “That will make Lyndon mad.” King responded to the crowds with one of his most memorable speeches: “They told us we wouldn’t get here . . . but all the world knows that we are



here and that we are standing before the forces of power in Alabama, saying, ‘we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’” The end they sought, King continued, was “a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That will be the day, not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”18 An electri¤ed crowd roared its approval. As the triumphant marchers returned home, a carload of Klansmen murdered Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife, as she ferried marchers back to Selma. Five months later, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, forever changing southern politics. Within a year of its passage, Dallas County black registration increased from 320 to 6,000. Perry County black registration went from 289 to 2,460; Lowndes and Wilcox from 0 to 1,496 and 3,201, respectively. Within the seven southern states covered by the new federal legislation, black registration rose from 326,000 to 988,000. Black registration in Alabama increased from 66,000 in 1960 to 113,000 in 1965 (24 percent of eligible black adults), to 315,000 in 1970 (65 percent of those eligible). But the percentage of eligible whites registered increased nearly as quickly, from 79 percent in 1965 to 97 percent in 1970. Events in Selma triggered one of the most momentous political shifts in U.S. history. More importantly, it signaled a transformation in the selfunderstanding of a people. Perhaps a Selma black woman stated the new reality most succinctly to a New York Times reporter: “Selma did something. It did something that’s hard to explain, but it’s inside where you can’t see it. . . . I mean, you remember when Jim Clark said there wasn’t going to be no march except over his dead body? Well, we marched, didn’t we?”19 The Unfinished Revolution The civil rights movement in Alabama can be measured in two ways, with sharply different results. On one hand, racism persisted long after Jim Crow was knocked off its perch. On the other hand, racial change occurred that few civil rights activists would have thought possible in the violent movement days of the 1960s. The agency in Alabama public life charged primarily with spiritual reformation failed miserably. White Alabama churches, together with white fraternities and sororities and country clubs, were most resistant to accept-



ing blacks. Most white churches remained segregated at century’s end. The segregation resulted partly from different worship styles, partly from the exclusion of minority black members from congregational leadership, but mostly from lack of welcome and even resentment at the presence of blacks. As many whites understood the matter, they had been forced to admit blacks into their factories, restaurants, theaters, hotels, legislature, schools, and colleges. They would not admit them to their homes or churches. Although politics represented the major bastion taken by force in the long civil rights battles of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, even there white resistance did not collapse. By the last decades of the century, blacks elected a quarter of the legislature, almost exactly the African American share of the population. But hardly an election cycle passed without some candidate playing the race card. George Wallace reached the pinnacle of racist demagoguery in his runoff campaign against Albert Brewer in 1970. No one matched him, though many tried. Sen. Charles Davidson, a Walker County Republican and Church of Christ layman, ran a campaign extolling the Confederate ®ag and arguing that the Bible endorsed slavery. That argument proved so offensive that even his own party renounced his campaign. But the ®ag issue did ¤gure in Republican Fob James’s defeat of Gov. James E. Folsom Jr., who had removed the Confederate ®ag from atop the capitol. The Republican Party, swollen by white Democratic defections after Wallace’s eclipse, had dif¤culty with the race issue throughout the last three decades of the century. Gov. Guy Hunt beat Democrat Paul Hubbert partly by using a racially loaded photograph showing AEA director Hubbert getting into a car with his black associate director, Joe Reed. In Hueytown, a city councilman assured residents in 1995 that he had nothing personal against blacks, but they messed up everything they tried to manage. Workplace issues raised particularly sensitive concerns for Alabamians. From a black perspective, court-enforced quotas and af¤rmative action programs sought to redress centuries of job discrimination. From a white perspective, such programs favored lesser-quali¤ed blacks over better-quali¤ed whites. A 1995 Mobile Register–University of South Alabama poll found half of all Alabamians favored ending af¤rmative action and 43 percent were in support of such programs. By race, 56 percent of whites opposed



af¤rmative action, 37 percent favored it. Blacks supported such programs by a margin of 64 to 26 percent. A majority of both races agreed that af¤rmative action had been effective in bringing minorities into the workplace. Just obtaining a job was no guarantee a black person would improve status. Lawsuits against timber companies, paper mills, and industry unions became especially common. Black wood dealers claimed white-owned mills shut them out. Black paper mill employees won numerous suits against companies that claimed unions forced them to marginalize black workers in bottom-wage jobs. Even with state agencies such as the Department of Transportation (DOT) black workers had to sue in order to obtain fair treatment. The most egregious case involved Freddy Golthy Jr., who was regularly subjected to physical attacks and racial slurs by white coworkers in Grove Hill. After leaving the county, ¤ling a federal suit against DOT for discrimination, and being promoted to accountant, Golthy returned to Grove Hill to be near his wife who was a member of the Grove Hill City Council. In 2001 he was killed after arguing with Marvin Daniel Graves, the father of a coworker whom Golthy had reprimanded for displaying a Confederate battle ®ag on the cover of his cellular phone. Graves, a deacon and former adult Sunday school teacher at Pineview Baptist Church in Thomasville, was a DOT retiree when he gunned down Golthy after an argument degenerated into a ¤st ¤ght. By 2003 the state had paid $62.5 million in legal fees and consultant costs to resolve the 18-year-old DOT suit. Black farmers turned their anger on a different villain, the Farmers Home Administration. In 1920 Alabama contained 161,000 farms operated by whites compared to 95,000 run by blacks. By 1987 those numbers had fallen to 41,000 and 2,000. Black farmers complained that whites started out with more capital, could more easily obtain credit, and had access to larger markets. They believed the federal Farmers Home Administration made loans more readily to white applicants than to black ones. In Alabama, 3-member committees in each county approved loan applications, and only 44 of the 195 committee members were black. Of the 209 loans made in 1991–92, only 29 went to black farmers. Housing and neighborhood patterns remained the chief urban barrier to desegregation. Paradoxically, as increasingly black city governments re-



named streets in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., his dream of a biracial South seemed to be eroding. Alabama cities of more than 100,000 population became con¤gured like nonsouthern cities. Whites ®ed to white suburbs trying to escape high crime rates and decaying schools. Af®uent blacks followed not far behind, integrating neighborhoods laterally according to wealth and education but with no more than a token black presence. In October 1974 the Council of Municipal Performance reported that 6 southern cities, including Montgomery, had the most segregated housing in America. A quarter century later, Alabama’s 4 largest cities were all in the top third of the nation’s most segregated cities. Huntsville was the nation’s 61st most segregated city, with 72 percent of its residents living in single-race neighborhoods. Montgomery ranked 71st among 281 cities above 100,000 residents, Birmingham 73rd, and Mobile 80th. Although Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery were becoming less segregated during the 1990s, Huntsville became considerably more polarized. The percentage of blacks in the total population increased in all 4 cities, as whites ®ed to suburbs and rural areas. Curiously enough, small towns often experienced more residential integration. There were no suburbs to accommodate whites trying to ®ee. Blacks and whites were more likely to know each other personally, and whites were less threatened when blacks began to move into their neighborhoods. Neighborhood schools posed some of the most intractable problems. After racial integration, many whites in predominately black counties pulled their children out of public schools and enrolled them in private academies, usually operated out of evangelical Christian churches. Though a later generation would claim that whites were merely ®eeing secularism, crime, sexual anarchy, and other threats to traditional values, the chronology of private Christian academies suggests their origins owed more to racism than white evangelical reaction to modernism and secularism. The ¤nal four decades of the 20th century experienced a cycle of desegregation and stability, followed by resegregation. A Harvard University study announced in 2001 that desegregation dominated the decade of the 1970s, then began to switch during the 1980s and ’90s. By 1998 the percentage of black students in majority white schools had dropped to 31.4 percent,



about the same as in 1970. Throughout the South, desegregation peaked in 1988 at 43.5 percent; by 1998, it hovered near the Alabama average at 32.7 percent. Montgomery’s Sidney Lanier High School served as a perfect example of the cycle. The beautiful Gothic-style building had educated the city’s elite white children and boasted the state’s highest number of college graduates who later won prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowships for graduate study. In 1964 a handful of black students enrolled, the ¤rst high school in the county to integrate. Af®uent whites began to remove their children and enroll them in expensive private schools. Support for adequate funding eroded until average expenditures per pupil became the lowest of any American capital city. Many whites moved to Auburn, an hour’s drive away, where their children could attend excellent schools (incidentally without paying the city occupation tax that partly funded such schools) while parents commuted down Interstate 85 to well-paying jobs in Montgomery. By 2000 only 6 white students attended class with Sidney Lanier’s 1,100 black students. Despite resegregation, Alabama could boast of two accomplishments. Resegregated though schools were, they were far more integrated than when George Wallace waged a national campaign against desegregation. And they were more integrated than schools in New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California, the four most segregated states in the nation, where pious platitudes and some degree of self-righteousness could not obscure the fact that residentially based resegregation was as much a northern and western problem as a southern one. Even when enrolled in the same schools, blacks and whites were often segregated by different curriculum (whites in precollege, blacks in occupational tracks), sports (whites in soccer, swimming, cross-country, wrestling, golf, tennis, blacks in football and basketball), and social activities. Some schools abandoned high school proms to prevent racial clashes or interracial dating (which both races often opposed). Others had two unof¤cial but segregated dances. In Randolph County, school superintendent Hulond Humphries told students that the 1994 Randolph County High School prom would not be held because some interracial couples planned to attend. A student from a racially mixed family whom Humphries referred to as a “mistake” he was



trying to prevent from happening again sued the school, and the community polarized according to race. Federal intervention forced rescheduling the prom for the student body that was 38 percent black, though heavy security was necessary to prevent violence. Outside groups—SCLC, NAACP, KKK—visited town, and a young black man ¤nally torched the historic high school building. Grieving whites gathered around smoldering ashes to mourn the loss of a building and a way of life. Rev. Emmett Johnson, leader of the black parents group pressing for Humphries’s resignation, reacted differently: “It may be a symbol of glory for them, but for me it’s the place where they use[d] to call me nigger and throw rocks at me as I walked [past] it on the way to the black high school.”20 Students who graduated from Randolph County High and continued on to college encountered a system of higher education much like the one they left. If black students chose not to attend historically black colleges, they entered universities that were overwhelmingly white. Auburn, the largest state university, played football with a mainly black team by the 1970s. But less than 5 percent of the student body was black. Blacks sued the state university system in a case that dragged on for 14 years and drained more than $20 million in desperately needed funds into lawyers’ fees. Finally, a Georgia federal judge ruled in 1995. He capped growth in predominantly white colleges that had been located in cities with historic black universities. He also mandated that more state education money be appropriated to historically black Alabama State and Alabama A&M universities for endowment and in-state scholarships to attract white students. He ordered merger of agricultural extension programs at Auburn and A&M. Gradually, minority enrollment increased at all the state’s universities, and token white players even appeared on Alabama State football teams. But in the ¤nal analysis, federal courts could no more integrate hearts of white students at Alabama or Auburn than in racially segregated neighborhoods or the Department of Transportation. The University of Alabama boasted a student body nearly twice as integrated as Auburn’s and considerably more liberal. Yet the white fraternities and sororities that ran student life never admitted a black student during the 20th century. The Delta Chi fraternity in Auburn broke the color barrier in 1984 by accepting Tommy Lanier, a black pledge from Huntsville. Few followed the path he broke.



Black students were often denied access to white fraternity parties. The organizations used as justi¤cation insurance policies that restricted parties to members only. Lack of diversity and racial insensitivity exploded at Auburn in November 2001 when Delta Sigma Phi fraternity’s Halloween party became an international incident. A student dressed in Klan robe and hood, standing next to a white coed dressed in a Playboy bunny costume, posed for pictures holding a noose around the neck of a fraternity brother in black face. The photography service taking photos at social events decided to advertise its wares by posting the offensive photo on the World Wide Web. Letters and email poured into the university, including some from black servicemen in Afghanistan, denouncing the offensive photo. Auburn, with the lowest black enrollment of any state university, entered a prolonged crisis. Pres. William Walker, calling the incident “shocking and outrageous,” expelled the offending students and kicked their fraternity off campus. A lawsuit soon returned both. The most troubling aspect of the incident was not the woeful ignorance of black history that caused many otherwise bright Auburn white students to protest they couldn’t understand what the furor was all about. That honor belonged to letters from white parents living in wealthy Birmingham suburbs, especially in Shelby County, which ¤lled the Birmingham News letters-to-the-editor columns for weeks. Their arguments varied: white racism was protected by First Amendment guarantees of free speech; “boys will be boys”; adolescents make mistakes in judgment that need to be forgiven by adults; Auburn’s faculty and administration overreacted; calls for diversity and sensitivity training were examples of offensive “political correctness.” The entire debate revealed two profoundly disturbing truths about post-civil rights-era Alabama. Much remained unchanged. And not all bigotry could be blamed on “white trailer trash” and blue-collar workers. Elite white suburbs were more likely to have all-white neighborhoods, segregated schools, and pure white churches than other communities in the state. While Alabama whites were slowly converted to the values of a biracial society, some black leaders ironically discovered value in a separate society. Beginning with the Black Panthers who brie®y ®ourished in Lowndes County, a few African Americans proved that racism came in at least two



colors. Gradually gaining political control of a number of Black Belt counties, black leaders became skilled at the practice of politics they had observed practiced by whites for more than a century. Whites had defeated black aspirations by manipulating elections and manufacturing political majorities. Now some black leaders used absentee votes to accomplish the same end for their own purposes. In some counties, a third of the ballots cast were cast absentee in a process rife with corruption, either real or potential. School systems became patronage opportunities, and black superintendents often requested waivers of graduation requirements, and resisted teacher testing, standardized student tests, criminal background checks on teachers, and other measures of academic accountability. If black educators managed some school systems ef¤ciently and fairly, they managed others clumsily, inef¤ciently, and corruptly (although many school systems taken over by the state because of ¤nancial irregularities and low test scores were also managed by white superintendents and school boards). Black political unity, forged by white oppression and opposition, began to splinter when white racism abated. Joe Reed’s powerful Alabama Democratic Conference, centered in the Black Belt, was outmaneuvered by the urban-based New South Coalition. Mayor Richard Arrington’s powerful community-based Birmingham machine degenerated into factious politics by the century’s end. Rep. Earl Hilliard, often criticized by whites for spendthrift junkets and by blacks for inattention to the problems of his desperately poor congressional district, survived a well-educated black challenger in the 2000 elections but went down to defeat two years into the new century, along with his Montgomery political ally Joe Reed. Clearly blacks were becoming more politically independent and more open to courtship by a variety of black and white aspirants. Many noble initiatives within the African American community were undermined by corrupt and self-serving black leaders. None was sadder than the highly touted West Alabama Health Services. Organized in 1974 by a remarkable black physician, Sandral Hullett, the agency provided comprehensive medical care through 20 clinics in 17 Black Belt counties for two decades before federal audits began to reveal disturbing patterns. West Alabama Health Services required physicians to treat emergency room cases beyond their expertise; in®ated patient visits, resulting in overbilling Medicare and Medicaid; lent money to a dog racing track in violation of federal



regulations; and borrowed from a bank whose of¤cials also served on the Health Services board. Although many problems within the black family structure could be traced to poor education in underfunded schools, lack of early childhood programs, pervasive poverty, lack of decent jobs (especially in the Black Belt), and other social injustices deeply rooted in Alabama history, other problems existed that could only be resolved by African Americans themselves. Too many black children were born out of wedlock; too many fathers abandoned their families; too many teenagers had babies—all of which exposed black children to high risks of failure in school, dropping out before high school graduation, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and cyclical poverty. Of course none of these conditions were new, and many of them were improving by century’s end. And, on balance, more good news than bad emanated from race relations in Alabama. For all the ignorance of black history at the state’s predominantly white universities, ever-increasing numbers of black students chose to attend them, even if it meant creating a parallel system of black Greek organizations. Finally, nearly four decades after the University of Alabama admitted black students, an all-white fraternity pledged an African American student in 2001. That same year Auburn University awarded honorary degrees to the school’s ¤rst black student and the ¤rst black graduate. That same year a mixed-race Birmingham jury convicted former Klansman Thomas E. Blanton Jr. in the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. A year later a jury of nine whites and three blacks meted out the same fate to the last of the accused Klansmen, Bobby Frank Cherry. The conviction brought rejoicing in the city’s black community, where civil rights hero Fred Shuttlesworth told a rally at 16th Street Baptist Church, the “Birmingham of yesterday is no more.”21 There was much to celebrate beyond high-pro¤le convictions of white terrorists, though the convictions had enormous symbolic importance in a state where only decades earlier virtually no white jury ever found whites guilty of crimes against blacks. The 2000 census revealed that blacks were better educated and had higher incomes, and fewer lived in poverty than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data. Nearly 80 per-



cent of blacks over age 25 were high school graduates, and 17 percent held at least a bachelor’s degree, both record achievements. In 2002 the Medical Association of the State of Alabama also elected Dr. Regina M. Benjamin the ¤rst black (and the ¤rst woman) president of the prestigious professional group in its 129-year history. She also became the ¤rst black woman ever to be president of a state medical society in the United States. Her work operating a clinic for the poor in Bayou La Batre made the event even more special. A native of Daphne in Baldwin County and a graduate of the University of Alabama in Birmingham Medical School (with a master’s degree in business administration from Tulane), Benjamin could have practiced her profession most anywhere. Her decision to remain in Alabama and practice among poor patients sent a message both about her and about how much the state had changed since the 1960s. The presence of idealistic, competent black professionals such as Sandral Hullett and Regina Benjamin revealed much about Alabama’s growing black middle class. Their poor black patients revealed just as much about the persistence of poverty and the continuing casualties of discrimination. Political change accompanied economic mobility. As the black vote divided and subdivided, black political leaders no longer held tight reins on their organizations. In 1998 Richard Arrington’s Birmingham organization endorsed a Republican in the party’s gubernatorial runoff. Black millionaire Donald Watkins, son of a longtime Alabama State University president, created a new political action committee as willing to endorse nonracist Republicans as Democrats. In 1969 Arthur Shores, a 65-year-old Birmingham attorney whose house had twice been dynamited by terrorists, garnered the second highest countywide vote among 20 candidates for ¤ve open seats on the Birmingham City Council. He estimated that whites accounted for nearly half his votes. The returns prompted him to tell a Newsweek reporter: “What has happened to the racial climate in this city is as profound as it is unbelievable.” Some local whites resented a black man serving on the council. And one black militant scoffed at the wealthy, college-educated Shores: “We got our Uncle Toms, but this guy is an Aunt Jemima.”22 But most blacks and whites greeted Shores’s election as a watershed event that would begin to change the city’s grimy image. A year later Chris McNair, father of one of the children mur-



dered at 16th Street Baptist Church, was elected in a countywide referendum as the ¤rst black representative to the Alabama legislature in the 20th century. Ever the city booster, the Birmingham News published a special supplement in June 1973 entitled “Birmingham: 10 Years Later.” Finally admitting what the paper had so strenuously denied in 1960 (that Birmingham was a city polarized by racial fear and violence), the team of journalists generally extolled racial progress made during the decade since the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. The series validated the century-long pattern of the state’s largest newspaper: back progress (usually a decade or so after it happened), while endorsing the most conservative candidate in each election and proclaiming the triumphs of the city at every opportunity. All was not as well as the News thought. Poverty still dominated black neighborhoods. Whites ®ed the downtown for the suburbs in ever increasing numbers. Police incidents still marred race relations. All these factors combined in 1979 to elect the city’s ¤rst black mayor. Richard Arrington was the ideal transitional ¤gure in Birmingham’s racial maturation. Born on a tenant farm in the Black Belt, Arrington bene¤ted from a stable family committed to the Primitive Baptist Church and to education. After graduating from high school, he attended Miles College in Birmingham, then earned a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oklahoma before returning to his alma mater to teach. There he began building the political organization that would help elect his liberal white friend David Vann mayor in 1975. Four years later, they parted ways over Vann’s handling of a police shooting of a black woman parked at a convenience store that was being robbed. Pro¤ting from a 73 percent turnout of registered blacks and picking up a decisive 10 percent of white voters as well, Arrington defeated Vann to provide Alabama’s largest city its ¤rst African American mayor. During his four terms as mayor, Arrington won the support of the business community, renovated downtown, helped diversify the economy, helped develop the University of Alabama at Birmingham as the economic engine driving the city forward, and strengthened his Jefferson County Citizens Coalition into arguably the state’s most powerful political machine. He pushed aside older, more conservative leaders such as Arthur Shores and A. G. Gaston in favor of younger, more militant cohorts. In January 1986 he joined J. L. Chestnut Jr., Hank and Rose Sanders, all of



Selma, and Mike Figures of Mobile in founding the Alabama New South Coalition, challenging Joe Reed and his Alabama Democratic Conference for political leadership of Alabama blacks. Riding the crest of these organizations, he won three reelection campaigns before his Jefferson County machine began to unravel in the late 1990s. Increasingly restive city council members began to clash with him, and some self-serving associates used their in®uence to reward themselves and their friends. Increasingly powerful black political leaders had a hard time winning statewide elections but found willing allies among the state’s ambitious white Democrats. U.S. senator Howell He®in in particular pro¤ted from black support. The last Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in the 20th century, He®in represented an important point. For a Democrat to win in an increasingly Republican state, the candidate needed to take nearly 90 percent of the black vote while holding at least a third of the white. Once elected, He®in sided with his black constituents on a number of economic policies and key votes to con¤rm judges. In his most dramatic departure from Confederate forebears, he made a dramatic 1993 speech on the Senate ®oor calling for an end to racism in America. Joining Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (DIllinois), the ¤rst black woman to serve in the Senate, he passionately urged rejection of an amendment that would have renewed the Confederate insignia design patent Congress ¤rst granted to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1898. While revering his Confederate ancestors, He®in begged fellow senators to respect the progress made in removing racism. Some fellow senators termed the speech the most emotionally moving they had witnessed in a generation of Senate debate. The resultant 75–25 vote to kill the amendment reversed an earlier 52–48 vote in favor of renewing the patent. As symbolically important was a public referendum on a constitutional amendment to remove the ban on interracial marriages from the 1901 constitution. Although many whites and not a few blacks voted against the amendment, it passed by a 60 to 40 percent vote. In that 2000 election, some 73 percent of voters were white and 25 percent were black, so whites had to split almost evenly to account for the victory margin. Given the racial symbolism of sexuality characteristic of racial debates throughout the century, this election demonstrated the remarkable change in white attitudes. That same year, the legislature honored the 78-year-old civil rights pioneer Joseph



Lowery, a Huntsville native and Mobile minister who had served as president of SCLC until his retirement in 1998. The reception—®owers and a glowing resolution of praise—was quite different from his reception a quarter of a century earlier. He had marched from Selma to the capitol, there to be blocked by a solid phalanx of state troopers when he tried to deliver a list of demands to Gov. George Wallace. A nostalgic Lowery told the legislature: “I’m always proud to be an Alabamian. Alabama has been in the vanguard, and America is a better place because of the witness of Alabama.”23 Morris Dees, like Lowery and Arrington, grew up on a tenant farm. But he was white. After attending the University of Alabama and making a fortune in direct mail ventures, Dees began a racial pilgrimage. He left the small Baptist church his family attended when his appeal as Sunday school superintendent for an offering to 16th Street Baptist Church after the 1963 bombing was rejected as none of the church’s business. Organizing the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Dees assembled a stellar staff of young activists who sued the Klan and other white supremacist organizations in order to strip away their ¤nancial assets. Dees also contracted famed architect Maya Lin to design a memorial to the 40 people killed in the South’s struggle for civil rights. A crusty, tough, controversial ¤gure, he allegedly became the target of assassination attempts. Of course, racial unity was born in more than politics and economics. In 1990 con®ict swirled around a new state-of-the-art Birmingham golf course. Shoal Creek Country Club, the dream of founder and Birmingham entrepreneur Hall Thompson, won a bid to host a prestigious Professional Golf Association (PGA) tournament. But when local blacks discovered that Thompson refused to admit black members, Lowery brought his SCLC network down on the PGA, which threatened to cancel the tournament. The local white establishment persuaded Thompson to change his mind, and black businessman Louis Willie (who seldom even played golf ) agreed to join a country club he cared nothing about. As the ¤rst black member of the Birmingham Kiwanis Club, the Downtown Club, and The Club, this ritual of tokenism was not new to Willie, but it was infuriating. Nonetheless, he swallowed his pride for the sake of a city he loved. Equally courageous and even less predictable was Mike Warren’s dramatic resignation from the all-white Birmingham Country Club a few



weeks before Willie’s announcement. A native of Lee County and an Auburn University graduate, Warren had used his law degree to advance rapidly to the presidency of Alagasco, one of the South’s major utilities. Ambitious businessmen did not usually risk careers by reckless acts of moral courage, as a century of Birmingham history demonstrated all too well. But Warren’s strong moral upbringing and his outrage at the Shoal Creek affair caused him to denounce a private club that had long excluded both Jews and blacks from membership. Having worked quietly to open The Club and the Downtown Club, Warren was aware that only one of Jefferson County’s seven country clubs admitted black members. Although many friends argued that he could affect policy more from the inside than by resigning, the Shoal Creek debacle threatened to turn the spotlight of national attention once more on the city. Warren believed his dramatic resignation could blunt some of that criticism. These two incidents sparked renewed dialogue about race relations in the city. The biracial Community Affairs Committee, which had defused numerous earlier crises, became more active. Formed by Operation New Birmingham, an economic development coalition, the committee met each Monday to discuss and defuse racial issues in the city. Greater Birmingham Ministries brought religious leaders together to address race and other issues of social justice. Leadership Birmingham, Police Athletic Teams, Urban Ministries, Partnership for Affordable Housing, Birmingham Partnership, Youth Leadership Forum, Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Breakfast, Birmingham Alive, and Student Exchange Program all sought the same goal of racial harmony, biracial discussion, and social justice. A mere recitation of the organizations exhausted would-be reformers, but their efforts paid hefty dividends. A local attorney drafted the Birmingham Pledge, a personal commitment to eliminate prejudice and treat every person with respect. Signed by more than 50,000 people, including Pres. Bill Clinton, the pledge circulated on many campuses, including Auburn University after the unseemly 2001 Halloween incident. And in 2000 Newsweek magazine and television network MSNBC chose Birmingham as the site for a two-day conference on diversity. Even more impressive was the reaction of the city’s Islamic community after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. When they sponsored an open house to explain their religion to nonbelievers, leaders of the Islamic



Society were surprised both by the number who attended and their outpouring of compassion. One Moslem leader, contrasting sporadic attacks on Moslems in other parts of America to the understanding encountered in Birmingham, said that he could not imagine a better place for American Moslems to live than in the city. He attributed the tolerance to the decadeslong struggle of Birmingham citizens to come to terms with a troubled racial past. Perhaps the surest evidence of racial change is neither the testimony of Birmingham’s Moslem community, the Birmingham Pledge, nor desegregated country clubs. Rather it is the number of blacks who acknowledge change by their feet. In increasing numbers, they left other states and moved to Alabama. Blacks had long made a lie of the century-old litany that southern whites were the black man’s best friend. They left in large numbers to live elsewhere. But in the 1990s more African Americans moved to Alabama than left. And demographers projected a population growing ever darker, reaching 36 percent black by 2025. Of course, what remained to be done in race relations at century’s end would be more dif¤cult than what had been accomplished. Courts and Congress could pass laws and abolish laws. They could not compel kindness, fairness, equity, or neighborliness. These terrains of the heart required spiritual and moral reconstruction, and such change comes slowly.


8 Fighting Mad Alabamians at War

Everything my life had been before and has been after pales in light of that awesome moment when my amtrac started in amid a thunderous bombardment toward the ®aming, smoke-shrouded beach for the assault on Peleliu. . . . Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The ¤erce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. —E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa

In his post–World War Two career as a professor of biology at the University of Montevallo, Eugene B. Sledge specialized in ornithology, the study of birds. That the author of what many military historians consider the best ordinary ri®eman’s memoir of the Second World War should spend his postwar years watching eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings, evening grosbeaks, and pileated woodpeckers is a supreme paradox. Perhaps the appeal that ornithology had for Sledge was the silence of the watch after the cacophonous and unending artillery barrages of Okinawa. Or perhaps it was a bird’s freedom of ®ight after Sledge’s con¤nement on Peleliu, where marines could neither dig ri®e pits in the impenetrable coral nor move for fear of Japanese snipers. So they froze into motionlessness, praying that no stray artillery shell had their name on it. Or perhaps it was the unaffected beauty of the birds that attracted him after the mangled, mutilated corpses and gore of human death in the South Paci¤c. It is easy to romanticize war. But the people who do so are usually the civilians who remained at home, the of¤cers who directed from the rear, or support troops who logged no days in trenches and foxholes under ¤re. For


374 CHA P T ER EIGHT

combat soldiers and marines such as Eugene Sledge, the horror of war was unrelenting. Perhaps boys in all societies grow up dreaming of some transcendent event that will usher them into manhood. But if they also grow up in a society that believes personal, family, and national honor to be a primary virtue, among a people who promote physical exertion over intellectual and metaphysical aspirations, and who also possess legendary military traditions that have merged into mythology (outnumbered, undergunned, poorly equipped Confederates held at bay vastly superior northern armies for four desperate years), then the common threads binding most male adolescents are strengthened immeasurably in these particular young men. Some of these traditions affected mainly white Alabamians. But blacks were no less physical or patriotic. And they were also poorer, had fewer employment and professional opportunities, and had more to prove about their race and manhood. Given the chance, African Americans ®ooded into the military, oftentimes because they needed the money, but increasingly because in the U.S. military (as in sports) a person was more likely to be judged on the basis of ability than color. As for the violence of war, Alabama was a violent society anyway, regularly ranking among the top states in homicide rates, casual physical assaults, and domestic violence. It seems entirely appropriate that Eugene Sledge decided to attend Auburn University when he was discharged from the Marine Corps, earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1949 and a master’s in botany and microbiology in 1953. The university was a re®ection of conservative, traditional Alabama values of honor, patriotism, and national military service. Although the University of Alabama was better remembered for its Civil War–era mobilization of cadets, Auburn would eclipse the Capstone in its military enthusiasm during the 20th century. Auburn, along with the three national military academies and a handful of other land grant universities, provided more of¤cers for the military than any other colleges. The 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act required the new universities established under its auspices to provide military instruction to students. So when Auburn became the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama in 1872, it also began instruction in military science. Before the school became coed in the 1890s, every student took four years of military instruction, and after that date all males continued to do so. Cadets rose to the beat


A L A BA M IA NS AT WAR 375

of a drum at 5:30 a.m. to report for roll call. Sunday Parade was compulsory, and cadets marched to the church of their preferred denomination. Legend claims that prior to the establishment of Saint Michael’s Catholic Church, many cadets listed their religious preference as “R.C.,” realizing that lack of a Catholic church in the community would exempt them from this tedious chore. The ruse allegedly worked so well that the Catholic bishop of the diocese reasoned that a community with such a large number of unserved Catholics needed a church and founded one in Auburn. At ¤rst he could not understand why a school with so many Catholic students required by their religious obligations to attend mass had so few people attending services. In 1899 the school, newly rechristened Alabama Polytechnic Institute, organized the Auburn Military Band, the ¤rst of the school’s many military auxiliaries. In 1916 the Reserve Of¤cers Training Corps was established on campus as part of Woodrow Wilson’s preparedness program (Auburn thus became one of 37 land grant colleges where ROTC originated). The program made it possible for a cadet graduate to obtain a second lieutenancy in the reserve. The military enthusiasm spilled over into America’s declaration of war in April 1917, and an estimated 2,000 Auburn alumni served in the U.S. military during the “war to end wars.” Patriotic feelings ran just as high between 1941 and 1946 when a Civilian Pilot Training Program and various technical courses came to Auburn. During the Second World War, manpower shortages forced students to be sent to of¤cer’s candidate school before they graduated. After the war ended, new air force and navy ROTC units were organized on campus. ROTC training for at least two years remained a graduation requirement for all male students until fall quarter of 1969, when criticism of the Vietnam War and campus unrest eroded support. Even without compulsion, Auburn remained one of only 32 universities in the nation to host all three branches of the military service. And so strong was the military tradition that despite the advent of volunteer ROTC, the number of cadets commissioned each year actually increased in the late 1960s. By 1972 the school’s graduates who had attained the rank of general or admiral numbered nearly 50, among them Gen. Holland M. Smith, the father of amphibious warfare, and Gen. Franklin A. Hart, commandant of the Marine Corps. In addition, the university graduated four men and two



women who became astronauts (or Auburnauts as they called themselves), including Lt. Cmdr. T. K. “Ken” Mattingly, who piloted the Apollo 16 module moon vehicle, and James Voss, who spent two tours of duty aboard the international space station. (In 1995 Auburn ranked eighth among nonmilitary universities in production of astronauts and ¤fth in NASA scientists and engineers.) By 1972, the centennial of military training at Auburn, the university had graduated 7,400 of¤cers (6,000 army, 1,400 air force, 1,000 naval). Although no other university in Alabama matched Auburn’s production of military leaders, it is fair to say that all of them supported the U.S. armed forces more enthusiastically than comparable colleges in other regions, particularly during and after the Vietnam War. And the same thing could be said of Alabama’s general population. World War I Given the martial spirit so manifest in Alabama, the remarkable aspect of the state’s involvement in the First World War was not the population’s ultimate enthusiasm for the con®ict but its initial reluctance. These doubts originated from a number of sources. Many cotton farmers, ®ush with prosperity for the ¤rst time in a generation, bitterly resented Britain’s haughty arrogance in 1914, declaring cotton to be contraband and blockading its shipment and sale to Germany. They sent a torrent of angry letters aimed at Britain to Alabama’s congressional delegation. So ¤erce was the reaction from Alabama and other southern states that British of¤cials quickly announced their intent to purchase the entire cotton crop at the high prevailing market prices. Other objections remained. In north Alabama both Populist remnants in the rural hill country and Socialist cadres in Birmingham denounced the war, creating sentiment widespread enough to cause several U.S. congressmen from the region to vote against the U.S. declaration of war. At the other end of the state in Fairhope, a mass meeting on April 4, 1917, protested U.S. entry into the war, called for continued neutrality, and demanded an advisory referendum by the American people before Congress declared war. Evangelical religion was also a source of discontent. Two successive edi-



tors of the Alabama Baptist, Frank W. Barnett and L. L. Gwaltney, opposed U.S. intervention. They emphasized that the suffering of war fell heaviest on civilians and wage earners, and blamed war hysteria on “fool-hearted ambitions” and “buncombe pure and simple.” All the high-sounding patriotic sentiments propounded by both sides were “mere banalities and pose,” Gwaltney wrote: “They fool no one.”1 Joseph Judson Taylor, previously pastor of Mobile First Baptist Church and vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was forced to resign his new pastorate in Savannah, Georgia, after offering a series of paci¤st resolutions at the 1917 Southern Baptist Convention. But paci¤sm had no staying power, and once the United States declared war and the American propaganda machine became fully operational, evangelicals rallied to the colors. When Gunner’s Mate Osmond Kelly Ingram became the ¤rst American serviceman killed in World War I (a German submarine torpedoed his ship and made him the ¤rst Alabama recipient of the Medal of Honor in this new war), Alabamians talked more about getting even than about the biblical principle of loving one’s enemy. “Jesus the Fighter” proclaimed a headline in the Alabama Baptist. Paci¤sm, one minister sneered, was merely an excuse for cowardice. Another justi¤ed wars of self-defense so long as the combatants waged a “Christlike war.”2 He did not elaborate on what kind of war that might be. Nearly 80,000 Alabama men served in the military during the First World War (many more were rejected because of poor health or failure to pass a simple intelligence test). Most were assigned to a variety of regiments and divisions. But the old 4th Alabama, legendary for its Civil War combat record, remained together throughout the con®ict. Before the U.S. declaration of war, the 4th had been federalized in 1916 and sent to the Mexican border where Gen. John Pershing had launched an incursion into Mexico in pursuit of bandit/terrorist/revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. After its return to Montgomery, the 4th continued its training at Camp Sheridan, three miles from the capital. Augmented by additional National Guard units from around Alabama, the 4th was designated the 167th U.S. Infantry Regiment in August 1917 with a strength of 3,600 of¤cers and men. Although not every man in the 167th was an Alabamian, most were. Eight special trains transported the young men north, many of whom were leaving their home state for the ¤rst time. After arriving at Camp



Mills on Long Island, some of the soldiers got their ¤rst taste of ¤ghting against their own kind. Small groups of Alabamians from the 167th squared off for an “insigni¤cant scrap of a personal nature” with soldiers from the 165th Regiment (the old 69th New York National Guard). When the 15th New York (a black unit) arrived, members of the 165th warned their fellow Empire Staters that “the Alabamas are coming over and clean you out,” causing the African Americans to sound a call to arms.3 They spent their ¤rst night at Camp Mills on vigilant patrol while the 167th slept soundly. This animosity between the old 4th Alabama and the 69th New York was not entirely unprecedented. They had met each other for a row once before, at First Manassas in 1861. And the Camp Mills skirmish would not be their last dispute. Diversity was a hallmark of the new 42nd Infantry Division, which was made up of the 165th, 167th, and one additional regiment. Its units came from 26 states, forming an arc across a map of the United States in the shape of a vast rainbow (thus earning the nickname “Rainbow Division”). Following initial instruction at Camp Mills, the 42nd was sent to France for advanced training and entered the trenches in February 1918 (the ¤rst American division to occupy an entire sector). For the next 110 days, the 167th engaged the enemy, by some estimates the longest continuous American engagement of the war. In June the 167th was ordered to the Champagne front where it participated in more heavy ¤ghting. The unit’s ¤ve major operations during 1918—the Lorraine Sector (February–June), ChampagneMarne (July 3–18), Aisne-Marne (July 26–August 2), Saint Mihiel (September 12–27), and Meusse-Argonne (October 5–November 9)—were among the bloodiest of the war, costing the regiment 592 killed, missing in action, or dead from disease, and more than 3,200 total casualties (this accounted for a high percentage of the more than 2,500 Alabamians killed in the war). All but one of the 167th’s ¤eld of¤cers were killed or wounded. On March 4 soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 167th became the ¤rst exclusively American unit to capture German soldiers. Sgt. Varner Hall of Birmingham led a night patrol from D company that inadvertently overran a trench full of Germans. Tumbling into the trench, Hall and Cpl. Homer Whited of Bessemer grappled hand-to-hand with a wounded German soldier as a highly excited corporal, E. H. Freeman of Montevallo, held his ¤re for fear of hitting his mates in the darkness and shouted “Which is you,



Homer?”4 Finally able to recognize his comrades, Freeman shot the German, taking him and another soldier from the 77th Bavarian Regiment prisoner. Humorous in the retelling, there was nothing whatever funny about the event. The general commanding the 4th French army corps sector rewarded each member of the 167th’s patrol with the Croix de Guerre (French war cross). These were the ¤rst of many such awards for heroism. Two soldiers from the 167th (though only one of them from Alabama, Cpl. Sidney E. Manning of Flomaton) received the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Thirty-six men received Distinguished Service Crosses, 13 the Croix de Guerre, one the Ordre de Leopold, and another the Belgian Order of the Crown. One decorated soldier, Pvt. Hugh Haynes of Sandy Ridge in Lowndes County, was reported killed on the battle¤eld three different times, but was only wounded. Upon ¤nally returning to the Black Belt, he explained: “You just can’t kill a man from Lowndes County, Alabama. They are as resilient as a rubber ball.”5 Following the November 11, 1918, armistice, the 167th became part of the U.S. occupation army for another half year. Occupying a stretch of Germany straddling the Rhine, troops took boat excursions to cities along the river and began publishing a regimental newspaper appropriately entitled the Alabamian. It spread news, reported the results of regimental athletic competition, and kept soldiers in touch with families back home. Apprised of the needs of their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers, Alabamians sent various delicacies by mail, none more welcome than cigarettes and chewing tobacco. When the ¤rst few shipments were lost, angry protests to military and government of¤cials in Washington, D.C., resulted in strict orders to make sure that the next tobacco shipment got through to the boys on the Rhine. A nervous quartermaster of¤cer in France decided his cargo deserved special treatment. So he placed the tobacco-¤lled containers in the middle of boxcars surrounded by crates of eggs. The tobacco, together with its fragile insulation, was hand delivered by the convoy of¤cer to Col. William P. Screws of Montgomery, the regiment’s commanding of¤cer. Screws gladly accepted everything, although disposing of 150,000 eggs proved to be harder than it seemed, equaling as they did more than 40 eggs per soldier.



Screws soon discovered that such delicacies came at a price. Just as orders came in early April for the 167th to board trains for the French port of Brest where they were to be loaded on U.S. warships for the return home, the Quartermaster Corps presented the regiment with a bill for $8,000. Arguments over payment for eggs that the regiment had not ordered threatened to delay the regiment’s departure until Colonel Screws made it absolutely clear to the Quartermaster Corps that the dispute could wait until his troops were back in Alabama. After some side excursions to Paris and additional military decorations presented by the French government at Brest, the 167th sailed for home. The soldiers reached New York City on April 25, and shortly thereafter nearly 1,500 of¤cers and men boarded trains for Alabama. The trains made a grand tour of the state, where each town greeted its returning heroes with parades and celebrations. Before disembarking at Birmingham’s Terminal Station, the troops were treated to festivities in Anniston, Gadsden, Huntsville, and Decatur. On Saturday, May 10, 1919, the regiment, decked out in full battle gear, marched in review before an estimated 100,000 Birmingham spectators. Three Alabama Civil War veterans led the parade, two in their Confederate gray uniforms ®anking a Union veteran wearing blue and carrying an American ®ag. Girls showered the returning warriors with ®owers, inspiring a Birmingham News reporter to exalt: “It was roses, roses all the way, for the men who passed through hell.”6 On May 11 the movable parade arrived in Montgomery. The next day’s celebration was special because the capital was not only the home of Colonel Screws but also the center of the rural area that supplied so many soldiers to the 4th Alabama. Garlands of roses covered Fountain Square for the largest celebration in the city’s history. Veterans marched to martial music played by the Auburn Military Band. When band members spotted Lt. Edward R. Wren of Talladega leading his company up Dexter Avenue, they changed tunes. Wren had been an ROTC cadet at Auburn before the war and a star football player as well. Returning home as one of the most decorated heroes of the 167th (he had received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de Guerre, the Belgian Order of the Crown, as well as a handful of lesser citations), Wren stopped in his tracks when he heard the band strike up “Touchdown Auburn,” the school’s ¤ght song. At ¤rst confused and disbelieving, Wren’s face broke into a broad grin as he renewed his



march up Dexter, though this time to a different and more dif¤cult cadence. Veterans who returned home by the tens of thousands found almost everything different because the home front had changed as much as they had. Most drifted back to private reunions without parades or fanfare, to disrupted lives and new opportunities. Montgomery was at the epicenter of change. Wilbur Wright had come to the capital in February 1910 searching for a site to continue his airplane experiments. He selected a plot of land along the Alabama River west of the city, and his brother, Orville, mechanics, and student pilots soon arrived to set up their “®ying school.” After America entered the war, the federal government established Montgomery Air Intermediate Depot, commonly referred to locally as the “aviation repair depot.” The government later made the depot a permanent aviation facility and in 1922 renamed it Maxwell Field in honor of Lt. William C. Maxwell of Atmore in Escambia County who had been killed in an airplane accident. With so many of their boys overseas, Montgomery civilians had rallied enthusiastically to the cause. Schoolchildren emptied piggy banks to purchase Liberty Bonds, and victory gardens sprouted in backyards. Citizens also extended southern hospitality to 20,000 troops training at Camp Sheridan on the outskirts of town. Many of these soldiers belonged to the 37th Division, recruited from the nation’s heartland (most from Ohio). Montgomerians reacted to the northerners in a variety of ways. One diehard Confederate complained about the “Yankeeizing” of the capital of the Confederacy, and another talked of forming a club to rekindle memories of Sherman’s ravages lest local youth fraternize too freely with the “invaders.” But such animosity was rare. Synagogues and churches opened their doors to the soldiers, even supplying reading rooms with “wholesome” books and hometown Ohio newspapers. Brothels along the Alabama River opened their doors as well, though for a different form of entertainment. For soldiers who were neither overly sensual nor religious, the city staged vaudeville shows at the Grand Theater and parties and dances for of¤cers at the country club. Soldiers popularized scandalous new dances such as the Shimmy, the Bunny Hug, and the Buzzard Lope. Youthful courtships sometimes turned to love, and love resulted in marriages between handsome northern warriors and beautiful Montgomery



belles. Of the hundreds of such matches, one became the quintessence of “®aming youth” for an entire generation, the marriage of Zelda Sayre to Scott Fitzgerald. Far more common were new perils and opportunities. Soldiers gathered from isolated rural communities spread disease. In October 1918 Camp Sheridan had to contend with 500 cases of the new swine ®u raging through America (one of the worst epidemics to strike the nation during the 20th century). At ¤rst called “Spanish in®uenza” because of its suspected country of origin, the epidemic actually began in the United States and was carried abroad by the American Expeditionary Force. With soldiers lacking immunities and packed together in places like Camp Sheridan, the virus spread like wild¤re, killing an estimated 20 million people worldwide and thousands in Alabama before it subsided. (Many more Alabamians died from swine ®u than in the war.) For one Auburn woman the legacy of war was a different disease. Born into a sharecropper’s family in Clay County, she was at ¤rst delighted when the son of a prominent farmer showed romantic interest in her. But their subsequent marriage revealed a different side to his nature. He was not only lazy and had a hard time holding jobs but also possessed a violent temper that manifested itself in an attack on her dog, which he kicked to death. She thought little about his disappearance following the death of her pet, perhaps even relishing his absence. But as weeks passed she concluded that he had deserted her. Months later she was summoned to a phone where the commanding of¤cer of a military installation explained that her husband had joined the army, lying to an enlistment of¤cer that he was single. Now tiring of army discipline and wanting out, he had given the of¤cer a number to call so that his wife could con¤rm his marital status. The of¤cer explained that he did not doubt the man was married. But given his adolescent behavior in the army and general lack of discipline, the of¤cer urged the woman to deny their marriage and let her husband serve his full time in the army. She agreed to the deception, and her husband was soon on his way to the trenches in France. The armistice ¤nally brought him back, no wiser for his ordeal. He passed along to her the venereal disease he had contracted in France. North Alabama was transformed as much as southern parts of the state.



Cut off from its supply of nitrates for munitions and fertilizers (which had come mainly from Germany), the U.S. government planned construction of a nitrate plant and a dam to supply it power at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River. Construction began in February 1918, with as many as 20,000 men (a third of them black) laboring feverishly on the projects. The ¤rst plant came on line just before the war ended and the second, two weeks after the armistice. But Wilson Dam was only half ¤nished. More than a decade of controversy would pass as Congress, presidents, and businessmen debated whether to sell the facility to private business or retain government control. Not until Franklin D. Roosevelt made Wilson Dam the hub of his new Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 was the full potential of this First World War initiative realized. Like the romance of Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald, the war began many new relationships that would take decades to play out to their full potential. World War II The two decades between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second were momentous ones. The self-indulgent conduct of the ®apper generation made inroads on the middle class but hardly touched the vast masses of poor whites and blacks. And the onset of the Great Depression eradicated all vestiges of self-indulgence left over from the Jazz Age. One legacy of the 1920s that did persist into the following decade was the ¤rm conviction among many Alabamians that the sacri¤ces of the world war had been in vain. The unjust peace treaties that followed war, revelations of extensive prewar loans by American banks to allied governments, the rise of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism in Europe, revulsion against the carnage of ¤xed-position trench warfare, all these and more fed a spirit of neoisolationism in Alabama. A number of Baptist leaders, many of them theological conservatives, literally interpreted Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to be a prohibition against war. Although this sentiment moderated after 1940, paci¤sm imprinted many leading Christian spokesmen. The same was true of state newspaper editors, though for different reasons. When war began in Europe in 1939, most editors argued that the United States should stay out of the con®ict, strengthen its defenses, and



repeal the neutrality act, thereby allowing assistance to Britain. But as in the case of ministers, editors began a perceptible change toward a more interventionist foreign policy by early 1941. Whatever lingering misgivings citizens had about war disappeared with the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As in so many earlier wars, Alabamians rallied to the ®ag in massive numbers until the total mobilization reached a staggering 321,000, one-third of the state’s adult male population, plus thousands of women who served as WACS, WAVES, SPARS, WASPS, nurses, shuttle pilots, or in other branches of service. The Gadsden High School history teacher Catharine Hurst kept careful records of every student at her school who served in the military during the war. Her list recorded an astounding 1,000 names of whom 40 were killed. Oneseventh of the state’s physicians entered the military, a percentage exceeded only in New Mexico. Nearly 6,300 Alabamians were killed in the war. Not surprising for a state with such proud military traditions, Alabama produced a remarkable number of senior grade of¤cers who performed singular service during the con®ict. Brig. Gen. Asa North Duncan, a native of Leighton in Colbert County, helped organize the legendary 8th Air Force, which pulverized Germany for more than three years from its British bases. In time he became the 8th’s chief of staff. Rear Adm. Charles H. “Socrates” McMorris of Wetumpka became commander of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco and later chief of staff to Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief, Paci¤c Fleet. Maj. Gen. John C. Persons, a Birmingham lawyer and World War I veteran, commanded the 31st “Dixie” Division composed of National Guard units from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. Persons was one of only two National Guard generals to lead divisions into combat during World War II. The 31st departed for the Paci¤c in 1944 where its soldiers fought bravely on New Guinea, Morotai, and in the Philippines. But perhaps the most important strategist that Alabama provided the nation was Marine Corps general Holland McTyeire Smith. Considered by many military historians to be the father of amphibious warfare, Smith planned the landings on Tarawa and Makin Islands in the Gilberts, Kwajalein and Eniwetok atolls in the Marshalls, Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, as well as the assaults on Guam and Iwo Jima. As one of only two three-star Marine Corps generals (later promoted to four stars), he com-



manded the 5th Amphibious Corps and later the Fleet Marine Force Paci¤c. In those roles, he commanded more troops than any previous marine of¤cer in history. Born at Hatchechubbee in Russell County, Smith grew up in Seale. His devout parents named him for a great-uncle who was a Methodist bishop and the ¤rst president of Vanderbilt University, and they wanted him to become a Methodist preacher as well. Their aspirations for their son were only partly realized. Every night before he went to sleep and especially on the night before invasions, Smith read the Bible. But his pulpit was a landing craft and his gospel was amphibious warfare. Following in the footsteps of his father, Holland entered Auburn University in 1898 but did not appreciate the military aspects of the school. He preferred athletics and history, becoming a sprinter who lost only one race in two years and a voracious reader of military biography. Though he was a poor student overall, he excelled in history and claimed to have read every book in the library on Napoleon. He particularly admired the French general’s reckless offensive spirit. In later years he sprinkled quotations from Napoleon, Frederick the Great, the Duke of Wellington, and other successful generals throughout his writings. But at the time his father’s in®uence was more signi¤cant so he enrolled in the University of Alabama Law School, study that he thoroughly detested (whether because he hated legal studies or had been too ¤rmly imprinted by the Auburn spirit, he left tactfully unresolved in his autobiography). After practicing law brie®y with his father’s Montgomery ¤rm, he enlisted in the marines in 1905 as a second lieutenant, beginning a 44-year career in the corps. Service in the Paci¤c earned him a nickname, and duty in France brought him promotion to major. Always a tough taskmaster, Smith determined to break a previous of¤cer’s company record for “rapid march” in the Philippines. He worked Company A so hard and shouted so much that the marines dubbed him “Howlin’ Mad.” The name also ¤t his confrontational style of leadership. Assigned to the Naval War College after the armistice, Smith engaged in vigorous debates with his teachers and other of¤cers about the future of naval strategy. He advocated the primacy of amphibious warfare for the Marine Corps and a new role for the navy. In his view, warships should function primarily as transport and supply vehicles for marines. Naval of¤cers predictably dis-



missed his ideas, considering him “a bad boy in inter-service arguments.”7 Not dissuaded, Smith wrote the ¤rst complete plan for a separate marine command once ashore and began in 1923 training marines in the Caribbean for this role. His tactical ideas were included in a “Tentative Landing Operations Manual” in 1934, and he actually organized such a force as assistant to the commandant of marines three years later. By 1940 he commanded what was arguably the best trained seaborne assault force in the world. Realizing the reluctance of the navy to implement his ideas about the centrality of amphibious operations, Smith collaborated with New Orleans boat builder Andrew Jackson Higgins to build shallow-draft vessels such as the ones Higgins constructed for Cajuns who ¤shed Louisiana’s shallow bayous. They introduced the prototype Higgins boat in 1940 and added a critically important retractable bow ramp the following year. By making amphibious technique central to all marine training, Smith believed he had made the most “signi¤cant development” in transforming war from static combat (1914–18) into a war of maneuver (1941–45). Creation of the Fleet Marine Force allowed assaults on coral islands in the South Paci¤c that were considered impregnable. “I could have landed [marines] in the mouth of hell if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had picked the target,” he wrote immodestly. And “Iwo Jima was a fair substitute.”8 Despite his tactical brilliance, Smith was not skilled at interpersonal relations. He thought highly of his innovations, spoke his mind too readily, and lost his temper too quickly. Chaf¤ng at naval treatment of marines aboard ships, Smith attributed the affronts to “the peculiar form of snobbery common in the Navy at that period.” When, as director of Marine Corps Operations and Training, he requested appropriations for six artillery trucks to haul ammunition, the budget of¤cer, a navy captain, responded: “Why don’t you do like the Army and use mules and wagons to haul ammunition.” Smith “choked back the obvious riposte, ‘There are enough jackasses in the Navy to do the pulling but where would we get the wagons?’” When he reported to Pearl Harbor to command the 5th Amphibious Corps, he was billeted to a junior lieutenant’s quarters despite the fact that he outranked every rear admiral at Pearl Harbor save one. After vigorously protesting “the habitual disregard of the Navy for the Marines,” he was moved to the usual quarters occupied by generals. In the South Paci¤c,



Smith criticized Gen. Douglas MacArthur for ignoring the role of marines and demanded that naval of¤cers relinquish command of marine units once they were ashore. Coral, when blasted loose, he wrote icily, could be used on the islands for construction purposes. “I would hesitate to place in the same useful category a lot of our brass in the Paci¤c.”9 Such opinions infuriated senior of¤cers in the army and navy and led to constant quarrels. On Iwo Jima, where marine casualties numbered 1 of every 3 men engaged (a total of 21,500 American casualties in 26 days of ¤ghting), Smith blamed the navy’s lack of gun¤re and air support for the carnage. (He had asked for a 10-day preliminary bombardment but got only 3.) But it was his command of the Saipan invasion that created the greatest furor. The invasion force consisted of both army and marine units although they were trained in different offensive techniques. Amphibious training was the most dif¤cult form of military preparation, and the army spent far less time at it than the Marine Corps. Samuel E. Morison, the preeminent historian of U.S. naval operations during World War II, used a sports analogy to explain the dif¤culty: “It was as if a football coach were required to form a team from different parts of the country, brief them with a manual of plays, and, without even lining them up, send them against a champion opponent. To make the parallel complete, this All-American team would not even know on what ¤eld it would play.”10 Complicating matters still further, once ashore the army advanced slowly and methodically while Smith’s marines were trained to bypass enemy positions and push aggressively against command posts and strongpoints. On Saipan, Maj. Gen. Ralph C. Smith commanded the 27th Infantry Division, a New York National Guard unit that contained the 165th Regiment (the old 69th or “Fighting Irish” unit of Civil War fame that had also fought alongside Alabama’s 167th Regiment in France). The 165th had performed adequately under Holland Smith’s command earlier on Makin Island but seemed to have lost its ¤ghting edge on Saipan. Smith impatiently tolerated delays and excuses from Gen. Ralph Smith on the ¤rst few days of the assault but removed him from command on June 24. To make complete the paradox of an Alabama marine removing the commanding general of the 27th Division (and therefore the commander of the 4th Alabama’s old Civil War nemesis), the cruiser USS Birmingham provided ¤re



support for the 27th Division. A Marine Corps general removing from command an army general with the permission of a navy admiral provoked a storm of controversy. (Curiously, this was the only such imbroglio, despite the removal from command of ¤ve army generals in the Paci¤c theater alone.) As a National Guard division, the 27th had powerful political allies in Congress, and Holland Smith found himself in a full-scale row. Historian Samuel Morison sided with Holland Smith, blaming the 27th’s problems on “incompetent and overage company and battalion commanders” who had more political connections in New York than they had tactical military skill. After orchestrating a hundred successful marine amphibious landings in the Paci¤c during the war, Holland Smith was forced to resign as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force in July 1945, barely a month before the end of the war. And being denied access to Japanese surrender ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri added insult to injury. He would neither forget nor forgive and ¤lled his autobiography with barbs ®ung in all directions (except toward the young marines he had commanded and led to victory). Reminiscing about the triumph his marines won on Iwo Jima, he wrote that victory required “men who were tougher than the Japanese, whose patriotism transcended that of the enemy, who also could reach the heights of Bushido [the Samurai warrior’s code] but in the American way, which is based on cool reason and methodical ef¤ciency instead of blind obedience.”11 At the opposite end of the command structure from Holland Smith fought one of the young marines whom he sent into battle. Eugene Sledge of Mobile could not wait to test his manhood for fear the war would end before he even arrived. He dropped out of Marion Military Institute in May 1943 during his freshman year to join the marines. When the corps sent him to an of¤cer’s V-12 program at Georgia Tech instead of to the Paci¤c, he intentionally ®unked out in order to get to the ¤ght. Self-consciously an Alabama boy, he rejoiced when most of the “expert ri®emen” in his platoon were southerners; he complained that everyone in advanced infantry school who arrogantly claimed to be an expert seemed to come from New England; and he rapturously reported an impromptu concert by two marines playing mandolin and ¤ddle on Pavuvu Island as “some of the ¤nest mountain music I’d ever heard.” Paci¤c sunsets observed from LSTs bound for



the invasion of Peleliu Island reminded him of sunsets over Mobile Bay, and Paci¤c storms raged like Gulf Coast hurricanes. And he loved the marines, he wrote, partly because they traveled light, “the way fast-moving Confederate infantry did during the Civil War.”12 But Peleliu was more a test of southern manhood than Private Sledge could have imagined. “Bloody Peleliu” was 500 miles off the direct line of invasion, which stretched from Saipan to Iwo Jima to Okinawa and thence to Tokyo. The Japanese had transferred their command to the coral atoll after U.S. air strikes denied them effective use of Truk Island. And it was on Peleliu that the Japanese ¤rst employed defense in depth rather than expending all their assets defending the beaches. The 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, Sledge’s unit, lost 1,378 of its 3,000 men on Peleliu. (The young man’s romantic fancy was ful¤lled when he was assigned to the 5th Marines; it was the only marine regiment to ¤ght in every American war of the 20th century.) His Company K landed with 235 marines and exited with 85, and only 2 of 7 of¤cers survived (company casualties amounted to 64 percent). American casualties totaled nearly 40 percent of the invasion force, the highest for any amphibious invasion in U.S. history. As casualties mounted, Private Sledge became executive of¤cer and then company commander, all before his 21st birthday. Nothing had prepared one so young for the dehumanization of war. Marines saw the mutilated bodies of fallen comrades and retaliated in kind. Sledge suffered through nighttime Japanese in¤ltrations where jittery marines mistook each other for the enemy and killed their own men. He described the savagery of marines extracting the gold teeth of dying Japanese soldiers. When a bright young comrade who wanted to be a brain surgeon was fatally wounded in the head, Sledge mused that “war is such self-defeating, organized madness the way it destroys a nation’s best.”13 Ironically, military historians concluded that the invasion of Peleliu was unnecessary and served no strategic purpose. Not so Okinawa. As a staging area for B-29 raids on the main Japanese islands, Okinawa was vital. Buoyed by a vision that God would spare him (and that he would respond by making his life “amount to something after the war”), Sledge approached the next invasion in the ¤rm belief that no horror could surpass Peleliu.14 He was mistaken.



Company K landed on Okinawa at full strength (235) and received 250 replacements while engaged in combat. Of the 50 men left at the end of the campaign, only 26 had made the initial landing. Sledge experienced “jungle rot” (festering sores on his hands from malnutrition and monsoon rains) that did not heal for half a year. Nor did the irrationality cease. He observed two marines from his mortar crew engaged in a ¤erce ¤st¤ght over which one had the right to a 5-by-7-inch range card in a cannister of 60-millimeter mortar ammunition. The card contained printed columns denoting range, sight settings, and powder increments. Superimposed over these printed columns was the ruby red imprint of a woman’s lips, the valiant attempt of some anonymous female ordnance worker to boost morale at the front. Between the exploits of Holland Smith and Eugene Sledge were tens of thousands of stories equally as life changing. Howard W. Gilmore of Selma became the ¤rst submarine commander in World War II to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. While on night patrol with the USS Growler, a Japanese naval ship attacked the sub, wounding Gilmore and killing two seamen who were with him on deck. Unable to move, Gilmore ordered his ship to submerge. The commander was washed into the sea, but his ship and crew survived. Lt. William R. Lawley Jr. won his Medal of Honor half a world away and high in the sky. The son of a Leeds Baptist minister, Lawley was piloting an 8th Air Force B-17 on his tenth mission when 20 German ¤ghters attacked the plane. His copilot was killed, he was wounded, and an engine set a¤re. He ordered his crew to bail out, but when he discovered two crewmen too badly wounded to do so, he put his plane into a steep dive to smother the ®ames, piloted his crippled aircraft back to England, and bellylanded the plane with only one engine still running. The episode earned him one of the 14 Medals of Honor awarded to crew members of the 8th Air Force. Nor were all the acts of ultimate courage performed by of¤cers. Sgt. Ross Franklin Gray of Bibb County preached the Gospel back in Alabama, earning him the title “Deacon” and “Fightin’ Preacher” among men of the 4th Marine Division. He earned his Medal of Honor posthumously, having been killed in action while clearing a mine¤eld and attacking six different Japanese positions on Iwo Jima. Staff Sgt. Henry “Red” Erwin, the orphaned son of a Jefferson County coal miner, managed to dislodge a phos-



phorus bomb that detonated prematurely on his B-29, thus saving the plane and its crew. Though badly burned and nearly blinded by the blast, Erwin survived, returning to Bessemer, a hero’s welcome, and 33 operations. Of the 469 Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, Alabamians received 12 of them. The Paci¤c theater provided the setting for many such acts of valor. Lt. Joseph H. Willingham of Pell City on the USS Tautog sank more enemy vessels than any other U.S. submarine. Commander David McCampbell, born in Bessemer, became the navy’s leading World War II ace with 34 recorded kills in the air and 20 more on the ground. He set a record when he shot down 7 Japanese aircraft in one day during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, then broke it four months later when he shot down 9 planes bearing down on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. Recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other awards, McCampbell became one of America’s most decorated heroes. Marine Corps lieutenant Howell He®in of Leighton, a future chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and U.S. senator, led a platoon against a heavily defended Japanese position on the island of Bougainville in 1943, which won him a Silver Star for heroism. The Crommelin family of Wetumpka furnished 5 sons to the Paci¤c war, all graduates of the Naval Academy. Two died in combat. (Charles, air group commander on the new USS Yorktown lost his life over Okinawa in March 1945, and Richard, who had survived being shot down during the Battle of the Coral Sea, failed to return from a mission over Hokkaido Island, during the last weeks of the war.) Capt. John Crommelin became chief of staff to Rear Adm. H. M. Mullinnix. Adm. Thomas H. Moorer of Montgomery, later the ¤rst naval of¤cer to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was wounded while ®ying a PBY reconnaissance aircraft from Australia. As unusual as it seems to have 5 men from one family serve simultaneously in a war, the Crommelins did not set Alabama’s record. Mrs. James Jones of Frisco City furnished 4 sons and 10 grandsons to the U.S. military. Mrs. William B. McDonald of Huntsville and the Taylor family from Opp each sent 6 sons off to war. Emma Grady from her farm near Montevallo gave 7 sons to the cause. And Charity Deason of Lomax near Clanton lived up to her name, contributing 8 sons to the U.S. military. Alabamians fought just as ¤ercely in the European theater. Sylacauga’s



Capt. William F. Nichols, an Auburn football star, artillery of¤cer in George Patton’s 8th Army, and later both a U.S. congressman and Auburn University trustee, lost a leg to a land mine in the Battle of the Huertgen Forest. Army air force lieutenant Tom Borders of Edgewood had already become a hero of a different sort, playing tackle on the 1938 Crimson Tide Rose Bowl team. Borders’s B-17, appropriately christened the “Birmingham Blitzkrieg,” contained a mainly down-home crew. Lt. W. C. Lewis hailed from Birmingham, and belly gunner Sgt. Kent West came from West Blocton. On a raid over Rouen, France, in 1942, West was credited with the initial kill recorded by the 8th Air Force. Four months later Borders and his crew were killed when ®ak hit the plane during a raid over North Africa. Alabama native and brigadier general Asa Duncan, chief of staff for the 8th Air Force, died the same month when his plane disappeared over northwestern France on its way to North Africa. Among the ground troops being supported by Duncan’s crews was Lt. Ralph “Shug” Jordan of Selma, who later became the most beloved head football coach in Auburn University history (which was also Duncan’s alma mater). Jordan once joked that there were so many Auburn grads in the area that he considered forming a North African chapter of the Auburn Alumni Association. Minding the Home Front News of such exploits reached home in a variety of ways. Many Alabama newspapers featured special columns devoted to news about local servicemen and -women. Letters to and from them boosted morale and broke the monotony of work and the anxiety of worry. There were also physical manifestations of the war. News that Birmingham had been designated the second most important military objective in the South led to partial blackouts every night and creation of a Civilian Defense Control Center where the approach of enemy aircraft and bombings could be reported. A captured Japanese two-man submarine went on display for a day in Montgomery in 1943; 25,000 citizens paid one dollar for a savings stamp in order to view the menacing machine. Mobile residents feared seeing German submarines that were still operating in coastal waters. More than a dozen German U-boats plied shallow Gulf waters from



May to September 1942, where they destroyed 58 ships (U-106 operated off Mobile). The U-boats struck mainly at night as tankers and merchant vessels left ports, the ships silhouetted against urban skylines. Gulf ports did not dim their lights until June 1942 following FBI antiespionage classes and other warnings. Some of the submariners from the two U-boats sunk in the Gulf of Mexico may have gotten a close-up look at Alabama. The state’s mild climate and cheap land made it an ideal location for prisoner of war camps. Of the 450,000 Axis POWs imprisoned in the United States between 1942 and 1946, 17,000 were sent to 26 camps in Alabama (most were veterans of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps). The largest camp, in Aliceville, held 3,500 captives and caused the most problems. Organized by ideologically rabid Nazi submariners, two POWs from the camp were shot while trying to escape. Two others managed 60 hours of freedom in the bottomlands along the Tombigbee River. Six more managed not only to break through a double chain-link fence and escape the searchlights of 10foot-high watchtowers, they also stole a car and ended up in Memphis where they were arrested for driving on the wrong side of the street. Other camps were located in Opelika, at Fort McClellan near Anniston, at Camp Rucker in Dale and Coffee Counties, and at 20 subsidiary sites where prisoners were used mainly to harvest crops. At the larger facilities, POWs organized soccer teams, camp orchestras, newspapers, and at Fort McClellan even operated a zoo ¤lled with exotic Alabama creatures such as snakes, ®ying squirrels, a fox, and an opossum. The con®icts at such facilities were often internal, as Italians and Germans, Nazi party members and anti-Nazis argued and fought with each other. But one common distress united all POWs detained in Alabama. Even decades after the war, they still remember the unrelenting summer heat, humidity, mosquitoes, red bugs, gnats, and horse®ies that tormented them. U.S. military bases dotted the landscape as well. In fact, the government located more training camps in Alabama than in any states other than California and Texas. Although Camp Rucker, Fort McClellan, the Anniston Ordnance Depot, Camp Sibert near Gadsden, and other facilities performed yeomanlike duty training and equipping servicemen, the concentration of air bases in and around Montgomery were the most enduring. In 1940 Maj. Gen. H. H. Arnold established the Southeast Air Corps



Training Center at Maxwell Field to train all pilots, navigators, and bombardiers assigned to the Southeast. By spring 1943 more than 9,000 cadets trained continuously at the base, and more than 100,000 American airmen completed programs there during the war (along with 12,500 British and 4,100 French aviators). Maxwell also was home to the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the army’s advanced institute for aviators, where senior air of¤cers studied strategy, theory, and tactics. Gunter Air Force Base across town trained four classes a year and a total of 12,000 cadets during the war. And numerous auxiliary ¤elds (at Shorter, Deatsville, Dannelly, and elsewhere) served as training sites. Culture clashes like the ones that had occurred two decades earlier began again. At Howard College the navy’s decision to locate a V-12 training program on campus not only solidi¤ed the school’s precarious ¤nances, it also displaced all the coeds from a women’s dorm. More than 500 secular navy of¤cers ¤nished the program, and many took devout Baptist wives as well as degrees away from the college. South of Birmingham, the army air corps sent Erik Shilling to Maxwell Field in early 1940. He served as a test pilot, observing aircraft under simulated combat conditions and evaluating tactics developed by ACTS. Shilling had a year’s ®ying experience and thought himself to be “a pretty hot pilot.” But on one test ®ight of a two-seater using instruments inside a hooded enclosure, he made a near fatal mistake. Craving a cigarette, he opened the hood, motioned for his copilot to take the controls, and lit up. Unfortunately, the open hood blocked the vision of his companion, who never saw the signal or took over the controls. The plane began a series of climbs, dives, and gentle stalls, each a bit more severe than the former. Finally the plane dove nearly vertically toward a hapless farmer riding a tractor. Just before the plane beheaded the terri¤ed man, Shilling yanked back on the stick and skimmed over the ducking farmer with only a few feet to spare. When they returned to base, the group commander chewed Shilling out for performing stunts in an instrument trainer. Shilling vented his wrath on his fellow pilot: “What the hell were you doing out there?” he raged. “What the hell were you doing,” his friend replied: “I wasn’t ®ying the damn plane.”15 Shilling was an unhappy young pilot whose marriage was dissolving and who judged Montgomery social life to be an adventure. One evening



he and three pilots from his squadron had too much to drink at a local barbeque restaurant. Entrusting his car to the least inebriated airman, Shilling crawled in the passenger seat, and they began an eventful drive back to base. On the way, the driver sideswiped a Montgomery police car, which gave chase. Following them to the base, the policeman cursed and arrested them. Fortunately for the aviators, the driver was dating the daughter of a prominent Montgomery family, and his call to her produced a quick release. A week later Shilling ran a red light and the same policeman pulled him over. As he approached the car, he roared: “Isn’t this the car that sideswiped me about a week ago?” Shilling, dreading the dire consequences of his situation, sheepishly admitted that it was indeed the same car and was about to plead his case when he saw the policeman put away his citation book. “Hell, it’s no use giving you a ticket,” the policeman muttered, then walked back to his car and drove off in disgust.16 A few months later Shilling left the army air force to ®y commercial airliners, though the restless young pilot soon found himself in India with the Flying Tigers piloting P-40s against the Japanese. It was Shilling who suggested the shark’s teeth logo that became the dreaded insignia of the Flying Tigers. After a dismal decade of economic trouble, perhaps the most obvious consequence of the war was returning prosperity. Birmingham, recently designated by President Roosevelt as the American city hardest hit by the Great Depression, was now dubbed the “great arsenal of the South.” TCI, already operating at full capacity by the fall of 1939, increased its workforce from the Depression era total of 7,000 to 30,000 by 1941. Bechtel-McCone Aircraft opened a plant in the city, as did numerous other defense-related ¤rms. The Birmingham District produced 75 percent of the munitions, steel, and other war materials manufactured in the Southeastern Ordnance District during the war. South of Birmingham at Childersburg 14,000 construction workers began to build the $90 million Alabama Ordnance plant, which manufactured smokeless powder and TNT. The facility also boasted an ammonia plant that produced heavy water for the atomic bomb. Tiny Childersburg on the banks of the Coosa River experienced the greatest population boom of any town in Alabama during the war, growing from 500 in 1940 to 9,000 in 1945. In the Tennessee Valley, cheap land and TVA power, the availability of



Tennessee River barge transportation, and a large poor white surplus population attracted defense plants like a magnet. Construction of Redstone and Huntsville arsenals pumped more than $80 million into Huntsville’s economy. At the opposite end of the valley, the tri-cities of Florence, Shef¤eld, and Muscle Shoals bustled with defense workers in aluminum plants, foundries, and other defense facilities. Anchoring south Alabama’s defense industry, Mobile stirred from a nearly century-long slumber to become one of the fastest growing American cities. Blessed with a splendid, protected harbor and the nation’s second largest river drainage system, Mobile’s war industry was the most diverse in the state. Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company (ADDSCO) constructed a new 16,000-ton dry dock as the foundation for construction of 20 Liberty ships, 102 tankers, and the conversion or repair of nearly 3,000 additional vessels. Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation at Chickasaw added 30 tankers, 7 destroyers, and 29 minesweepers to navy and merchant marine ®eets. Between them, the two ¤rms employed 40,000. The Mobile Air Service Command at Brookley Field modi¤ed B-24 bombers and served as a military depot. At its peak, 17,000 civilians worked at Brookley, which equaled Mobile’s total prewar workforce. The city’s population mushroomed from 79,000 to 125,000 between January 1940 and March 1943. In the vast small-town interior of Alabama, the textile industry boomed in communities such as Sylacauga, Alexander City, Opelika, and Phenix City as the state’s mills fashioned uniforms for soldiers, sailors, and marines or clothed a suddenly af®uent civilian population. The industry’s largest manufacturer, Sylacauga-based Avondale Mills, increased production by half. The collective impact of these economic changes were incalculable. The postwar decision to centralize military rocket research at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville ultimately led to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s (NASA) rocket engine program being located there. Mobile suddenly became the 15th busiest port in the United States. By 1944 ordnance manufacturing (which had been nonexistent as an economic category in 1940) ranked sixth among the state’s manufacturing industries. Birmingham emerged from the war as the South’s premier heavy industrial manufacturing center, swamping runner-up Houston. Social change accompanied economic expansion. The most notable tran-



sition occurred in the lives of women. The percentage of females in the national workforce underwent phenomenal change, growing from 25 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 1945, an increase greater than in the preceding four decades. On one side of the war was a traditional world of homemaking, domestic responsibility, and volunteer work. On the other side of that great divide was a world where half the adult women were employed for salary outside the home, of child care centers, church, charitable agencies, and PTAs begging for volunteers, of marriages stressed by new kinds of blurred roles and differing expectations. World War II neither began this transition nor brought it to completion. But it was certainly a major catalyst for change. The most dramatic departures for women occurred among those newly entering the workforce. When the war began, Alabama’s capital city contained 2 female lawyers among 80 members of the local bar. One female physician practiced medicine among 100 males. No female pastored a church in Montgomery, served as a judge, or for that matter served on a jury. All that changed due primarily to effective government propaganda that sought to convince women that their patriotic duty was to work in defense plants. “The more women at work,” proclaimed one advertisement, “the sooner we’ll win.” The propaganda campaign was wildly successful. Bechtel-McCone allegedly chose Birmingham over competing cities because a labor survey identi¤ed more women in the steel city willing to engage in manufacturing work. Forty percent of the labor force at the facility that modi¤ed 5,000 B-24 and B-29 bombers consisted of women. And so it went across the state. At the DuPont ordnance plant in Childersburg, 48 percent of workers were women. At Redstone and Huntsville arsenals, 25 and 35 percent were female. In the Mobile shipyards, 10 percent were women. The Mobile Air Service Command at Brookley Field actively recruited women, who made $90 a month as trainees and earned regular salaries of $125 a month. Half of Brookley’s employees were women, who spent their time disassembling and reassembling airplane engines, welding, and performing other manufacturing jobs. The demand for women in such traditional men’s roles created a need for training. The Alabama School of Trades in Gadsden stepped into the void. So many women enrolled when the institution began to admit them



that they soon became a majority of the student body, inspiring the Birmingham News to proclaim the Alabama School of Trades “now a school of maids.” It was a clever editorial pun that obscured dif¤cult social reality: the courage it took for a woman to leave the familiar sphere of homemaking for the public world of supervised labor; sexual harassment; disparaging labels such as “welderettes” used for them by male welders at ADDSCO and Brookley Field; or sexist remarks such as those in the May 2, 1942, Birmingham News: “Girls work better in factories if they have a man for a boss.” The prominence of women in new manufacturing roles stimulated creative thinking about how to use them to solve broader labor shortages. In 1943 the state prison board hired its ¤rst female superintendent of Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. Women also became auto mechanics, pharmacists, school bus drivers, legislative clerks, and security guards (despite strong reservations from some males—perhaps with good reason—who did not trust women with sidearms). So widespread did such labor become that by 1943 an estimated quarter of Alabama’s industrial workforce was female. By the end of the war, government propaganda had changed. From urging women to enter the workforce, federal policy switched to emphasizing the patriotic duty of women to surrender their jobs to returning male veterans. Sometimes happily and sometimes reluctantly women did so. But in their wake they left remarkable stories. Harriett Engelhardt bore the name of one of Montgomery’s best connected families. Her father sold real estate and her brother, Samuel, ran a large farm while serving in both houses of the legislature and as state highway director. He even ran for governor in 1962. His sister, Harriett, was an athletic, independent-minded woman who excelled in equestrian events. She graduated from the elite Margaret Booth School and continued her education at Hollins College before transferring her junior year to progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina to major in “textile weaving and independent thinking.” When she returned to Montgomery it was to work at Maxwell Field as a mechanic’s helper on planes and tanks. She left Alabama’s capital for Montreal and similar labor for the Royal Canadian Air Force before U.S. entry into the war. After December 1941 she joined the American Red Cross Foreign Service as a “recreational staff assistant” (meaning she followed American armies, dispensing doughnuts, coffee, cigarettes, and chewing gum). In addition to carefully inventorying Red



Cross largesse to George Patton’s 3rd Army (800,000 doughnuts, 350,000 canteens of coffee, 240,000 cigarettes), Engelhardt sent home a stream of thoughtful letters. She described the amused but respectful reaction of soldiers to the 5-foot 1-inch, 110-pound Alabama girl as she drove up in her huge GMC truck. She described museums visited, trenchfoot suffered, the French countryside, and the privations of soldiers. After the war, she and two friends, one American and the other Polish, found a horse farm and returned to riding. She established an American-style doughnut shop while waiting for her release from the Red Cross. But on her return from Munich where she had completed ¤nal paperwork permitting her return to Montgomery, she lost control of her jeep in a rainstorm and was killed instantly when it rolled over. She was buried alongside 10,000 American servicemen in the Lorraine American Cemetery near Saint Avold, France. Nancy Batson Crew of Birmingham chose to soar through the skies rather than plough through the mud of France in a truck. Crew grew up in Birmingham the daughter of a successful contractor. After graduating from Ramsay High School, she attended the University of Alabama, majoring in history, and was elected president of women’s student government. She also took ®ying lessons at Southern Airways in Birmingham where she earned both commercial and instructor licenses in the early 1940s. When she couldn’t ¤nd a job as a ®ight instructor in Alabama, she left for such work in Miami. In 1943 she heard about formation of the new Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Service, a team of 25 elite female pilots who would ®y planes from factories to shipping points for overseas. She quit her job in Miami and showed up one day in Delaware offering her services. After one test ®ight she landed the job, ultimately rising to command of the 2nd Ferrying Group. Crew and the women she commanded ®ew P-38s, P-39s, P-40s, P-47s, and P-51s, as well as B-24 and B-26 bombers to air¤elds, aircraft modi¤cation plants, and embarkation sites. Their planes represented a variety of aircraft that few male pilots had opportunity to master. On one ®ight into Pittsburgh piloting a P-38, the plane’s hydraulic system failed. For two hours Crew struggled by hand to pump enough pressure into the system to insure that the nose wheel had fully extended. When she touched down on the tarmac, a helpful airman climbed onto the wing of her plane and ordered her out of the cockpit. Crew, blistered hands testifying to her ordeal,



put him in his place: “If I can get this far, I think I can handle the taxiing.” After the war she continued her career as copilot of a commercial jet until she was nearly 80. Married and relocated in California, she also crossed another gender barrier when the incumbent mayor of her town angered her. She ran against him and won. After her stint in politics, she returned to Alabama and began a third career as a real estate developer. When she died of cancer in 2001, she made one request, that someone ®y her restored Piper Cub over the cemetery and off into the western sky. Her standard response to questions about discrimination against women pilots was simple: “An airplane doesn’t know if you’re a man or a woman.”17 As riveting as such stories are, the more common female experience was not so daring. Most women experienced the war through a familiar prism of female experiences. They coped as volunteers, housewives, and mothers. The State Defense Council mobilized 80,000 volunteers, more than a quarter of them women. Serving as Red Cross workers, air raid wardens, and civil defense specialists, women gave countless hours to their communities. The Citizens’ Service Corps consisted primarily of women. The work was pedestrian—organizing Russian war relief, bond drives, victory gardens, and canning centers; mailing gas coupons; collecting magazines; salvaging metal, paper, rags, and grease—but important. So well did they perform their duty that in each of the seven war bond drives, every Alabama county reached its goal, an accomplishment matched by no other state. Black and white female home demonstration agents from the land grant universities received much of the credit. Women also assumed primary responsibility for coping with wartime shortages. In May 1942 newspapers urged women to use rag hair curlers rather than metal ones, releasing the metal for war use. Women dutifully began rolling their hair around old socks. In March of that year the government rationed sugar, tires, and gasoline. Although black markets in these vital commodities sprang up, women kept their sense of humor, even reducing shortages to a joke: “What was the ¤rst thing Noah grabbed before he got on the Ark?” went the question. “His ration book,” came the reply. But there were limits to women’s patience. When a shortage of rubber delivered to textile manufacturers curtailed production of girdles and bras, women objected so strenuously that the government rescinded the order. African Americans experienced these events in ways sometimes similar



to their white counterparts but in other ways different. Although the state’s black population declined from 36 percent in 1930 to 32 percent in 1950, it was the place where they resided that told the larger story. When the Depression began, lack of education and job skills con¤ned most blacks to tenant farms and rural areas. But New Deal agricultural “reforms” displaced much of the state’s tenant population, and the advent of abundant manufacturing jobs in cities acted as a magnet for rural blacks. Whereas the white farm population declined by 9 percent during the decade of the 1940s, the decline among Alabama’s black farmers amounted to 27 percent. Although many of those migrants headed out of state, even more relocated to Alabama cities. For instance, Mobile contained 29,000 black residents in 1940 and 46,000 10 years later. Nearly a quarter of the workforce at Huntsville Arsenal was black. The collision of expanded black expectations and determined white resistance made racial con®ict inevitable. And when the government began to press for ending discrimination in federal defense contracts, tensions mounted quickly. Negro servicemen and white Montgomery policemen clashed on segregated city buses. Racial incidents also occurred off base in Anniston while the all-black 92nd Infantry Division was training at Fort McClellan. When a white Methodist minister brought the director of the black USO club to the Montgomery County courthouse to register to vote in 1942, the registrar agreed reluctantly to allow the registration. But the chairman of the board of registrars warned the white minister not “to bring this class of person here again.” It turned out “this class of person” was a black minister with a college degree and considerable work toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, perhaps the nation’s leading graduate institution in religion. When the ¤rst black lawyer arrived with a large group of potential African American registrants (most of them schoolteachers) a year later, all were rejected. After 16 of them appealed to the courts, city of¤cials arrested their sponsor, and local lawyers disbarred him from practicing law in Alabama. (He left Montgomery to practice in New York.) Racial tensions erupted most dangerously in Mobile. White resistance to demands by local black ADDSCO workers and the government that they be allowed to compete for skilled jobs led to race riots in May 1943. A year later at Brookley Field racial tensions erupted into a two-hour gun battle between Negro troops and white military police. Local civil rights leader



John LeFlore used such incidents to push for expanded black voter registration. The best publicized breakthrough in black opportunity during World War II occurred in Tuskegee. In 1934 a prominent Tuskegee Institute alumnus named John C. Robinson chose to ®y to his tenth class reunion from his home in Chicago. That ®ight sparked interest in the establishment of a ®ying school at his alma mater. Late in the 1930s national black leaders insisted that the army air corps admit people of color, which led to the establishment of a Civilian Pilot Training Program at Tuskegee Institute in 1939. Run cooperatively at ¤rst with aeronautics professors from Auburn University, black students scored impressively on their aviation exams, and the institute quickly emerged as the center of black aviation in the United States. Advanced training began the following year, and by the end of 1940 Tuskegee had its own ®ight trainers and instructors. More than 3,000 airmen (992 of them pilots) trained there during the war, heightening tensions with the town’s 1,000 white inhabitants. U.S. senator John Bankhead asked Gen. George C. Marshall to remove black troops from the South, a request Marshall declined. The southern novelist Carson McCullers proved equally incapable of processing racial change, inquiring of the white base commander if Negroes could ®y better than whites because they were closer to nature. Ironically, the Tuskegee effort also provoked a ¤restorm of disagreement between the school, the NAACP, and the air force over army refusal to accept black cadets into integrated units. Many national black activists interpreted the Tuskegee program as yet another Jim Crow effort to avoid mainstreaming blacks into previously white units. Nevertheless, establishment of the 99th Pursuit Squadron was a watershed in American military history. The ¤rst 5 pilots earned their wings in March 1942. Before the war ended, nearly a thousand men had followed in their footsteps, creating the 332nd Fighter Group (which contained four ¤ghter squadrons) and the 477th Composite Group (®ying twin-engine bombers). Under the command of Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (later the ¤rst black general in the U.S. Air Force), the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd fought aerial battles over North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, ®ying P-40s, P-39s, P-47s, and P-51s. They shot down 111 enemy aircraft, lost 66 of their own pilots (32 more bailed out and became POWs).



They won 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, Legions of Merit, and a Red Star of Yugoslavia. German pilots called them Schwartze Vogelmenschen (black birdmen), a particularly expressive combination of warrior respect and racial slur. Though some white U.S. pilots initially questioned their skills, in time grateful bomber crews adopted their own nickname based on the unique red paint design on the tail assemblies of their planes and the 332nd’s reputation for never having lost a bomber they were protecting to enemy ¤ghters: the Black Redtail Angels. After the war, 3 of their number—Gen. Daniel “Chappie” James (who became the ¤rst black fourstar general in U.S. history), Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., and Maj. Gen. Lucius Theus—rose to ®ag rank. And three Tuskegee Airmen ®ew combat missions in three wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. For young black of¤cers training in Tuskegee, the community was a quick primer in African American history and culture. Charles W. Dryden came from the Bronx in New York City and was the son of Jamaican teacher parents. On his ¤rst train trip to Alabama, he was befriended by southern blacks and insulted by southern whites. He and other cadets from the North knew little black history, culture, or folklore. Tuskegee’s legendary professor George Washington Carver tutored Dryden in black history, and it was at the Tuskegee Chapel that Dryden heard spirituals he had never heard before. After various postings in Europe and the North, he returned to Tuskegee as a pilot-instructor, aware that segregation in Michigan could be as blatant as in Alabama. Wherever he traveled in uniform, the patronizing treatment of whites never obscured the obvious af¤rmation and pride extended to him by black kitchen workers, ditchdiggers, truck drivers, and ordinary people. Not everyone had such a positive attitude about the effects of the Second World War on race relations. Sherman White Sr. and his wife lived in Montgomery, which was a short drive away from Tuskegee for their aspiring aviator son. When he became 1 of the 66 Tuskegee Airmen killed in action, they accepted their loss as part of the price Americans paid for freedom. But the Montgomery Civitan Club did not help heal their anguish. When the grieving parents received an invitation to the dedication of a monument for area servicemen who had died in World War II, they walked to the reserved seating and presented their invitation. To their amazement, they were refused a seat and told they would have to stand. Having pro-



duced a son good enough to sacri¤ce his life over Sicily with the 99th Pursuit Squadron for a population that would not seat his proud and grieving parents, the Whites chose not to stay to hear empty words of praise. They did send a restrained letter of protest to the Montgomery Advertiser. The paper’s editor, Charles Dobbins (son of a Black Belt Baptist preacher, Howard College graduate, and New Deal liberal), used the occasion for chiding his fellow citizens. Even in antebellum days, he wrote, white masters allowed their slaves seats in church: “The experience of these Negro parents of a dead American soldier is an unhappy commentary upon Democracy.”18 He invited local Civitans to respond and promised to publish their letters. None did. Post–World War II Conflicts Although the United States engaged in no additional major wars during the century, it did become involved in numerous protracted con®icts. In every one Alabama men died. In Korea between 1950 and 1953, more than 750 sailors, soldiers, marines, and aviators from the state perished. In Vietnam nearly 1,300 lost their lives during the 1960s and 1970s. In Operation Desert Storm (the Persian Gulf War) during the 1990s, 17 died.19 That so few Americans died in the Iraqi deserts owed much to Dr. Philip W. Lett of Newton. After earning his degree from Auburn in mechanical engineering, Lett completed a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, then became an engineer for Chrysler Corporation. As vice president for engineering, Lett headed the design and production team that built the M-1 tank, which was credited with destroying 2,000 Iraqi tanks at a loss of only four M-1s. And not a single American tank crew member was killed by enemy ¤re. Not all wars were so sanitary. In fact, Alabamians sometimes lost their lives in battles not even acknowledged by the U.S. government. That was the case in the early 1960s when Pres. John F. Kennedy permitted a clandestine Cuban invasion planned under the previous administration. The original plan called for Americans to train Cuban exiles who would conduct the actual invasion using B-26 World War II–era ¤ghter-bombers for air cover. Because the Birmingham unit of the Alabama Air National Guard had been the last in the United States to ®y B-26s before they were



withdrawn from service in the late 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency requested that the commander of Alabama’s Air National Guard and Gov. John Patterson permit pilots and crews from the Birmingham unit to volunteer to train Cubans at bases in Central America. As the attack on Cuba began, a number of tactical decisions jeopardized the invasion. When exhausted Cuban pilots could no longer perform, several Alabama instructors volunteered to ®y missions in their place. Two of their planes were shot down by Cuban ¤ghters and their crews (including four from Alabama) killed. In a bizarre sequel to the affair, U.S. government of¤cials denied the involvement of American citizens despite the fact that the Castro government preserved one of their bodies as evidence. Although the Birmingham families of the deceased pilots secretly received compensation, the airmen obtained none of the honors their heroism justi¤ed until the end of the century, when low-key award ceremonies and of¤cial listing on U.S. records ¤nally acknowledged their sacri¤ce. Alabama’s National Guard also played a key role in the Persian Gulf War. By 1990 the state operated the nation’s largest Guard program, with an armory in every county and a total enrollment of 21,500 men and women. Of¤cials attributed the popularity of the Guard in Alabama to a combination of factors: the state’s traditions of patriotism and pride in the military; its signi¤cant black population, which was overrepresented in the army; and its high poverty rate and low per capita income, which made military service an attractive source of supplemental income. When mobilization began in the fall of 1990 for the run-up to Operation Desert Storm, some 2,000 state Guardsmen and reservists were summoned to active duty, making the state the largest source of call-ups during the Persian Gulf crisis. Even larger mobilizations occurred in 2003–4 during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The state also continued to provide military leadership. Navy admiral Thomas M. Moorer rose from the post of chief of naval operations to the nation’s highest military post, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Several subsequent JCS chairs, though not native Alabamians, were Auburn graduates. During a century when so many aspects of Alabama life changed so fundamentally, perhaps it was comforting that some attitudes stayed the



same. Certainly the state’s pride in country, commitment to the nation’s armed services, and patriotism changed very little. Although such sentiments seemed increasingly out of fashion nationally, that never bothered Alabamians. When the state adopted the slogan We dare defend our rights, it applied to more than just politics.


9 Beyond the Game The Social Signi¤cance of Sports

Sports, having somehow become the medium through which Americans derive their strongest sense of community, has become the state where all the great moral issues have to be played out, often rough and ugly, right alongside the games. —Gary Smith, “Crime and Punishment,” Sports Illustrated

A familiar crisis engulfed Alabama at the end of the 20th century. Gov. Don Siegelman declared the state’s education budget to be in proration. Alabama Education Association president Paul Hubbert, in an effort to minimize the effect of budget cuts on K-12 schools, launched an attack on “rich universities.” Higher education responded with a press conference in Montgomery to present its side of the story. The presidents of Auburn and the University of Alabama, together with their respective football head coaches, spoke with the media. The object of this strategy was to mobilize football-crazed fans (both of¤cial graduates and unof¤cial “pickup truck” alumni—the preferred national term, “subway alumni,” hardly ¤t a state that had no subways). The apparent supposition underlying the press conference was that in order to have college football it was necessary to have colleges. Hubbert, one of the state’s shrewdest lobbyists, noted the obvious irony. Universities that insisted they were in ¤nancial crisis communicated that message at a press conference conducted by two presidents whose annual salaries were nearly a quarter million dollars and two football coaches whose annual salary packages each totaled more than a million dollars. Two hundred miles south of the Montgomery press conference, the


408 CHA P T ER N I N E

superintendent of Mobile public schools devised his own strategy to stave off proration. He announced the termination of high school football, band, cheerleaders, and other extracurricular activities. The prospect of an autumn without high school football sobered Mobile County’s legendary antitax population. As one local teacher put it, having Friday nights in the fall without football would “be like having Catholicism without the pope.” Two years earlier, Mobilians had rejected a property tax increase for schools by a three-to-one margin. And the county had not passed such an increase since the 1940s. But as the superintendent explained, “When I said the F-word, in Alabama that’s football, it was like I had ¤nally hit the mule on the right end.”1 Using football to justify funding schools was unique enough to warrant attention in the New York Times. The successful vote to raise taxes in mid-May 2001 after so many defeats guaranteed that football would continue uninterrupted. But it also provoked a Mobile Spanish teacher to complain that it was embarrassing to live in a society where football determined whether or not education would be funded adequately. There were lots of reasons for such misplaced priorities. During the 20th century, Alabama’s population was one of the nation’s poorest educated, ranking near the top in adult illiteracy and near the bottom in percentage of college graduates. Its economy had long been dominated by low-skill, low-wage manufacturing jobs. Living in a mild climate and shaped by a long frontier tradition hospitable to hunting, ¤shing, and outdoor activities, Alabamians valued physical exertion. Individualism seemed to be stamped in their genetic code, causing them to resent fencing land or restricting in any way their freedom to hunt and ¤sh wherever and however they chose. With a chip on their shoulder as large as Cheaha Mountain, white Alabamians also disliked outsiders in general and Yankees in particular. Military defeat in the Civil War, resistance to racial integration, and pervasive poverty had led to a negative national image and lots of demeaning stereotypes. As a ¤ercely proud people who perpetually found themselves at or near the bottom of many quality-of-life lists, Alabamians found one measure where they often ranked at or near the top: the ¤nal college football poll. This conservative population would begrudge every cent levied on their property for education but would spend lavishly to ¤nish in the top 10. This Bible-believing citizenry would mobilize politically to pulverize advo-


T H E S O CIA L SIGN I F ICA NCE OF SP ORT S 409

cates of a state lottery for education but would blithely ignore coaches and alumni who broke NCAA rules. If the Bible is correct when it states that where a person’s treasure is there his heart will be also, then the state’s true affection could be found at Bryant-Denny or Jordan-Hare stadium. It was not always so. Though Alabamians had always valued physical, outdoor activities, organized sports, especially football, were primarily 20th-century obsessions. Paradoxically, enthusiasm for team sports accompanied Alabama’s desperate desire to modernize the state. In the 19th century Alabamians were more likely to be found in woods hunting or on rivers ¤shing than watching someone else entertain them. Though an agricultural state, citizens had invested more money in ¤rearms than in agricultural implements. And Dixie Graves—longtime reformer, advocate of woman suffrage, wife of Gov. Bibb Graves, and herself brie®y a U.S. senator—proved her mettle in 1937 not by serving as the state’s ¤rst female U.S. senator but by besting her husband on a hunt (she bagged a deer while he had to content himself with shooting a wildcat). Even so individual a physical activity as hunting presaged the history of organized sports. From frontier days when hunting was a solitary undertaking to provide food for the table, it changed into a family activity, a social gathering that included profoundly important rituals. Fathers and grandfathers taught skills to sons and grandsons, complete with smearing the blood of a boy’s ¤rst kill on his face. Neighbors knew each other and often hunted together. Along the forested bottomlands of the state’s rivers and creeks, dogs drove deer toward a line of hunters, who nursed cups of coffee or some stronger libation, tracing the course of pack and prey by the sounds they made. The kill was a community event like a logrolling or barn raising, to be shared with everyone, celebrated in stories, and preserved by opposition to fencing laws and “posted” land. As the state’s deer population surged during the 20th century, a long hunting season, mild weather, cheap land, and inexpensive guides brought out-of-state hunters to Alabama looking for trophy bucks. The rules of this modernized, high-tech sport differed from older folkways. Hunting became big business. Stalk-hunting or still-hunting replaced dog-chase hunting. Like different sects of Protestants, hunters fought over style and man-



ners. The era when older men patiently taught boys outdoor etiquette that had been passed along for generations gave way to instant outdoorsmen who learned their hunting from magazines. They possessed the money to buy expensive weapons and high priced guides to maximize the limited time they had for the hunt. The new well-heeled hunters were willing to pay $350 a day for guides who could lead them to deer with a trophy rack of antlers. Land owners shared in the bounty by restricting local folk’s access, planting crops for deer, and erecting hunting stands. After all, who wanted a pack of dogs running the biggest buck over to a riverbottom where some “yahoo” neighbor was staked out waiting for a trophy buck when a land owner could coax thousands of dollars from out-of-state hunters for the same animal. As Alabama hunter George Maxey bitterly complained: “It’s all about a rich man telling me what I can’t do. They want to get hunting in Alabama like it is in Montana and Colorado—a high dollar deal where the common man can’t afford to hunt in his own state. I’m here for my sons and my grandsons, so they’ll have the same rights that I do to hunt the way they want to.”2 Maxey enunciated most of the wisdom necessary to understand sports in Alabama: the ritualized passage of boys to manhood; the masculine values and individualism of a frontier society; class-based grievances against rich people; parochial resentment to outsiders; pride in their own folkways. That sport came to play a key role in what Alabamians valued as a society is obvious. When ESPN sports television network selected its most in®uential athletes of the last four decades of the century, 3 of the top 25 were identi¤ed with Alabama (Henry Aaron, Joe Namath, and Paul “Bear” Bryant). Two of the network’s top 10 American athletes of the century (Jesse Owens and Willie Mays) were born in the state. In fact, Alabama, Georgia, and Pennsylvania tied for top spot as incubators of great athletes, each producing 5 of the top 50 (and Alabama’s ¤ve ranked highest, with all—Jesse Owens, Willie Mays, Joe Louis, Carl Lewis, and Hank Aaron—in the top 14). The Associated Press listed Joe Louis and Jesse Owens among its top 10 athletes of the century and Paul Bryant as the best collegiate football coach. One British publication named only 3 Alabamians among thousands of millennium record breakers. All 3 were athletes: Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Hank Aaron. Obviously, what Alabamians most valued, they excelled in.



Boxing and Track Boxing and track were the ultimate democratic and individual sports. They required little equipment or money. They provided a person the opportunity for decisive victory, a knockout or a solitary stretch to glory. For some poor white and black children, they were also a ticket out of deprivation and anonymity (and not incidentally for blacks also a ticket out of Alabama). However much these sports might demand of the body, body was all many poor Alabamians had to offer. Early in the century, the world’s heavyweight boxing champion was considered the unof¤cial king of athletes. In many sports, “world championship” was misleading because only Americans seriously contended. (For much of the century there was no Olympic competition in baseball or basketball, and American football was just becoming an international sport at century’s end.) But boxing was different, drawing competitors from Canada, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Germany, and elsewhere. Joe Louis Barrow (he eventually dropped the last name) was born in a sharecropper’s cabin on Buckalew Mountain near Lafayette, though his family joined the black migration to Detroit early in his life. He escaped Detroit’s slums to begin boxing professionally in 1934 and was undefeated in 26 matches before German champion Max Schmelling knocked him out in 1936. A year later Louis won the heavyweight title from Jim Braddock before 65,000 Chicago boxing fans, becoming only the second African American to claim the championship. Anyone pondering why a poor black boy from Alabama would absorb the physical abuse inevitable in boxing might consider the Depression-era purse for those eight rounds: $650,000. A year later 80,000 spectators thronged Yankee Stadium to witness a rematch of the Louis-Schmelling ¤ght, this one with international repercussions given unfolding events in Europe. Louis took only two minutes four seconds to knock out the pride of Nazi Germany. Alabamians typically reacted to Louis according to race. Whites often deplored boxing for its violence, and when they followed the sport at all, pulled for whites (even from Germany) over their black native son. The Montgomery Advertiser referred to Louis as “a 23-year-old boy from the cotton ¤elds of Alabama” in its report of his victory over Braddock.3 But it printed no congratulatory editorial for the Alabama-born champion, allo-



cating space instead to the state Chamber of Commerce meeting and the state’s cotton crop. Louis retained the heavyweight championship of the world for an amazing 13 years and was a celebrated hero to Alabama’s African Americans. Whites claimed him only after the civil rights revolution. In a December 1999 Birmingham News list of the state’s 50 greatest athletes, Louis ¤nished eighth. The athlete named ¤rst in that survey was another African American, Jesse Owens. James Cleveland Owens was born to Morgan County sharecroppers. But like the Barrow family, the Owens family gave up on Alabama’s racism and poverty, joining the black migration to Cleveland, Ohio. As was the case with Joe Louis, the move brought opportunities hardly imaginable to blacks who remained in the Heart of Dixie. In Ohio, Owens received the coaching, equipment, and opportunity he never would have had in Alabama. A scholarship to Ohio State University set up two dates with destiny. The ¤rst came on May 25, 1935, at the conference championships. Many sport historians consider Owens’s performance that day the greatest single demonstration of versatility in the history of track and ¤eld. Despite a bruised back that caused friends to advise him to withdraw from the meet, the college sophomore shattered three world records and tied a fourth. After that record-smashing performance, he won the low hurdles in a time only four-tenths of a second off the world record. But it was his triumphs a year later in Berlin that transformed Owens into an American icon. The same year that German boxing champion Max Schmelling scored a victory for Aryan supremacy over Joe Louis, the 11th Olympiad got under way in Germany. Buoyed by Schmelling’s victory, Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler expected to preside over a Teutonic rout. More than 100,000 people, mostly Germans, packed the massive, double-deck concrete stadium for the most spectacular opening day in the modern history of the games. On August 2 Jesse Owens ran 100-meter trial heats in a world record 10.2 seconds. The next day he won the ¤rst of his four gold medals in the 100 meters, followed on August 4 by two Olympic record– shattering sprints in the 200 meters before he broke another record in the broad jump. In four successive days, Owens dazzled nearly half a million spectators with bursts of speed and leaping that established U.S. supremacy



in the games, derailed Hitler’s racial agenda, and earned Owens two new Olympic records, a tie for a third, and two world records. Owens became only the fourth American ever to capture three or more championships in a single Olympiad, the ¤rst from any country to do so since 1924, and only the ¤fth American Negro ever to win a gold. Apparently the Montgomery Advertiser either did not realize Owens was from Alabama or didn’t care. During his amazing string of victories, the newspaper ran editorials about in®ation, isolationism, and Dothan peanut eaters. The paper even reprinted an editorial from the Atlanta Journal bragging about a University of Georgia student who had become the ¤rst from his state ever to win an Olympic gold medal. But not a word of editorial space did the Advertiser devote to native son Jesse Owens, whose feat is still celebrated as one of the century’s transcendent moments in sport history. After many years of neglect, Lawrence County erected a memorial park to Owens in 1996 but later cut funds to maintain it. Alabama blacks did celebrate Owens’s career. One young boy who idolized the Olympian was Carl Lewis of Birmingham (like the others, the Lewis family moved north when Carl was a boy). Carl’s father took the nine year old to the Jesse Owens Youth Games in Philadelphia. There the boy had his picture taken with Owens and his soul imprinted by his idol. In the 1984 Olympics, Lewis equaled Owens’s performance, winning four golds. He became the only athlete other than his idol to win golds in both sprints and long jump. During his incredible 17-year career, Lewis won nine gold medals, matching the all-time record for golds during four Olympic games (he would have run in an unprecedented ¤fth but for the 1980 U.S. boycott). Baseball If boxing and track were the most democratic individual sports, baseball was the equivalent team sport. It required only four feed sacks for bases, a bat, and a ball. Gloves were optional for sandlot play. Early in the 20th century nearly every Alabama community ¤elded a team, as did many industries. Even Civilian Conservation Corps camps recruited gifted baseball players during the Great Depression. For African American schools,



especially in rural areas, the costs of an indoor basketball court or football equipment made these sports prohibitively expensive. But baseball was a different matter. When the Birmingham News selected its greatest Alabama athletes of the century, nearly a third of the top 10 were African American baseball superstars (Willie Howard Mays ranked 3rd; Henry Louis Aaron, 4th; and Leroy Robert Paige, 10th). Nationally, the Sporting News selected Mays the second best baseball player of the century, and his basket catches and “Say Hey” exuberance made him one of the most popular men ever to play the game. Willie Mays grew up in a steelworker’s family, playing ball at Fair¤eld Industrial High School and for his father’s company team. After a brief stint with Birmingham’s Black Barons, Mays left for the newly integrated major leagues where he was voted rookie of the year. His 22-year career, mainly with the New York/San Francisco Giants, produced a batting average of .302, 660 home runs (third all time), and 20 records (including a career ¤elding record for most games that remains unbroken). Most batters never hit .300 in a season. To average that for two decades is the stuff of legends. Mays led the National League in various batting categories 24 times and became the consensus choice as the greatest center ¤elder of all time. “Hammering Hank” Aaron split his career between the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves. His 19 career baseball records included the most cherished one of all. On April 8, 1974, Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s career record. He ¤nished his career with 755 round-trippers (a record never matched). Like other black stars, Aaron had to overcome both physical and racial barriers. Despite playing for a popular southern team, his run at Ruth’s record subjected him to racial abuse and death threats, sapping the honor of much of its meaning and leaving Aaron embittered. Leroy “Satchel” Paige actually had more reason to complain than Aaron. Born a generation before Aaron and Mays, Paige won his fame pitching for segregated Negro teams before blacks were allowed to play in the major leagues. Had he enjoyed the opportunities of his two fellow Alabamians, he might be considered the greatest pitcher of all time. Born in Mobile, Paige received his nickname by carrying satchels for tips



at the port city’s train station. As star pitcher for the Kansas City Monarchs in the 1930s, Paige often played before crowds of 30,000 or more. Known for his magni¤cent control, blazing speed, and biting curve, he was the consensus selection as the greatest black pitcher of his time. His accomplishments in black leagues continue to amaze historians of baseball. In 1931 he won 31 games, holding the opposition scoreless in 16 of them. He averaged more than 15 strikeouts a game. He pitched in an estimated 2,500 games, won 2,000 of them, had 250 shutouts and 100 nohitters, all without a sore arm throughout perhaps the longest career in history. (He continued to throw in the minors into his sixties.) Although whites often criticized the level of competition Paige faced, he played in many exhibition games against white major leaguers. He once beat Dizzy Dean, one of the premier pitchers of the postwar era, 1–0 in 17 innings. He struck out Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby 5 times in one game. Pitching once against Dizzy Dean’s team of all-stars, Paige struck out 16 of the ¤rst 18 major leaguers he faced. And the legendary Joe DiMaggio called Paige the best pitcher he ever faced. In 1948 Paige, then 42, ¤nally got his chance to pitch in the majors. Called up by the Cleveland Indians in their stretch drive to the American League pennant, Paige won 6 games and lost only 1. Selected rookie of the year, the aging Paige quipped sardonically: “which year?” In a sport obsessed with record keeping, Alabamians could rightly claim state supremacy of baseball. Of the top 11 home run hitters of all time, Hank Aaron ranked 1st, Willie Mays 3rd, and Mobile’s Willie Lee McCovey 11th. McCovey also held baseball’s all-time slugging record for extra base hits. Aaron was 3rd in total hits behind Pete Rose and Ty Cobb. Only 3 players in baseball history had more than 500 home runs and 3,000 career hits; 2 of the 3, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, were Alabamians. In the ¤nal all-star game of the century, 3 players were tied for most appearances with 24 each, including Aaron and Mays. Football Although most Americans considered baseball to be the national pastime, Alabamians changed their minds during the century. In the Heart of Dixie,



college football was the sparkling jewel in the scepter of athletic power. And they could lay claim to the century’s greatest collegiate coach and one of its premier programs. Ironically, the South, which developed such a love affair with football, was a johnny-come-lately to the sport, importing the game from the reviled Yankees even as the region was recruiting northern industry and aping urban ways. Although University of Alabama fans like to believe that God awoke one morning, yawned, then thundered “Roll Tide,” the transformation of Alabama’s sport history actually began at Auburn. At the end of the 19th century Dr. George Petrie, professor of classics, took leave of the Agricultural and Mechanical College to complete his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In the Maryland city, he not only changed his graduate program from Latin and modern languages to history but also became enthralled with the new “scienti¤c football” (the name used to distinguish the game from “old-fashioned” soccer, a European import). When he returned from Baltimore, he and a classmate who came south to teach at Georgia, decided to introduce football to the Deep South as a way of bringing progressive northern values to provincial southern students. Like the new German seminars that Petrie imported to Auburn from Johns Hopkins, or the bicycle paths he built, or his radio lectures on world affairs, football was a way of duplicating newfangled innovations in a southern setting. Given Petrie’s motives, Atlanta, the birthplace of New South boosterism and chief southern aspirant for mainstream urban status, was the perfect place for the Deep South’s second football game on February 20, 1892. Nor did the local press disappoint Petrie. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution promised to “whoop ’er up in all the papers” and “really make things hum.”4 So was born a new sport and a new class of journalists to promote it. The game, played before 2,000 fans in the rain, was truly a community event. Professor Petrie not only coached, he also played. And Auburn’s star in a 10–0 victory was a young professor of electrical engineering (and a 210pound lineman) named Floyd McKissick. The national press applauded this southern return to the union, celebrating football as a way of revitalizing American competitiveness through “manly” sport. Predictably, clergymen and “effete” Christians led opposi-



tion to the new game, complaining about too many injuries, too much violence, and too much corruption. Shailer Matthews, a Baptist minister and champion of the social gospel, teaching at the liberal University of Chicago Divinity School, declared that football had become “a social obsession—a boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.”5 Ironically, the classics curriculum that Petrie abandoned when he switched to history and became obsessed with football began to decline in southern education as football grew in popularity. Perhaps there was a cause and effect relationship. Some moralistic Alabamians agreed with Shailer Matthews’s critique of the new sport, especially after a series of scandals at Auburn and Alabama. Without rules to govern the sport, Petrie and other coaches openly paid players to perform. And one Auburn star, a newly arrived Irish immigrant with few assets beyond a body ready for sacri¤ce, started for Auburn without bothering to enroll or attend class. The brutality and violence of the game, in addition to its association with alcohol use and gambling, further offended moralists. The pastor of Auburn’s Methodist church condemned football as little more than a collective brawl. Evangelical of¤cials broadened the indictment, denouncing the game as part of the general godlessness permitted on secular university campuses. Baptist reformers could take all this piety too far, and Spright Dowell certainly did. As president of Auburn from 1920 until he was ¤red in 1927, Dowell began a three-decade decline in the school’s football fortunes. By the time of his presidency even the state’s premier denominational colleges, Howard and Birmingham-Southern, had joined the football mania sweeping the state, playing the initial game at Birmingham’s fabled Legion Field. And Auburn had established itself as a southern football power. Under legendary coach Mike Donahue, Auburn had won three Southern Intercollegiate Association (predecessor of the Southeastern Conference) championships in the seven years prior to Dowell’s arrival. Dowell believed overemphasis on football came at the expense of both academic integrity and a single standard of conduct for students. To minimize corruption in recruiting, he sought to transfer control of intercollegiate athletics from the semiautonomous Auburn Athletic Association controlled by coaches, alumni, and boosters to the school’s regular academic



bureaucracy. He allowed intramural teams to use the school’s only football ¤eld, forced coaches to teach heavier loads, and refused increased funding for the sport. To make matters worse, he interpreted the canons of amateurism like he did the Bible at his beloved Auburn Baptist Church: as a code of conduct to be strictly adhered to, not as a set of loose guidelines to be ¤nessed or ignored. Under his administration Auburn avoided scandal. But it also avoided victories and lost Coach Donahue, who departed for Louisiana State University. Auburn’s Jefferson County Alumni Association, headed by Henry T. DeBardeleben (son of one of the city’s founders and brother of national AU alumni president Charles F. DeBardeleben) led the attacks on Dowell. Determined to restore Auburn to its “old-time place in Southern athletics,” the Jefferson County Club demanded Dowell’s removal. Supporters rallied behind Dowell, precipitating a bitter three-year con®ict. The state’s Baptist and Methodist hierarchies defended him, as did Miss Leland Cooper, the founder of Auburn’s Baptist Student Union. She wrote Gov. Bibb Graves that he should look beyond football records to the larger moral principles that Dowell represented. But Cooper missed the point. The ¤nal won-loss record in football had become Auburn’s larger moral principle. And when Dowell began expelling football players for academic de¤ciencies or for violating the school’s moral code, powerful alumni had seen enough. They successfully demanded that Governor Graves remove Dowell after the disastrous 1927 season. Dowell’s cross-state peer, George Denny, had no such scruples. As president of the University of Alabama, Denny made national football prominence the centerpiece of his plans to modernize and expand the university. Under his tutelage, football received added attention and resources, culminating in the undefeated 1925 team being invited to play in the nation’s most prestigious game, the Rose Bowl. No southern team had ever been invited to play at Pasadena because the nation’s coaches, fans, and sportswriters considered the South’s brand of football inferior to that played in other regions. But when other teams rejected the bid, Alabama accepted. The Tide’s 20–19 upset win over the highly favored Washington Huskies featured the exploits of a Bama halfback, Johnny Mack Brown, who went on to movie stardom as a Hollywood cowboy. But he would be best remembered in Alabama for catching a 63-



yard touchdown pass that beat Washington. One sportswriter described him as “slicker than an eel in a sea of stewed okra.”6 Such language was the idiom of the South, and Alabama’s Rose Bowl victory was a regional event. As Vanderbilt’s coach exulted: “Alabama was our representative in ¤ghting against the world. I fought, bled, died, and was resurrected with the Crimson Tide.”7 Alabama’s team went undefeated again in 1926, and this time there was no question of the school’s worthiness to contend for the title. Alabama repeated as national champion despite a 7–7 tie with Stanford in Pasadena. Even ¤ction writers celebrated the Crimson Tide. A 1926 short story depicted an upper-class northern boy whose intellectual curiosity far exceeded his athletic ability. His father, disturbed by the boy’s preference for philosophy and psychology books (“written by birds who change their mind twice a day and their shirts twice a month”), packed the boy off to Tuscaloosa to mend his sissy ways.8 On the University of Alabama campus, the boy was reborn in a manly likeness pleasing to his father and for added bonus became a hero in the Tide’s 1926 Rose Bowl victory. Thus were heroes born and reborn among a 1920s generation that was never “lost” and never “expatriated” (except, of course, expatriated from the increasingly intellectual and effete North to the increasing virile and manly South). The Tide’s Rose Bowl victory, and the national championships that followed in 1926, 1930, 1934, and 1941, proved a decisive rebuttal to negative northern publicity that depicted southerners as overly pious Bible Belters, hookworm-sapped weaklings, lazy slaggards, or incest-prone defectives. “Come out on the football ¤eld,” the heroes in crimson seemed to be saying, “and we’ll kick your butts.” During Auburn’s long drought and Alabama’s longer ascendency, the two schools refused to play each other. One factor in the 1908 termination was the class divisions within the state. Planters and businessmen tended to support Alabama, while lower-middle-class and farm families favored Auburn. The University of Alabama’s classical curriculum produced physicians, attorneys, bankers, and politicians. Auburn’s more applied curriculum was tailored toward technical occupations and agriculture. Bitter rivalries between these competing elites led in®uential Alabama alumni-politicians to try to close Auburn, restrict its programs, or place the school under the University of Alabama board of trustees. And Tuscaloosa-leaning gover-



nors and legislators placed more Alabama than Auburn graduates on the AU board until after World War II when the football rivalry was renewed (1948) because of intense political pressure. Within ¤ve years after the renewal, Coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan of Selma began his quarter century tenure as Auburn’s head coach and supplanted Alabama as the state’s predominant football power. Auburn’s ascendency was short-lived. In 1958 one of the players from Alabama’s 1934 national championship team returned to his alma mater, beginning a quarter century as head coach. Paul W. Bryant had grown up poor in Moro Bottom, Arkansas. A barefoot childhood ¤lled with plowing ¤elds, picking cotton, and ¤ghting bequeathed Bryant a huge chip on the shoulder. The signature event of his youth involved a traveling show at the Lyric Theater in Fordyce, the largest neighboring town. The show offered a dollar a minute to anyone willing to wrestle a bear. His friends dared him; Bryant needed the money; so the teenager agreed. He charged the bear, and both took holds they would not relinquish. The bear ¤nally broke loose, worked its muzzle off, and bit Bryant’s ear, drawing blood. Bryant quickly retreated. When the show skipped town without paying him, Bryant lost his money as well as some of his blood. But he did gain a famous nickname. Bryant later wrote that much of his coaching success resulted from his empathy with poor boys like himself. As it had been for him, their best hope for a better life was on a football ¤eld. When Bear Bryant returned to Alabama, he had already established himself at universities in Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas as one of the nation’s ¤nest coaches. But it was at Alabama that his harsh discipline (his strategy, he wrote in his autobiography, was “to bleed ’em and gut ’em, because I didn’t want any well-wishers hanging around”) and innovative coaching made him, at the time, America’s winningest coach.9 His Alabama teams won 6 national championships, and one of his former players took Alabama to another national crown in 1992, giving Alabama a total of 12 championships in 75 years. During half the years of the century, Alabama appeared in a postseason bowl game, setting national records both for appearances and victories. Between the initial Alabama football game in 1892 and the year 2000, Alabama won a phenomenal 75 percent of its games to place third among major colleges. Its 21 Southeastern Conference



titles and more than 40 top-20 ¤nishes left no doubt which team dominated southern football. And the century ended with Bear as the most successful major college football coach of all time, with 323 victories. When novelist Nanci Kincaid ¤ctionalized football in Alabama (as former wife to an assistant who coached at Alabama, she was an expert on the subject), she crafted her description of an ideal college head football coach from Bear Bryant: If a coach doesn’t have strong Alabama connections, then he doesn’t belong in Alabama. I call this the No Yankees need apply rule. A coach should be rural or at least act rural. This is no problem for anybody in the state—even folks from B’ham and Mobile, no matter what they say. A coach should not try to dazzle anybody with good grammar or an impressive vocabulary. A coach should hunt, ¤sh, chew tobacco, play golf, and have the guts to scratch what itches, cameras or no cameras. A coach should perform a few acts of symbolic cruelty early on to set the tone for later so people will take him seriously. (Alabama people respect this more than making money.) four players hospitalized from heat exhaustion. coach denies players water in 98-degree heat. lawsuit pending. An Alabama coach should talk to boys about their mamas. A coach should tell his players after every game, “Don’t do nothing tonight you wouldn’t want your mama to know about.” And he should mean it. Alabama likes old coaches better than young coaches. If a coach has at least one brother sent to prison, that really helps. Alabama likes coaches that harp on players going to church and dedicating their lives to Christ. Quoting or misquoting the Bible a lot is also good. A coach should develop a personal cursing style. A defensive coach is better than an offensive coach. Alabama loves defense. Most of the South loves defense. This is because people here are always more interested in stopping forward movement than they are in making any forward movement of their own. An Alabama coach should not be too good looking. People hate that. But he should have a good-looking wife and she should be a churchgoer. It’s okay for him to have kids if they pretty much stay out of sight and out of trouble. He should be nice to black people, but not



so nice people start to think he’s a liberal. He shouldn’t really have any politics, but if he does, they should be predictable. He should stick with whatever he was raised to think.10 Bear, of course was more than a model coach. He was a legend. As he immodestly but honestly announced after returning to Tuscaloosa, “I ain’t nothing but a winner.” Or as contemptuous fans of other colleges concluded, using derogatory rural grammar: “He can take his’n and beat your’n, and he can take your’n and beat his’n.” Or as one piece of Alabama folklore proclaimed: “An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in Bear Bryant.” In a poll conducted more than half a decade after Bryant’s death in 1983, the state’s citizens selected former Gov. George Wallace and Bryant as the most admired Alabamians. Bear’s hegemony in Alabama ended when one of his former coaches, Pat Dye, came to Auburn. After Shug Jordan’s retirement in 1975, Auburn’s football fortunes took a plunge (though even Shug lost to Bear 13 of the 18 times they faced each other). After his inaugural season, Dye beat his mentor in 1982 and the following year won the ¤rst of four SEC championships during the 1980s. He presided over the renovation and expansion of JordanHare stadium, forced Alabama to move the Iron Bowl game between the teams from Legion Field to Auburn in alternating years, and developed a cultlike following among Auburn fans desperate to achieve parity with Alabama. When Auburn’s fortunes plunged again, Dye was replaced by Terry Bowden, who took a Dye team that had two consecutive break-even seasons and compiled the best beginning Division 1-A coaching record in NCAA history, 20 consecutive victories. Although Auburn and Alabama dominated the state’s football galaxy, the state’s smaller universities competed successfully as well. Samford, Troy State, Jacksonville State, North Alabama, and West Alabama either won or competed for national championships within their divisions. Although autumn Saturdays belonged to college football, Friday nights were reserved for high school warriors. Towns that were losing industry, population, and even hope rallied around local gridiron teams. Football and churches became the focus of local pride and community spirit. Novelist Nanci Kincaid perfectly expressed the spirit of high school football as a community ritual. A new coach, just-arrived in ¤ctional Beasley, Alabama,



received this greeting at the Tastee-Freez: “You come to the right place. . . . [C]ome Friday night you can’t ¤nd a house with a light on. Everybody not laid up in the hospital is out at the high school. People around here support two things, the church of their choice and the Beasley Bulldogs.”11 In many ways football and church merged. The “muscular Christianity” proclaimed by evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Promise Keepers (an evangelical men’s Christian renewal movement founded by former University of Colorado head football coach Bill McCartney in 1990) extolled athletic virtues and used football metaphors. Christ should be everyone’s quarterback. Men of all races should bond as brothers, live sober lives, and take leadership responsibilities within their families. Football coaches and players became the best draws at religious revivals. Judged by attendance ¤gures, football rivaled churchgoing. The SEC sold nearly one of every ¤ve football tickets among the nation’s Division 1-A schools and earned one of every four dollars paid to the college Football Association by ABC and ESPN. The league’s stadiums ¤lled to more than 90 percent capacity, and SEC teams led the nation in total attendance for 20 straight seasons beginning in 1980. The vice president of ABC Sports told the Dallas Morning News in the 1990s that any conversation about college football began with the Southeast because no other region rivaled it in enthusiasm for the sport. And when Bill Curry left Georgia Tech to take the head coaching job at Alabama, his wife told friends that in Alabama “football is a religion.” “They said, ‘Oh no, no, no, Carolyn. It’s much more important than that.’”12 Alumni and fans planned vacations around out-oftown games and bowl appearances. At Alabama and Auburn, football extended beyond a game to become a process of community bonding, creating “the Auburn family” and “the Bama family.” And one needed no diploma from either school to belong. College “bloodlines” were determined by devotion to football teams, not by degrees earned. To insult one’s team was to disparage one’s ancestors, which is why Michael Smith, longtime Alabama loyalist, murdered Richard Nicholas, rabid Auburn fan, with a shotgun in Greenville in 1994. Nicholas, angry at Smith for trashing his mobile home after the Tide defeated the Tigers 21– 14 in November, was killed when he confronted his neighbor about the



vandalism. It is also the reason that a leader of the Alabama House of Representatives warned members that unless they passed Gov. Don Siegelman’s business taxes expeditiously in November 2000, the delay could keep them at the statehouse during the following Saturday’s Alabama-Auburn game. Representatives quickly approved the package. If college football was a religion for many Alabamians, it was a deeply ®awed one in which scandals occurred with alarming frequency. Rules were so casual in the early years of the game that no one paid much attention to ¤nancial inducements or academic favors given players. But once the NCAA established guidelines, both universities found ways around them. William Bradford Huie is best known as a novelist and chronicler of World War II, lynching, and the civil rights movement. But his ¤rst literary exposé appeared in Collier’s magazine in January 1941. The self-confessed Crimson Tide football fanatic (he had attended every Alabama football game between 1925 and 1941 except for a single season when he was out of the country) confessed his own misadventures on behalf of Crimson Tide football and carefully explained the sins of others as well. As an academic team tutor between 1927 and 1930, Huie steered players away from demanding professors or dif¤cult majors into education courses, despite his misgivings that someday as certi¤ed teachers they would have charge of educating high school students. According to one piece of Capstone folklore, a history teacher desperate to pass one player who had failed every exam offered one ¤nal chance at redemption. “What is the capital of Alabama?” the professor inquired. After a long pause the “beefer,” as Huie referred to players, responded “Wetumpka.” The perplexed teacher gave his pupil one more chance, noting that had the student correctly identi¤ed the capital as Montgomery, he would have received 100 points. Because Wetumpka was 18 miles from Montgomery, he would subtract 18 from 100, earning the athlete a grade of 82 for the course. What bothered Huie more than prostituted academic standards was the burden of tutoring Tuscaloosa High School students. Anxious to land the ¤nest recruits in Alabama, coaches relocated talented players to Tuscaloosa High (“the most important incubator in the Tide hatchery”) by ¤nding jobs for their parents. There Huie could make sure future heroes actually graduated from high school. And the local coach, partly subsidized by the university’s football team, could teach the Crimson Tide’s offensive and defen-



sive schemes. Explaining his repentance, Huie wrote: “We’re guilty of all the sins in the book. We’ve recruited players from all points of the compass. We can quote you current on-the-hoof prices for tackles or tailbacks. We’ve helped build a feeder organization that’s bigger than the New York Yankee farm system, and we’ve fought our big-time competitors on a nation-wide front. . . . In the name of sportsmanship,” he concluded, “we’ve built a rahrah empire that’s phony to its roots. We’ve taken a ¤ne game and converted it into a monster which takes from a boy his formative years and leaves him nothing but a letter to wear on his chest, a spavined knee and a false sense of values.”13 The Collier’s story helped launch Huie’s writing career. But it pretty well ended his relationship with the University of Alabama. The Bama football family was not happy. Only twice during his lengthy writing career was Huie of¤cially invited back to campus. Auburnites no doubt enjoyed Huie’s exposé, but they had little to brag about down on the Plain. Auburn managed to violate NCAA guidelines frequently enough (six major violations by end-of-century) to rank in the top ¤ve most-penalized universities. Matters got off to a bad start in the 1920s when Birmingham industrialist Charles DeBardeleben—already acquiring a reputation for antiunion violence, anti-Semitism, and promoting racial repression—helped ¤re Pres. Spright Dowell for his pious but naive determination to enforce ethical and academic standards on the football program. Conditions went downhill from there. Even the Tigers’ one national championship was tainted by probation that cost them the top spot in one of two national polls. Worse times lay ahead. An embarrassing scandal involved Pat Dye, the hero-coach who led Auburn to SEC domination during the 1980s. Dye, who had successfully recruited the ¤rst African American players for Bear Bryant as an assistant at Alabama, encountered a new reality at Auburn. His empathy with rural, small-town, and public-housing black athletes tapped one of the state’s largest reservoirs of football talent. But it also plunged him into a labyrinth of players with ¤nancial problems. In 1991 two of Dye’s players—Eric Ramsey and Alex Strong—alleged that payments to players were commonplace from 1985 to 1990. As was common in such situations, the coaching staff denied the charges. Unfortunately for them, Ramsey had purchased a microcassette recorder and a telephone



pickup within a suction cup jack and secretly recorded almost 100 conversations on two dozen microcassettes. The tapes, as their story emerged in the Montgomery Advertiser in the late summer of 1991, constituted a damning indictment of the Auburn program: Auburn alumnus Corky Frost paid two of Ramsey’s car notes and gave him $1,200 to buy another vehicle. Frost stocked his freezer with steaks and paid him $500 for touchdowns, $200 for interceptions, and $100 each for “big hits.” Frost paid his car insurance. Frost gave him $500 for Christmas. A coach gave him $300 monthly payments. Allegations that Dye used his connections as a director of Bobby Lowder’s Colonial Bank to arrange an unsecured loan of more than $11,000. Frost frequently instructed Ramsey on tape to keep quiet about special bene¤ts, but Ramsey claimed that at least 15 players received extra bene¤ts from Auburn coaches and boosters during his ¤ve-year stay. Although most players denied the charges when questioned by Birmingham News reporters, Vincent Harris initially con¤rmed Ramsey’s charges, saying that he also had received money from coaches. Continuing controversy, two-year NCAA probation, and two lackluster seasons cost Dye his job. After he angrily threatened to “bloody” anyone trying to make him Auburn’s scapegoat, he received a contract settlement package and a job as “assistant to the university president” with responsibilities for advising and fund-raising. He kept his palatial farm and house, admitting to no charge more serious than lack of control over his staff. Stung by the scandal, newly installed Auburn president William Muse and the search committee he headed made a surprise selection as Dye’s successor. The job went to Terry Bowden, the charismatic and highly successful coach of the small college Samford University Bulldogs. Muse believed



the committee selected Bowden because of a near-®awless interview and the weaknesses discovered in each of his competitors. Bowden believed he owed the job to powerful AU booster Bobby Lowder. Even without this advantage, Bowden had an impressive pedigree. His father, Bobby, was one of the most successful head coaches of all time. After coaching his alma mater, Samford University, to success, Bobby moved on to West Virginia and Florida State, where his teams dominated the sport during the 1990s, winning two national championships. Terry had broken his father’s record at Samford, recording the most career victories in school history. Bobby Bowden was a Birmingham native, a graduate of Woodlawn High School and Samford University. Three of his four sons and a son-in-law became coaches. And the family’s success seemed to be genetic. Not only did Bobby coach an undefeated FSU team during the 1990s, Terry accomplished the same rare feat his ¤rst season at Auburn in 1993, and Tommy later matched their accomplishments as head coach at Tulane. On October 25, 2003, Bobby broke Joe Paterno’s record of 339 career victories to become the winningest major university football coach of all time. The Bowdens had also become the most successful college coaching family in football history. Paradoxically, both Lowder at Auburn and the University of Alabama had passed on Bobby as head coach when vacancies had occurred during the early 1980s at a time when Bowden desperately wanted to return to his home state. After an undefeated initial season and a near-miss repeat in 1994, Terry lost his brother/offensive coordinator to Tulane; he ¤red Lowder’s con¤dante, defensive coordinator Wayne Hall; and he lost Lowder’s con¤dence. With lines of communications that ran directly from the head coach to Lowder, essentially circumventing the university president, football staff intrigue worsened and allegations of corruption surfaced again. Bowden feared that Lowder would undermine him by supporting an offer of the head coaching job to Brother Oliver, Auburn’s defensive coordinator. Hall, Bowden, and Oliver were all paid large severance packages with the condition that they remain silent about their dismissals, and Auburn’s scandals began to spread beyond football to a general battle for control of the university. When sportswriter Richard Ernsberger Jr. wrote a muckraking book, Bragging Rights: A Season inside the SEC, Football’s Toughest Conference, the



chapter on Auburn emphasized Auburn’s trustees and Bobby Lowder, who was termed by a former trustee “a control freak” whose obsession with football dominated his desire to take over the entire university. Bowden’s severance package, like those of most major college football coaches, contained provisions that required him to af¤rm that he knew of no NCAA violations in order to obtain his buyout. It also swore him to silence. From Bowden’s dismissal until April 2001, he restively complied with the agreement. But when Bowden believed that Lowder had made disparaging comments about him to a Texas sportswriter, Bowden considered the agreement unilaterally terminated and spent the following year treating anyone who would listen to an unparalleled version of “inside the Auburn Tigers.” According to Bowden’s conversations with a number of Auburn faculty leaders and reporters, he had barely arrived in Auburn when he received from an assistant coach a small book recording the names of in®uential boosters who provided $5,000 each. Some knew the purpose of their donations, others did not. A dozen or so players received payments of $600 dollars per month in the play-for-pay scheme. Contributors, Bowden claimed, included at least three who later became AU trustees. Presented with this information and unable to immediately end the system, Bowden claimed that he protested that it must stop but agreed to phase out players currently receiving payments. Some of the money, he contended, later was used to subsidize a University of Alabama player who had been recruited to report NCAA violations at Alabama, leading to sanctions against the Crimson Tide. After freely discussing detailed NCAA violations from April 2001 until May 2002, Bowden once again went silent, threatened he said by a loss of equity in the palatial Auburn home purchased through a loan from the school’s alumni association. If Bowden is believed, Auburn’s corruption reached into the highest echelons of its football family. The university did not vest control of athletics in the president’s of¤ce, as required by NCAA guidelines, but circumvented of¤cial channels directly to boosters and members of the trustee board. In fact, Bowden said he was told that Muse was a short-term president; the athletic director was an interim; and he should take problems directly to a highly placed booster.14



So widely did the Auburn scandal spread that one historian of football used the school as a model for the failure of NCAA reforms during the 1980s and ’90s. John Watterson’s 2000 book College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy alleged that the scandal caused Auburn people to attack the whistle-blower rather than reform the system. Hatred of Eric Ramsey reached such levels that he received death threats when he returned for what should have been one of the few triumphant moments in his Auburn career: to receive his baccalaureate degree. Instead, the gathered students, parents, and alumni greeted him with jeers and catcalls, to which he responded with an obscene gesture. It was not Auburn’s ¤nest moment. Books critical of Auburn by Ernsberger and Watterson might have furnished delightful reading for Alabama fans snif¤ng out Auburn scandals had the writers not hinted at Crimson Tide abuses as well. In a chapter on unethical recruiting in Memphis, Tennessee, Ernsberger introduced sports fans to Logan Young, a Vanderbilt-graduate-turned-Alabama-footballenthusiast who allegedly facilitated the recruitment of blue-chip Memphis football players by paying large sums to their coaches. When a local Memphis coach con¤rmed the story, furnishing the name of prized Alabama recruit Albert Means and detailing activities by Tide coaches, Alabama was on the way to its second NCAA football probation in three years. The prominence of poor, young black men such as Eric Ramsey and Albert Means in such scandals suggests that race was a central issue in Alabama athletics. College football was not king of the sports world for black Alabamians during most of the 20th century for a simple reason: few of them attended college or cared about Auburn or Alabama. Fanaticism for the sport depended on high concentrations of alumni who were college football fans. Such concentrations presumed lots of white-collar jobs and college graduates. Actually, Alabamians were not much interested in college football teams from outside the state or region. Even newspaper coverage of non-SEC football was sparse at best. Nor was there much interest in college football in the predominantly African American Black Belt of central Alabama. Birmingham was supposedly a great football town. But the failure of a succession of minor league professional football teams and the inability even of local college teams such as Samford or UAB to establish a fan base suggests that the rapidly darkening population of Birmingham had



other problems to deal with. Auburn-Alabama fans increasingly lived not in Birmingham proper but in the af®uent suburbs to the north, east, and south of the city. Segregation initially reigned supreme in sports as in Alabama politics. A gentlemen’s agreement begun in the 1920s provided that northern schools with black athletes would hold them out of intersectional games with southern teams. By the 1930s several colleges in North Carolina and Texas agreed to play against schools with black players (including Duke University, then led by former Crimson Tide coaching hero Wallace Wade). After the Second World War, northern teams refused to bench black athletes, virtually ending intersectional games with Deep South teams. In Alabama, blacks hardly ever attended games, and when they did, it was often in demeaning roles. Early in its football history, Auburn’s unof¤cial cheerleader was Bob Frazier, a black janitor who dressed spif¤ly in a cream-colored suit, high collar, tie, and derby as he prowled the sidelines, often drunk, cheering the Tigers. The Atlanta Constitution employed the racist language common at the time, calling Auburn’s choice of “an Alabama coon as mascot” typical of the college’s general lack of class.15 Though he publicly played the role of a witless Uncle Tom, perhaps Frazier was not as guileless as he seemed. When referring to Auburn’s football players, he routinely used the pronoun “she.” Auburn students found the term amusing. Perhaps Frazier did also, though for different reasons. Integrated sports came to Alabama before integrated churches, country clubs, or politics. Bear Bryant, who later claimed to see the wisdom in much of Martin Luther King Jr.’s criticism of the state, was not bold enough to take leadership in integrating Southeastern Conference football. That honor went to border state programs such as those at Vanderbilt and Kentucky. Sam “Bam” Cunningham helped Bear see the world from a different angle. Months after George Wallace defeated Albert Brewer for governor in one of the most overtly racist campaigns of the century, the Southern California Trojans came calling on Bear’s “skinny [white] boys” at Birmingham’s Legion Field. It was a welcome trip home for USC running back Clarence Davis, a Birmingham native. In an intriguing but unveri¤able account, some of Davis’s teammates supposedly packed pistols in their lug-



gage, remembering white terrorism on “Dynamite Hill,” the murder of four children at 16th Street Baptist Church, and snarling police dogs at Kelly Ingram Park. The outcome of the game was violent all right, but in a different way. Fullback Cunningham, an African American, ran over, around, and through the Crimson Tide, gaining 230 yards and scoring three touchdowns. Bear claimed Cunningham did more to integrate southern football in 60 minutes than King had done in 20 years. And an Alabama sportswriter claimed that not since Pickett’s charge up Cemetery Ridge had a group of white southerners been so overmatched in battle. An Alabama alumnus was less eloquent: “They just beat the hell out of us. It was an embarrassment.” The embarrassment would not continue. Bear dispatched assistant coach Pat Dye to look for skilled black players. He found Wilbur Jackson, who would become Alabama’s ¤rst black football signee. Dye, who had grown up on a farm near Augusta, Georgia, was familiar with the casual ways in which a segregated society breached formal racial boundaries by way of informal acts of kindness. In fact, a black minister had preached the funeral for Dye’s alcoholic and abusive father. Later at Auburn, Dye would construct his dynasty with gifted black athletes. In 1983 46 percent of Auburn’s football players were black; the team that Bo Jackson led to victory in the 1984 Sugar Bowl had a higher percentage of black players than the Michigan team (33 percent) that Auburn defeated. Dye claimed that black players from working-class families had fewer opportunities for success, were hungrier for victory, and were more willing to sacri¤ce everything for football. Sport sociologists explained the ascendancy of black athletes differently: most black role models were athletes rather than college professors or engineers. Auburn preceded Alabama in integration. In the racially troubled year of 1968 the basketball Tigers pioneered interracial athletics in Alabama sports. Henry Harris, the valedictorian of rural, all-black Greene County Training School in the western Black Belt, passed up a scholarship to tradition-rich Villanova in order to break the color barrier at Auburn. He became the ¤rst black scholarship athlete in the South’s last line of defense— the Deep South cotton belt. Harris averaged 20 points a game on the freshman team but had trouble off court. He ®unked a freshman English theme



and struggled in freshman math. A local sports reporter quoted Harris as never regretting his decision to attend the school. Harris remembered the circumstances differently. He did not graduate, and in 1974, at age 24, jumped to his death from the roof of a building at the University of Wisconsin. Joe Cribbs also felt socially isolated during his senior year (1979–80) as one of only 400 blacks among Auburn’s 17,000 students. Although he was a second-round professional draft pick and National Football League’s rookie of the year (for the American Football Conference), he regretted that virtually the only black role models at Auburn were athletes. Had he the opportunity to relive his college years, Cribbs told an Atlanta reporter in 1982, he would attend a school with more black students. Not all African Americans were so bitter or regretful. Auburn superstar Bo Jackson considered leaving during his freshman year, but played out his eligibility, won Auburn’s second Heisman Trophy, symbolic of America’s best college football player (Pat Sullivan had won the ¤rst), and became the ¤rst modern athlete to star in two professional sports. Jackson denied being paid to play at Auburn, complimented Auburn’s interest in his academic progress, and a decade after completing his football career returned to receive his college diploma. Alabama star Willie Wyatt, who grew up in a lean-to at the end of a dirt road near Gardendale without running water or indoor plumbing, expressed similar gratitude to the University of Alabama. Playing for the Crimson Tide afforded him a way to help his destitute family, earn a college degree, and make a decent life for himself. Balancing the positive opportunities that integrated athletic competition afforded black Alabamians against the frank exploitation of them is no simple matter. Inadequate support for black public schools left the ¤rst generation of African American athletes woefully unprepared for the academic demands of college. A 1989 national scandal involving black football star Dexter Manley, who despite his degree from Oklahoma State University claimed to be illiterate, led Alabama and Auburn representatives to claim that their academic programs could coexist with football, and that they allowed no situations like Dexter Manley’s. But a decade later an Auburn alumnus/football star leveled similar charges against his alma mater.



The Manley exposé and other scandals caused the NCAA to enact a package of reforms in 1990 that included phasing out athletic dormitories, reducing spring practice, limiting the number of football and basketball scholarships, and restricting athletic-related activities to four hours per day. Pat Dye criticized the reforms, as did most major college coaches. The requirement that schools publicize graduation rates revealed why there was so much coachly commotion. At Alabama all students graduated at a rate of 52 percent over seven years; but only 36 percent of student athletes did so (28 percent of Crimson Tide football players and no men’s basketball players). Auburn’s rates were better: 64 percent for all students, 53 percent for athletes, 36 percent for football players, 23 percent for male basketballers. These statistics and other negative revelations, plus lack of administrative control, reportedly were factors in popular Alabama president Joab Thomas’s decision to leave the Capstone for the presidency of Penn State University and later for president Roger Sayers’s early retirement. Critics of the state’s football culture also pointed to misplaced priorities. Universities perpetually underfunded even by southern standards paid head football coaches some of the highest salary packages in America. When Bear Bryant ¤rst arrived at Alabama in 1958, he demanded the same salary as the deans plus a house and permission to make his own television deal. Thirty years later, both Pat Dye and Bill Curry (Alabama’s head coach) still earned approximately what a dean made. But the television deals, shoe agreements, and personal service contracts escalated annual salaries to more than a million dollars. Pat Dye also joined many Auburn trustees as a member of the board of directors of the holding company of Bobby Lowder’s Colonial Bank. As Bear Bryant explained, the difference between a professor and a football coach was that the coach gave his ¤nal exam in front of 80,000 people. Faculty complaints about coaches’ salaries were often dismissed as petty jealousy. But the presence of Mercedes-quality football programs in Volkswagen-funded universities raised troubling questions. Given the state’s endemic poverty, woefully underfunded schools, and pervasive social problems, the seemingly limitless pool of money available to football seemed downright immoral. In Birmingham, where a quarter of the population lived in poverty and 11 percent of adults had less than an eighth grade edu-



cation, the city council in 1994 voted to give UAB $2.2 million to begin a Division 1-A football program. Outsiders made fun of such misplaced emphasis. One satirical Web site described a Princeton University professor who sniffed that the way conditions were in the Deep South, the population was in danger of devolving into “overall-wearing sub-morons. Either Southerners will start improving themselves, or they’ll be sold to middle-class Asians as pets.”16 Alabamians did not appreciate the satire. When the University of Alabama received its ¤rst NCAA probation in 1995, a Birmingham fan only thought he paid Bama a compliment when he grumbled that members of the NCAA committee came from academic backgrounds and failed to appreciate football schools such as Alabama. The Montgomery Advertiser published a letter in 1994 complaining about the Capstone raising academic standards because it jeopardized progress on the football ¤eld. Stuck with perpetual Bear-envy, Crimson Tide fans seemed to be waiting in vain for Bryant’s reincarnation. Outraged over the departure of Bill Curry, a successful successor to Bear who nevertheless could not beat Auburn, one national sportswriter claimed that “Crimson Tide football has done much to perpetuate the notion that there are more yahoos per square mile in Alabama than anywhere else on earth.”17 Auburn fared little better. Faculty members alleged that university trustees campaigned to keep admission standards low and to allow students to drop failing grades, at least partly because lower academic standards made it easier to recruit and retain star athletes. By the end of the century tougher NCAA rules requiring progress toward graduation, inadequate Alabama high schools, and keener competition for players by ever-increasing numbers of I-A football programs had contradictory impacts. Many Alabama high school stars could not score suf¤ciently well on standardized tests to gain admission to four-year universities. Auburn and Alabama regularly led the SEC in recruiting “nonquali¤ers,” who often departed for a year or two at academically suspect prep schools or junior colleges. Their eventual admission to Auburn or Alabama often came with suspicion of academic or recruiting subterfuge attached. Those who did qualify tended to compete more successfully in the classroom, earning degrees at a rate comparable to other students. And



many gifted athletes continued to leave school for professional careers long before graduation. Stock Car Racing White working-class Alabamians who could not reconcile themselves to integrated team sports still had an option—stock car racing. In addition to the stereotypical audience of truck-driving, beer-guzzling, Confederate®ag-waving good old boys and girls, racing began to appeal to a more sophisticated clientele of male college students and young professionals, and not just in the South either. Although stock car history is more complicated than the stereotype of Appalachian poor whites racing souped-up cars ¤lled with illicit whiskey down winding mountain roads, there is an element of lawless, deathdefying danger in the sport. The Flock family of Fort Payne personi¤ed the sport’s countercultural origins. After her husband died, Maudie Josie Williams Flock, more familiarly known as “Big Mama,” took her eight children to Atlanta where several of the boys began transporting illegal liquor. Sixteen-year-old Bob Flock earned $30 to $40 dollars a trip hauling moonshine from Dahlonega in the Georgia mountains to Atlanta. He also won 200 races at local tracks and drove in what would become NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Grand National events. Fonty Flock followed in his brother’s footsteps, both hauling whiskey and competing in Grand National races. He became well known for eccentricities of both conduct and dress. He baited state troopers into chasing him in his modi¤ed moonshining car. And he sometimes raced professionally in Bermuda shorts. His sister, Ethel Flock Mobley, not only raced in the 1949 Grand National at Daytona Beach, she ¤nished 11th (her brother Tim ¤nished 2nd). The youngest of the siblings, Tim, won his ¤rst race at Greensboro, North Carolina, on June 20, 1949, and called his mother to brag. She was only slightly impressed. Fonty had called earlier to tell her he had won a race in Birmingham; Bob had called as well to report a victory at Columbus, Georgia. Tim Flock won 18 races in 1955 and captured his second Grand National (later known as Winston Cup) overall championship. His



career winning percentage was the best in Winston Cup history. Although he raced in more dapper attire than brother Fonty, he could be equally outrageous. Promoters during the 1950s were not guaranteed the huge audiences drawn to racing in later decades and had to ¤nd gimmicks to attract crowds. Tim Flock selected an ironclad winner. He installed a tiny seat on the passenger side of his race car for Jocko Flocko, his pet monkey. During a race at Raleigh, Jocko managed to escape from his safety belt and ended up, terri¤ed, on Flock’s shoulder. Legendary stock car racer Junior Johnson considered the Flocks among the toughest racing competitors of the 1950s. Tim Flock was not only a tough competitor on the speedway. He could be equally intransigent off the track. When the Teamsters International Union sought to organize drivers in 1961, autocratic NASCAR organizer Bill France Sr. threatened to exclude union members from the sport. Tim Flock was one of only two union leaders who de¤ed France despite the threat. Bill France not only broke unions; he was also the man who modernized racing in much the same way football had been transformed half a century earlier. Though not an Alabama native, France built Talladega Superspeedway in 1969, giving Alabama its only major league pro sport, NASCAR racing. Talladega Superspeedway was the biggest, fastest course in the world, and it attracted 175,000 to its two Winston Cup races each year. That was twice the size of the largest crowds packing Bryant-Denny or Jordan-Hare. France also inspired the International Motorsports Hall of Fame next to the speedway, which drew 100,000 visitors a year. More importantly, France founded NASCAR in 1948, which provided bureaucracy, rules, and structure to the sport. A former service station mechanic who had earlier built Daytona International Speedway, France considered Talladega his crowning achievement.18 Unfortunately, the 2.66-mile, high-banked track at Talladega was too fast and rough for the tires then used on stock cars. So in 1969 drivers Richard Petty and Bobby Allison of Hueytown tried again to organize a union (the Professional Drivers Association) and boycotted the race. Bobby Isaac was the only name driver who competed in the 1969 Talladega 500. France ¤lled the ¤eld with lesser drivers and ran the race without the stars. Paradoxically, a state whose business community was renowned for its anti-



unionism produced in Tim Flock and Bobby Allison two of the most persistent advocates of drivers’ rights. Allison emerged as one of the brightest stars in the new NASCAR galaxy. He began racing in Winston Cup events during the 1960s, the same decade that George Wallace began running for president and Bear Bryant seemed destined to win a national football championship at least every other year. Winner of 84 Winston Cup events (which tied him for third all time), the 50-year-old Allison began the 1988 season, his twenty-¤fth, by outdueling his son Davey, to take the checkered ®ag at Daytona (his third Daytona 500 victory). But a few months later, the season that had begun so hopefully ended in tragedy. At Pocono International Raceway, Allison was nearly killed. Suffering brain damage and numerous broken bones, he retired to form his own motor sports team. Bobby’s sons Clifford and Davey carried on the family racing tradition. In 1987 Davey Allison won two races, ¤nished in the top 10 eight more times, and was selected NASCAR rookie of the year. The next two years yielded four more victories and established Davey as a fan favorite. Young, handsome, daring, a cerebral driver, he seemed to have it all. But he also lived on the edge. In 1992, like his father four years earlier, he won the Daytona 500 but was badly injured in a crash later in the year. Another wreck at Pocono fractured his skull. Incredibly, he insisted on racing the next week at Talladega because he was NASCAR points leader at the time (the total points leader each year became Winston Cup Champion). He managed to drive six laps at Talladega, groaning in pain, only because his team attached Velcro to his hand and stick so he could shift gears. Two weeks later at Michigan International Raceway, Davey’s brother Clifford was killed. And as if some cosmic curse af®icted the family, Davey became the next fatality in 1993. Piloting his turbojet helicopter into a con¤ned space at Talladega Superspeedway, Davey lost control. The helicopter crashed, causing fatal brain injuries. The so-called Alabama gang, which had once threatened to establish a NASCAR dynasty to rival the Crimson Tide in football (the Alabama gang of Bobby, Donnie, and Davey Allison, plus Neil Bonnett, combined to win 131 Winston Cup races, including four Daytona 500s), never recovered from the multiple tragedies that befell the Allisons and Bonnett, who raced well in the 1980s but was seriously injured in a crash at Darlington in 1990.



Country Club Sports Although most Alabamians preferred sport to be an extension of their virile working-class culture, the new Sunbelt economy of the 1970s and ’80s created an alternative kind of athletics to match Southern Living magazine’s alternative kind of suburban southerner. The magazine appealed to the newly af®uent, college-educated, country club set. So did the new sports. Hubert Green, son of a Mountain Brook physician, won 19 tournaments as a golf pro, including the 1977 U.S. Open and the 1985 PGA championship. He was PGA rookie of the year and three times a member of the Ryder Cup international U.S. team. When he joined the senior circuit, he didn’t have to go far to ¤nd a world-quality course: Shoal Creek was only a few miles south of his house. And the head of Alabama’s state retirement system, David Bronner, funded a string of Robert Trent Jones courses that were considered some of the ¤nest in the world. These courses generated an estimated billion dollars of income for the state. Nor were aquatic sports neglected. Rowdy Gaines, Auburn University’s premier swimmer, won ¤ve individual NCAA titles and three Olympic gold medals while setting two world records. His alma mater built on his success to win two NCAA swimming championships in the 1990s, then dominated the sport in the early 21st century. Jennifer Chandler of Lincoln proved that women could excel in the new sports as well, winning the three-meter springboard diving gold medal at the 1976 Olympics. Chandler’s victory was a barometer of changing gender composition in sport. The University of Alabama diversi¤ed into women’s gymnastics and either competed for or won NCAA championships in the sport repeatedly in the 1990s and early 21st century. Mia Hamm, who grew up in Selma, became the most famous and beloved woman soccer player in the world. She led the U.S. women’s team to its ¤rst Olympic gold medal and then to victory in the World Cup, a triumph that was voted the top sports story of 1999. She also helped make soccer the most popular women’s sport on American college campuses. Congressional passage of Title 9 (a section of the 1972 Education Act), transformed sport in America by requiring equal opportunity for women in collegiate athletics. Title 9 proved a traumatic experience for male athletic departments. They had to ¤nd money to add women’s sports or elimi-



nate men’s teams or both. Fortunately enormous revenue generated by both Alabama and Auburn football programs (they were two of only several dozen major college sports programs operating in the black by end of century) funded the expansion of women’s sports, though many smaller colleges had to rely on student fees. The process of gender equity was complicated as women administrators entered previously sacrosanct male temples, sometimes boldly assertive and with the power of federal mandates, other times cleverly nudging good old boy networks toward greater equality. Finally, in the midst of Mia Hamm’s 1990s celebrity, several undergraduate Auburn University coeds stepped off the proverbial women’s pedestal long enough to sue the university for violating Title 9. Often it took federal suits to open the minds of recalcitrant trustees and athletic departments, but they ¤nally got the message. Auburn created women’s teams in soccer, softball, and volleyball. And University of Alabama women’s gymnastics coach Sarah Patterson led her team to NCAA national championships in 1988, 1991, and 1996. At last women had stepped into the magic circle so dear to the heart of Alabamians, the cherished world of competitive sport.



PART T H R E E

Alabama’s Culture



10 What Would Jesus Do? Religion

Of course you can’t all go out hunting up jobs for people like me, but what I am puzzled about when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing “Jesus I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow thee,” is what is meant by following Jesus? I remember how my wife died gasping for air in a New York tenement owned by a member of a church. I suppose I don’t understand, but what would Jesus do? —Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps

The 20th century began with a virtual Baptist-Methodist monopoly on religion in Alabama. The 1906 religious census listed nearly 400,000 black and white missionary Baptists among a total church membership of 832,000. Another 243,000 black and white Methodists of various af¤liations meant that Baptists and Methodists accounted for more than 3 of every 4 church members. Roman Catholics claimed 50,000 and Presbyterians 24,000, the only other denominations in double ¤gures. Episcopalians, Churches of Christ, and Disciples of Christ lagged with 9,000 members each, and Jews numbered only 1,100. As for Pentecostals and Holiness people, they barely appeared on the religious landscape, with the Assemblies of God accounting for 200, a mere fraction of the Greek Orthodox, who claimed 1,500 within their ethnic religious enclave. Although Alabamians were institutionally religious, they were barely more so than other Americans. In 1906 10 states (including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Utah) had higher


444 CHA P T ER T EN

rates of church membership. Alabama’s 62 percent rate of adult church members compared to the U.S. average of 56 percent. During the next two decades, Alabama evangelicals labored as if the end of the world was just around the corner (and an increasingly large number believed it was, a hope fueled largely by the apocalypticism of the First World War). Their efforts paid off. The percentage of adults belonging to churches increased to 66 in 1916 and 71 in 1926. By 1926 only the two Carolinas and Utah boasted higher church membership rates than Alabama. Nearly four in ¤ve of the state’s 1.2 million church members in 1926 were black and white Baptists or Methodists. Other groups experienced rapid growth as well: Jews from 1,100 to 9,200; the Church of God from zero to 2,200; the Church of the Nazarene from zero to 1,300; Churches of Christ from 9,200 to 30,000. Some denominations headed in the opposite direction. Black and white Primitive Baptists, who as hyper-Calvinists believed human efforts to convert the heathen at home or abroad were a waste of time, suffered the obvious consequences of such belief, declining from 25,000 to 21,700. Congregationalists declined by a third to 3,600. Cumberland Presbyterians, like Primitive Baptist a mainly rural denomination, lost more than half their 8,600 members between 1906 and 1926. Ethnic churches generally declined as immigrant workers—especially in the steel, iron, and coal industries—sought better economic opportunities elsewhere. Catholics declined from 50,000 to 36,000, and the tiny Russian Orthodox church lost half its members. Such statistics reveal a good deal about religion in Alabama while obscuring nearly as much. For instance, Jews and Catholics exerted much more economic in®uence than their size might suggest, just as Presbyterians and Episcopalians wielded far more political power than their numbers indicate. In a state completely dominated numerically by white Southern Baptists, a 1984 newspaper survey of the 19 most in®uential leaders of Birmingham listed only two Baptists, and one of them was the African American mayor Richard Arrington, who belonged to Bethel Primitive Baptist Church. Ten of the 19 were divided equally among Episcopalians and Presbyterians, 4 were Methodists, and 3 were Jewish. Five Birmingham congregations claimed 13 of the 19: Temple Emanu-El, Cathedral Church of the Advent, and Canterbury United Methodist led with 3 each. South Highlands Presbyterian and Independent Presbyterian claimed 2 each. Even if


R E L IGION 445

evangelicals had less in®uence than their numbers suggest, southerners in general and Alabamians in particular believed they were uniquely and distinctly Christian. They believed they adhered to a stronger, purer, deeper, more personal, evangelical, Protestant faith than other Americans. By and large, data support their beliefs. Going to church regularly, making the profession of faith that de¤nes one as a born-again (that is, adult) believer, and translating that belief system into a ritualized set of personal ethics is central to Alabama religion. A 10-year study of national attitudes conducted at century’s end revealed that 66 percent of Alabamians said they had been born-again, compared to a national average less than half as high. And they were a full 13 percentage points more likely to believe themselves born-again than the average southerner. This elevated number of evangelical Christians accounts for the high self-identi¤cation of Alabamians as conservative in personal values, 57 percent compared to a national average of only 43 percent. Once again, much evidence supports such self-de¤nition. In one survey, Birmingham residents listed their favorite pastime as reading the Bible. In a 1995 statewide poll, 99 percent said they believed in heaven; 95 percent believed in hell; and 86 percent were convinced Satan or an evil spirit existed (60 percent of Americans believed in hell though only 4 percent believed they were headed there). More than half of Alabamians believed that every word of the Bible came straight from God and was entirely free of error. Some 60 percent said they attended church regularly (though Americans notoriously in®ate this ¤gure in response to pollsters’ queries, perhaps actually meaning that they feel they should attend regularly whether or not they do). Christianity as Belief and Practice It is easier to poll Alabamians about speci¤c beliefs and practices than to gauge what religion means to them. Religion can be divided into three primary components: theology, piety, and ethics. Theology consists of beliefs or truths that believers accept by faith yet constantly study and examine. Piety refers to the spirituality and religious experience of the believer, an awareness of the presence of God, and ritualistic practices required by such experiences and awareness. Ethics applies to an entire range of relationships,


446 CHA P T ER T EN

both personal and within community, governed by religious belief. Although all three components of Christianity are found in every American region, the North initially opted for a pietistic Christianity that sought to create a theocratic society where God ruled in the midst of a wilderness. Such religion could be and often was self-righteous. Initially the easygoing Anglican (Episcopal) Church dominated the South, with less interest in personal piety than concern for the general welfare of the community. All that changed after 1800 as the result of a series of great evangelical revivals. Episcopalians lacked the ardor and commitment to stem the Baptist and Methodist tide that swept over the South. Poorly educated evangelical preachers made up in piety and zeal what they lacked in learning, and they made the individualistic conversion experience central to southern Christianity. All creeds and beliefs became secondary to whether or not a person had been born-again. This was pure Christianity as they understood it, and any deviation was a sign of heresy. Concern for community had its place; concern for individual conversion was paramount. Slowly at ¤rst, then with accelerating speed, Christianity north and south of the Mason-Dixon line began to diverge. Central to that divergence were issues of race: slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and segregation. Even the most erudite southern ministers had to come to terms with race. How they did so shaped southern Protestantism for two centuries. If the Bible was inerrant, if southern society was rooted in the Bible, and if white southerners demanded slavery and racial segregation, then God must have initiated such social arrangements. Hence the biblical admonition that every soul was equal in the sight of God must refer to spiritual, not social or political, realms. White Christians found a handy theological trapdoor in the doctrine of the “Spirituality of the Church.” As an exclusively spiritual entity, the church had no business involving itself in worldly affairs. Its function was to save sinners, not redeem society. The venerated American tradition of separation of church and state found many adherents, though southern evangelicals often confused their own political preferences with the will of God. Meanwhile, the North was changing as well. While the South remained largely rural and agrarian, the Northeast and Midwest were becoming urban and industrial. New patterns of immigration from southern and eastern Europe after 1880 introduced denser and denser layers of religious


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diversity to those regions most rapidly industrializing (including southern cities such as Birmingham). Prosperity, educational progress, and growing cooperation between Protestant churches made the non-South ever more optimistic about the future. Increased intellectual interchange between American and German universities infused northern Christianity with liberal theology: deemphasis on original sin, guilt, heaven, and hell; more concern for social ethics and establishment of the kingdom of God in the present world rather than in some future spiritual realm; the use of modern canons of literary criticism, archaeology, history, linguistics, and scienti¤c analysis that reduced the Bible to just another important but historically and scienti¤cally ®awed book. Gathering urban social and economic problems forced the northern church to redirect its efforts away from exclusive emphasis on personal salvation toward a more balanced approach that was attentive to social justice as well. All this, southern Christians viewed as cutting loose from venerated biblical landmarks and Christian tradition to follow every new sociological fad. Despite being enmeshed in the web of Lost Cause Christianity, glorifying its deeply ®awed past, and proclaiming black inferiority, southern Christianity still found vindication in its spectacular rate of baptisms and church growth. Far from succumbing to an inferiority complex, southern churchmen boldly proclaimed their version of the faith once delivered to the saints superior to all others at every juncture: purer, more uni¤ed, less tainted by modern science and sociology, more Bible based, more ¤ercely opposed to personal sin and national moral decay. They proclaimed church growth rates as God’s vindication of their conservative theology. Of course, such generalities are the mainstay of regional stereotypes. Southern evangelicals, so the wisdom goes, were obsessed with the world to come. So otherworldly were they that they ignored social injustice and even material well-being for a grander ultimate vindication. Such conclusions stem more easily from the words evangelicals wrote and spoke than from the lives they lived. Whether in their endorsement of the Confederacy, their baptism of the Lost Cause after 1865, their support of segregation, or their conservative political values, southern Christians were seldom escapist or otherworldly. As many a secular, thirsty Alabamian discovered in the 20th century, when a liquor referendum or gambling vote appeared on a ballot, Alabama evangelicals were about as quiescent as a springtime tor-


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nado. And by century’s end, abortionists, pornographers, advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment, gun control devotees, and foes of school prayer or posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings probably wished evangelicals were a bit more otherworldly. Perhaps evangelicals did anxiously await Christ’s Second Coming. But in the meantime, they were quite willing to do all they could to enact their vision of the kingdom of God right smack in the middle of Alabama. Even on race, evangelicals were of many minds. Blacks were even more theologically conservative than whites, but they chose to focus on the advancement of their race rather than on theology. White evangelicals split along lines of class, education, and gender. Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and many other white Pentecostals and evangelicals boldly challenged segregationist racial taboos. Perhaps southern evangelicals did conform to their culture. But there were many cultures to conform to. There was labor union culture and business culture, blue-collar and white-collar cultures, urban and rural, educated and illiterate. Methodist minister Denson Franklin pastored a small church in a coal mining village during the Great Depression. The church had a double entrance, he recalled. After services, a union man would stand at one door giving out ®yers while a nonunion man passed out antiunion literature at the other door. To state the matter accurately, becoming a bornagain Christian often did transform life. But the pattern of this transformation occurred within a speci¤c race, class, or sex that usually shaped conversion as much as conversion shaped them. Ethics Ethics furnished the battleground for a second series of stereotypes. According to mythology, Alabama evangelicals became obsessed with personal ethics to the exclusion of social ethics. The dualities of right and wrong, black and white, righteous or sinful seemed as clear to them as rivers and roads on a map. Indeed, they were roads—to perdition or paradise. Once again such conclusions result from paying too much attention to words and too little to deeds. Careful examination of the way Alabamians practiced ethics reveals lots of elasticity in their do’s and don’t’s. In fact, nearly every serious social ob-


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server has been fascinated by Alabamians’ contradictory devotion to puritan values and hedonistic practices. A 1989 survey found that two-thirds of Alabamians said they did not drink any beer or liquor; but the other third drank enough to bring the average number of alcoholic drinks to 2.7 per week. One in 10 respondents said they consumed more than one alcoholic drink per day. Blacks were less likely to drink than whites and women than men. Religion thrived in Alabama. But so did irreligion. The journalist W. J. Cash’s hedonistic “hell of a good fellow” who lived hard and seldom worried about hell or heaven became an alternative folk hero. If born-again Alabama Christians were only half as likely to smoke tobacco products or drink alcohol, and less likely to dance, attend movies, or fornicate, they seemed just as likely to defend segregation and divorce, and turn a blind eye to cheating at the state’s two premier football factories. At Auburn University in the 1920s Baptists overwhelmingly backed one of their own who as president sought to clean up corruption in the football program. Alumni who cared more about winning than ethics ¤red the president with an ease that confounds the notion that evangelical ethical values trumped secular values. Another wave of football scandals in the 1980s and ’90s raised similar issues. Humorists insist that college football is the unof¤cial religion of most Alabamians. But if religion is de¤ned as the object of a person’s ultimate concern, a case could be made for Auburn or Alabama football as the state religion. An alternative hypothesis makes more sense. College football ¤rst emerged as an obsession early in the 20th century as a form of “muscular Christianity.” Long associated with effete, womanly values, Christianity had appealed much more to women than to men. Rather than serving as a substitute for Christianity, football became its complement. The logic went like this: Christ did not select sissies to be disciples; he preferred real men, rugged ¤shermen and artisans. Measuring oneself in physical combat, man to man, not only established a worldly order of dominance but also proved that the strongest and most muscular men were also Christians. Problem was, such supremacy must be established according to rules of fair play. Gradually college football evolved from the unregulated days of George Petrie’s ¤rst Auburn team in 1892 to a tightly structured sport governed by a com-


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plicated set of rules (indeed so complicated by century’s end that even genuinely decent coaches had trouble understanding them). Using the complexity of rules and the universality of sin to justify a person’s own ethical lapses was not unique to football. But the game furnished a wonderful laboratory for such rationalization. Perhaps the state’s most intriguing morality play began in Memphis during the late 1990s. High school coach Lynn Lang allegedly shopped his star player like a side of beef available to the highest bidder. A University of Alabama booster offered top dollar, and the player, Albert Means, enrolled at the university. When an assistant high school coach who had expected a share of the money did not receive his payment, he leveled charges against the university’s boosters and coaches. University of Alabama coaches issued the characteristic denials almost universal in such cases (and no doubt uttered a prayer that none of the Memphis participants had secretly recorded illegal transactions as Eric Ramsey had at Auburn). Notwithstanding his own initial claims of innocence, high school coach Lang eventually pleaded guilty to a felony count of racketeering, claiming that one former University of Alabama coach had suggested Lang locate someone to take Means’s ACT college admission exam and that another had paid $1,200 to enroll Means in summer school classes prior to his freshman season at the Capstone. The NCAA levied severe penalties against the University of Alabama football team, suggesting that except for the rigorous enforcement efforts of faculty compliance of¤cers, the university might have lost its football program altogether. The university’s director of compliance, Marie Robbins (a former AllAmerican gymnast at Alabama herself ), added another ethical layer to the revelations. The university’s football coaches had resisted her efforts at compliance with NCAA rules. The NCAA allegedly told university of¤cials that the football recruiting coordinator had tried to have Robbins ¤red. Robbins con¤rmed frequent clashes with football coaches that were so severe she could not eat or sleep at night: “You’re beating your head against the wall, doing the right thing, and people are stabbing you in the back or promoting their own interests.”1 Robbins’s experience raised a central ethical issue, “doing the right


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thing.” All ethics is rooted in the assumption that people can know “the right thing,” either because such a principle can be found in universal human conduct or is mandated by a speci¤c set of religious rules or values such as the Ten Commandments or the Auburn creed (“I believe in honesty and truthfulness, without which I cannot win the respect and con¤dence of my fellow man”). Certainly Alabamians believed Christianity contained such universal ethical principles. They were even determined to post them in public buildings and schools. They just had lots of trouble applying them to college football. In this debate, the state’s sportswriters found themselves in the unaccustomed role of priest-confessors, trying to sort out the contemporary meaning of ethics. Gospel ministers, as in racial con®icts earlier, were strangely silent in the debate. Birmingham News sportswriter Kevin Scarbinsky criticized a football culture that denied evil and attacked anyone who claimed it existed. A football good old boy network denied all violations, then blamed such claims on outside agitators, disgruntled faculty, or jealous competitors. The dean of the state’s sports journalists and one of the most respected as demonstrated by his numerous awards, Clyde Bolton (also a writer for the News), was retiring after a long career of insightfully reporting NASCAR and college football. He turned the scandal at Alabama into a long soliloquy about ethics: “Everybody does it. I wish I had counted the times Alabama fans have spoken that sentence during conversations with me about the NCAA investigation into the school’s football program.” Bolton analyzed each rationale for cheating: cheating had become so ingrained in college football it could never be eradicated; only schools with great traditions could win without cheating; poor players needed the money for their families; current players and coaches should not be penalized for violations by former regimes; universities should not be penalized for the actions of rogue boosters. Like a good biblical ethicist, Bolton refuted the arguments one by one, then concluded: “The question of cheating in recruiting is like any other moral question. We can try to rationalize by blaming the system and circumstances and the unfairness of life—but we know in our hearts we simply aren’t supposed to cheat.”2 The Huntsville Times had other ideas. Concluding that the entire debate was merely a disagreement about the interpretation of arcane NCAA rules,


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the paper editorialized: “It doesn’t excuse Alabama, but every major college football program in America does the same thing or things comparable. Is it fair? No. Is life fair? No.”3 The paper did not expand on the obvious implication. If college football cannot be made ethical, then should an ethical society permit the game to continue? This debate about football was neither esoteric nor unrelated to more fundamental issues. Christian ministers struck mute by midcentury racial turmoil would certainly not dare address violations within college football. They left such duty to sportswriters. Though quite clear about the sharp moral distinctions involved in fornication, adultery, movies, dancing, gambling, homosexuality, and abortion, the church had little relevant commentary about the ethical standards of sport, or parental rage at sporting events. Christian parents who would have smacked their teenagers’ rear ends had the youngsters excused moral lapses by whining that “everyone does it” made precisely the same excuses for football scandals at Auburn and Alabama. That such moral ambiguity exists in the world of ethics is widely acknowledged. But in a state whose population regularly denounced ethical relativism as evil and self-righteously condemned the sins of others, observers had the right to expect a higher standard. Despite such inconsistencies, the world of moral absolutes had its strengths as well. As some ethicists noted, Alabama’s high divorce rate resulted at least partly from a strong ethical impulse among teenagers to marry before having sex instead of cohabiting, which was more common elsewhere. Though the Christian sense of community might not ¤nd expression in religious commitment to social justice, it certainly did well in dispensing charity. Like most Bible Belt states, Alabama ranked high in a survey measuring what residents gave away to people in need compared to what they earned. The Church in the Wildwood Two social institutions provided the glue that held rural communities together. One was the community school. The other consisted of country churches, mostly indistinguishable from each other despite ¤erce doctrinal


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differences. Their common ground—the primacy of a born-again conversion experience, the dualism (right-wrong) of ethics, ultimate judgment, substitutionary atonement (Christ died for a person’s sins), Christ’s Second Coming, the need to conduct one’s life soberly and responsibly, the responsibility the church had to police community morals, the obligations of charity and neighborliness—greatly exceeded differences over the proper mode of baptism or the eternal security of believers. In fact, most rural people moved easily back and forth between country churches, which typically conducted services only once a month. Despite belonging to the church closest to their doctrinal beliefs, rural people might attend their own church one Sunday a month and churches of other denominations the other three. The religious rhythms of rural life were as ¤rmly ¤xed as the agricultural cycles. Folks would dress in their best clothes, hitch up wagons or crank up cars, pile in the children, and head for church. They were usually welcomed by a neighbor who served as bivocational minister of a tiny congregation that could afford no more than a modest honorarium for his services. Of 1,800 Alabama ministers representing 17 denominations in 1926, 76 percent had neither college nor seminary education. Of 3,200 Alabama ministers representing 21 denominations that same year, 41 percent pastored a single church while 47 percent pastored two to four different congregations. Inside a tiny frame church, the service rang with hymns familiar to regular attendees: “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.” Sermons tended to be extemporaneous, long, and emotional. Every service ended with an altar call or invitation to be saved. Liturgy was scarce, ornamentation nonexistent, services unstructured and casual. Special events broke the monotony of the ecclesiastical year. In May, rural churches sponsored a homecoming and decoration day, often associated with an all-day church singing and gargantuan dinner on the ground (or more typically served on rough-hewn tables). People who had moved to town returned to show off their children and help clean the cemetery where their ancestors rested in peace. Baptisms by total immersion in a creek or pond were sacred events marking the death to old ways and the resurrection to new ones. (Methodists


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often settled for a sprinkling but sometimes accommodated those determined to be fully dunked.) Entire communities often came to observe, not just the new member’s congregation. When Fred Maxey Jr. joined Mount Hebron Baptist Church near Leeds, he had already been baptized in another denomination. But Mount Hebron members decided he needed to be immersed again in sacred Baptist waters. The night of his decision, they took him to a creek, turned on their car lights and immersed him in the waters. Members of Mount Hebron ever after called him a “moonlight Baptist.” In August most churches conducted a camp meeting or protracted revival, typically with a visiting evangelist. The timing—during lay-by time after hoeing and cultivation were completed and summer rains had ended— was important. It afforded momentary cessation from back-breaking toil and came just before even more arduous cotton picking began. Uncertainty about the fate and price of crops heightened anxiety at the same time as intense exposure to evangelical Christianity. Such meetings also brought together extended families and communities, thus serving social as well as religious functions. Though renowned for church ¤ghts, rural congregations remember better their remarkable oneness in the spirit. Annabel Moore, an elderly member of Mount Hebron Baptist, a rural church consisting mainly of poorly educated farmers, knew of Baptist controversies concerning the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture, but those debates did not intrude on the church’s fellowship: “We discussed that some, but when they have conventions they almost get in a ¤ght. It has been in the news and we’re sorry about that, but in Hebron Church, it’s just lovely now and we’d never think about having any trouble or anything. Everybody loves each other and why we just enjoy our life as we meet there on Sundays and prayer meetings.” When members experienced layoffs, plant closings, diseases, injuries, or other calamities, church members rallied to their aid. Furnishing the most important social interaction for its congregants, Mount Hebron fostered a “special feeling of closeness.” Margie Poole Martin believed members were “more like brothers and sisters than we are neighbors.” Annabel Moore added: “I just have the deepest feeling, I’m the happiest, I feel it’s heaven when I get down there and sing and worship with the others. It’s just part of my life and I don’t reckon the door ever opened that I wasn’t


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there.” Maggie Wilkinson added: “Everyone loves one another. . . . Everyone knows what you need, you don’t have to call them, they’ll come to help you.” T. C. West concluded: “It has been a wonderful place to live, this valley. I tell you right now there’s plenty of love over here.”4 If these sentiments represent the essence of community, rural churches could also present a harsher and more human face. An exhaustive 1930s survey of seven churches within the rural Tuscaloosa County community of Gorgas revealed sharp class divisions. Five of the churches (including several varieties of Baptists and Methodists) were much alike. Females made up 58 percent of membership but held few of¤ces. Members of one denomination often visited other churches. No church was full time, only one pastor was, and four of the ministers were bivocational. None of the seven conducted weekly services. The oldest church was Baptist and drew members mainly from landowners. A smaller Baptist congregation consisted in equal parts of owners, tenants related to them, and unrelated tenants. In all the churches, the sermon, not communion or liturgy, took center stage, where the pulpit literally stood. Pastors drew the theme of their sermons from Scripture and emphasized the need to repent of sins and accept Jesus as savior and lord of life. Salvation was deeply personal, individualistic, and urgent. Though the messages could be harsh, the ministers were often sweet in disposition and tolerant in attitude. Church services were important social occasions for the residents of the Gorgas community, especially the shape note singings so famous in the rural South. Most pastors believed the local population was indifferent to religion, used too much alcohol, suffered from lack of trained leadership, and engaged in too much petty denominational rivalry. They believed consolidation of rural churches was a good idea in theory but was wholly impractical because of excessive individualism and church rivalry. All but one rural minister was pessimistic about the future of churches in the Gorgas community. Although all church of¤cers in ¤ve of the congregations were landowners or tenants related to them, two newly formed Pentecostal churches catered mainly to poor whites. Their children avoided public schools, and adult members had little education. The Nazarene congregation earned grudging acceptance, but the Church of God’s Children did not. Its 37 members held emotional weekly Sunday services from 10:00 to sometimes


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4:00 in the afternoon, and met again on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. The church’s offerings averaged less than a dollar. Condemning false doctrine and heresy, members also accepted the Bible literally, practiced divine healing, spoke in tongues, and often interrupted the sermon to shout encouragement or commentary: “Hallelujah! Praise Jesus! Glory! Praise Him! Love Him! Bless the Lord! Bless Jesus! Glory, Glory, Glory!” During the sermon, some members raised their hands toward heaven, raised their heads, testi¤ed, danced, and jerked their heads from side to side. Church people from established congregations expressed contempt for the new congregation, though they had accepted the Pentecostal Nazarene church. One community leader charged that members of the new Pentecostal congregation were “a bunch of damn fools.” Another advised that “something should be done to scatter these people, because they are raising too many children who are mimicking them like a bunch of apes. . . . Frankly I don’t know how they can be helped, for they refuse to associate with better people or to listen to outsiders. They are steeped in ignorance and poverty and, being in that condition, they have become insane in their religion.”5 Neither class aspects of rural church life nor the rise of Pentecostals went unnoticed elsewhere in Alabama. When a new pastor of Salem Baptist Church near Brundidge invited a tenant farmer to attend church, some of the “hoity-toity type people didn’t want them in church.” His wife invited a tenant’s wife to the Woman’s Missionary Society, and churchwomen “let us know they didn’t care to have her in the church, so we just had to let things pass off.”6 Such class divisions within Christianity were not unique to Alabama. South-wide, 60 percent of farm owners belonged to churches compared to only 33 percent of tenants. Some traditional denominations (Primitive Baptists and some missionary Baptist and Methodist congregations) in mill towns, mining camps, and rural areas reached poor whites. In fact, the Methodist evangelist Sam P. Jones of Oak Bowery became what one intellectual referred to as the “Savonarola to the hillbillies.” Jones departed from his ancestral path of Methodist piety to become an alcoholic before a dramatic conversion brought him back to the straight and narrow. As the South’s foremost critic of effete elites and wealthy sophisticates, Jones belonged to the “take-no-prisoners” school of


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evangelism. He had unkind things to say about the conventional church (“the devil can travel a mile while we are putting on our boots”) and conventional preachers (who stood idly by while souls traveled to hell). He divided revival audiences into “heathen outbreaking sinners” and “selfrighteous goody-goody sinners,” the latter comprised of “church folk who looked righteous on the outside but inside were ‘whited sepulchres.’” He spent the ¤rst half of a revival loosening up the hide of saints and the last half taking off the hide of sinners. The rich and powerful were central targets of his denunciations. “Society has been in sackcloth and ashes all the week,” one journalist announced during a Sam Jones meeting. His “stag parties” for men only administered a startling dose of masculine bluntness to a society dulled by Victorian prudishness: “There are people by the hundreds who know you are licentious and not faithful to your wife. They know you built that house over there that woman is living in. They’ve seen you hitching up your horse and buggy at the gate and they know you don’t get any money for rent. . . . There’s many a man here that’s going right straight into hell on a blooded horse.”7 To the well-educated and higher critics of the Bible, Jones scoffed that he “would rather be in Heaven reading my ABC’s than sitting in hell reading Greek.” The historian and Calhoun County landowner Herman C. Nixon remembered how fondly white tenant farmers treasured and repeated Jones’s denunciations of “society” women who wore evening dresses that exposed so much cleavage on top that he dared not “look under the table.”8 Nixon also noted that a “holy roller church” had occupied the abandoned Asbury Methodist church building in Possum Trot. Holiness theology was another new stream of southern spirituality. John Lakin Brasher became the premier preacher of the southern holiness movement and an evangelist only marginally less important than Sam Jones, even if he was far less entertaining. Contrary to the stereotype of holiness people as poor, uneducated, alienated, emotional, unbalanced, ascetic, and sectarian, Brasher was well educated, thoughtful, well grounded in theology, and a careful pulpiteer. Born in the north Alabama hill country to a Unionist, Republican family, he served as pastor of the Methodist Episcopal (Northern) Church


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until he was converted in 1900 to the cause of personal holiness. Thereafter, he traveled some 700,000 miles and preached in 650 camp meetings spreading holiness doctrine. Although Pentecostal and holiness movements produced erudite ministers such as Brasher, their appeal made most sense to the down-andout. Poor farmers, tenants, coal miners, and textile workers felt betrayed and unwanted in mainline churches. But Nazarenes, Assemblies of God, Churches of God, and holiness sects welcomed them into a fellowship as egalitarian in practice as in theory. In the early stages of sect formation, women became evangelists and missionaries, blacks and whites sometimes worshiped together, and some sect leaders denounced the First World War as a conspiracy of the wealthy. They urged young men to become paci¤sts. They railed against secret societies, whether the society was Masonic, fraternal, labor union, or Ku Klux Klan. In their pilgrimage from back alley to uptown, such people de¤ed negative stereotypes and carved out a place of respect in the kingdom of God that many mainline denominations denied them. Of course, there were excesses as well. A fringe Pentecostal movement applied literally the advice of Mark 16 that faithful believers could safely handle serpents and drink poison. Numbering no more than 3,000 nationally, snake handlers met in plain, concrete block or wood frame churches usually on the industrial fringes of Appalachia. Rev. Charles McGlocklin of New Hope, Alabama, who handled snakes for decades, had dif¤culty articulating his faith to a well-educated outsider: “I don’t put people down for not believing. I’m just a poor country boy, and it’s hard for me to explain to a well-educated man. . . . But I know that it’s real.”9 At least 74 people died of snake bites following the ¤rst recorded handling early in the century near Ooltewah, Tennessee. In Alabama, snake handling was most common on Sand Mountain and in the northeastern corner of the state. It spread mainly among marginalized poor whites. Glenn Summerford, a part-time pastor of the Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, received a 99-year prison sentence for attempting to murder his wife by holding her hand in a box full of rattlesnakes. Described by a fellow pastor as “backslid on God” at the time, Summerford’s trial in 1991–92 became a national news story covered by freelance Bir-


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mingham journalist Dennis Covington, whose sympathetic book on the subject became a best seller. Summerford denied that he was trying to kill his wife, blamed the bites on her lack of faith, and likened his fate to the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro boys. Summerford’s association of his own plight with that of nine black boys accused of raping two white women made a useful point. At no point was the interaction of blackness and whiteness more fascinating than in the Christian faith. The Black Church As with white Christians, blacks sorted themselves into a variety of denominations, though Baptists and Methodists predominated. This fact imposes more uniformity than actually existed because no single sector of these denominations won exclusive loyalty. For instance, 45,000 Alabama blacks belonged to African Methodist Episcopal churches in 1926, 80,000 to African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, and 21,000 to Colored Methodist Episcopal churches. Missionary black Baptists organized into four major state conventions. The Alabama Colored Baptist State Convention (ACBSC) began in 1868 in Montgomery, which shortly thereafter also hosted the initial meeting of the National Baptist Convention, Incorporated (NBC). It became the largest black Baptist body in America. The ACBSC changed its name to Alabama Missionary Baptist State Convention (AMBSC) in 1974, and by end-ofcentury included 100 local associations, 1,000 churches, and 150,000 members. An 1898 split created the New Era Baptist State Convention, and another division in 1920 gave birth to the New Era Progressive State Convention. The Progressive Baptist State Convention formed in 1961 as a result of both civil rights disputes and clashes over leadership of the national convention. Burdened by stereotypes typical of those directed at white evangelicals (black churches were too emotional, otherworldly, fundamentalist, pastordirected), blacks nevertheless carved out a unique religious sphere. Because all-black congregations usually selected and ¤nanced their own pastor, he became the singular black person wholly dependent on a black constituency for survival. White leaders could and did co-opt black ministers by a mix-


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ture of ®attery, bribery, and even some modest inclusion in local elites; but black ministers knew that if their congregations perceived them as being too malleable to white interests, they would quickly be turned out of of¤ce. Besides, most black pastors were ¤ercely aligned with the interests of their parishioners. That meant they could not become consumed with the world to come because their members suffered too much pain in the daily world of Jim Crow Alabama. As a result, ministers administered an extensive program of local charity, often transformed their churches into schools or centers for adult literacy, started black businesses, and advised their congregations about political candidates. Blacks elected a surprisingly high number of black pastors to public of¤ce after 1965. Bivocationalism, which was common in all evangelical churches, was particularly common among blacks. Because parishioners were generally poor, contributions seldom provided a decent wage. This assured that pastors would be one with their people in employment as well as in spirit. In black churches located in mining camps, the pastor was likely a miner. If the church was near a foundry or steel mill, the pastor usually followed those trades. If the church was in the country, the pastor shared the struggles of small farmers or tenants. Few at any level possessed formal theological education until well into the 20th century. To assure as wide participation as possible, the AMBSC divided Alabama into four geographical districts (southeast, southwest, northeast, northwest) to allow rural pastors to attend regional denominational meetings. From the outset of denomination-building, black churches assigned highest social priority to education. During the early years (1900–1920) of the Jim Crow era, black Baptists founded 30 local academies. Although their schools did not rival white denominational institutions such as Samford (Baptist), Birmingham-Southern (Methodist), or Spring Hill (Catholic) in size or academic complexity, they did provide opportunities for black youngsters not otherwise available. Some of the best denominational colleges (Talladega and Stillman) were solid academically and received signi¤cant support from northern denominations or the state’s white Christians. Others such as Selma University struggled with virtually no white help. Although the Alabama Baptist State Convention (white) talked a great deal about assisting black Baptist schools, it actually did very little. What it could not control, it would not ¤nance.


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As a consequence, Selma University experienced chronic ¤nancial problems. Though it gamely tried to educate Black Belt youth and did graduate generations of Baptist preachers, it did so always on the edge of bankruptcy and collapse, ¤ghting constantly to obtain or maintain accreditation. Birmingham Baptist College began as a project of 16th Street Baptist Church in 1904, of¤cially opened in 1913, then moved to a campus in southwestern Birmingham. The civil rights movement provided the transformative moment in the history of Alabama’s black churches. Although both races tend to remember a black church united against segregation, the facts are more complex. Many pastors of well-to-do black congregations had always stood apart from the struggles of the black masses. They often considered workingclass congregations and bivocational ministers to be overly emotional and mercurial. Class divisions (as between King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Abernathy’s First Colored Baptist Church, or John Porter’s elite 6th Avenue Baptist Church and Shuttlesworth’s working-class Bethel Baptist) were as pronounced as among white congregations. These tensions played out not only in Montgomery and Birmingham civil rights organizations but also in national denominational politics. Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, longtime president of the National Baptist Convention did not fully support Martin Luther King Jr. or the SCLC. He also rejected attempts to limit his tenure or move the convention toward younger, more activist leadership. King and his allies denounced Jackson as an Uncle Tom and sought to depose him. When their attempts failed, they formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC). Central to the polity of the new denomination were term limits for of¤cers and vigorous advocacy of civil rights. Although many Alabama pastors were sympathetic to PNBC goals, they hesitated to join its state convention. Its tiny membership was not the place for an astute and ambitious pastor to gain signi¤cant denominational in®uence. Furthermore, the AMBSC had thrived on leadership that had held of¤ce for decades, so term limits held no appeal for most of them. The older national convention had begun in Alabama, and pastors were bound to it by ties of loyalty and friendship. Also, many pastors had been caught up in local civil rights struggles, so Jackson’s timidity on the national level hardly affected them at all. It is easy to characterize conservative pastors as accommodationists who had pro¤ted from opportunities


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afforded by a segregated society or allowed themselves to be co-opted by the white power structure and the morsels of power and prestige it dispersed to its black minions. But such a conclusion would be simplistic and unfair. Black evangelicalism produced courageous prophets and timid accommodationists, denominational loyalists and those whose transcendent concern was the movement, practitioners of folk religion and advocates of elite theology. With the coming of age of the civil rights movement, black Christianity changed in numerous ways. New opportunities available to blacks in post– Jim Crow Alabama provided better-educated leaders and more af®uent congregations. John Porter attended Alabama State University, where his ¤rst church job was as assistant to King at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Later he earned a master’s of theology degree at Morehouse College, where he worked for three years under King’s father, who was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Porter’s ¤rst major pastorate was at First Institutional Baptist Church in Detroit. He returned to Alabama in 1962 as pastor of the 5,000-member 6th Avenue Baptist, Birmingham’s largest black congregation. King Jr. preached his installation sermon. Wilson Fallin Jr., whose father was a Baptist pastor and Selma University graduate, earned a degree in sociology and religion from Morehouse in 1964, a master’s of divinity from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1967, a master’s of art from the University of Montevallo in 1989, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alabama in 1995. In addition to pastoring Birmingham’s Oak Grove and New Zion Baptist churches, Fallin taught philosophy and religion at Miles College, served as president of Birmingham Baptist College (1971–83, 1986–2002) and Selma University (1983– 86), and as a professor at the University of Montevallo. His extensive research on the history of black Baptists led to his election as of¤cial historian of the National Baptist Convention. The AMBSC elected Julius Scruggs president in 1995, another sign of changing times. Scruggs, pastor of First Baptist Church, Huntsville, held a Ph.D. in theology from Vanderbilt with a dissertation on the comparative theology of M. L. King Jr. and legendary New York pastor Harry E. Fosdick. A social gospel advocate, Scruggs dedicated himself to righting the convention’s ¤nances, strengthening education, limiting terms of of¤ce, and reorganizing the convention.


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As mainstream black evangelicals became better educated and organized, black Pentecostals ®ourished alongside them. Alabama was home to 24 congregations of the Church of God in Christ by 1926. W. T. Phillips of Mobile founded the Pentecostal Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God (AOH) in 1917. Later headquartered at the AOH Cathedral in Birmingham, the denomination spread to 200 churches, and 24,000 members, principally in the United States, Nigeria, and Haiti. Blacks formed a separate branch of the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, and also joined traditional Assemblies of God congregations. By century’s end the black religious landscape was as cluttered with new expressions of faith as the white. Religion and Society The way Christians relate to society has always been a source of considerable tension. Whether and to what degree should one adapt to culture, remain aloof from it, or try to transform it? Some Christians (mainly Catholics) chose to separate from culture. Many evangelicals saw themselves in perpetual con®ict with society. Others (including many evangelicals and most liturgical Christians) lived within secular culture with a minimum of friction. No period better revealed the tensions implicit in these options than the years from 1900 to 1940. Although virtually all evangelicals agreed that repentance and salvation were foremost concerns of the faith, they sharply disagreed on the degree to which the church should address social injustice. Obviously, the black church was most active in reaching out to the poor and dispossessed. But white churches were remarkably engaged in similar undertakings. There are many explanations for this singular era. Nationally, many Christians mobilized behind the social gospel. Although critics disparaged the movement as an attempt to relegate Christianity to social work and the kingdom of God to settlement houses, the origins of the movement are far more complex. At the simplest level, Rev. Charles M. Sheldon captured the spirit of the social gospel in his 1896 novel In His Steps. In the novel, an unemployed man interrupts a service to describe his economic plight and pose the question “what would Jesus do” about social injustice. Translated into 21 languages, the novel became a 1936 motion picture, by which time it had sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. Reduced to pietistic ini-


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tials (WWJD) on teenagers’ bracelets and on bumper stickers during a 1990s fad, the theology was narrowed by evangelicals to a concept governing private moral decisions. But the term originally questioned how Jesus would reorganize society toward greater social and economic justice. That is the question and the vision that captivated the imaginations of many Alabama Christians during the ¤rst four decades of the 20th century. Just as the civil rights movement mobilized black Christians to political action, the prohibition movement catalyzed many white evangelicals. Prohibition was one of the ¤rst major social reform movements to allow a public role for women. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League became the prototypes of modern 20th-century political pressure groups. Led in Alabama by Presbyterian minister Brooks Lawrence, the league combined ministers and lay leaders of many denominations in a vast, well-organized ecumenical, political movement. Despite earlier beliefs that the church should focus entirely on spiritual matters, evangelicals now vowed to use the power of the state to purify and restrain a society they believed to be headed for perdition. While two bills to prohibit alcohol stalled in the 1907 Alabama legislature and Jefferson County voters pondered a local prohibition referendum, Birmingham’s WCTU and Pastors’ Union launched a public campaign to pass them. Women and children—wearing white ribbons, serving coffee, and singing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There”—paraded 5,000 strong through the streets, waving banners, proclaiming Save the Boys and Vote for Mothers. When Jefferson County (though not the wicked city of Birmingham) voted dry by 1,800 votes, throngs of women crowded polling places, singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” All ®owing blessings, that is, except alcohol. The legislature followed Jefferson County’s lead, banning alcohol in 1907, repealing the ban in 1911, and reenacting it in 1915. Without doubt the agitation over alcohol, its prohibition and enforcement, mobilized thousands of Alabama women into suffrage clubs, and many suffragists were also prohibitionists. Like many attempts to impose a set of moral standards on people who do not share the same beliefs, prohibition did not work well. Jefferson and Shelby Counties, along with many hill counties and towns, simply refused to enforce the 18th Amendment. The initial director of state enforcement sighed resignedly that “Birmingham is the wickedest place in Alabama,”


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though scandals involving law enforcement agents or judges also occurred in Madison, Crenshaw, Lowndes, Elmore, Covington, and Lauderdale Counties between 1923 and 1929.10 Throughout the 1920s, violations of prohibition constituted the most frequent cases tried in federal courts. Having learned from the prohibition crusade important lessons about the ef¤cacy of political mobilization, church people applied their new wisdom to other causes. No single person played a larger role in this mobilization than the Episcopal priest Edgar Gardner Murphy. Born in Arkansas and educated at the University of the South in Tennessee, Murphy became rector of Montgomery’s Saint John’s Episcopal Church in 1898. The congregation of more than 600 was one of the largest and most in®uential of that denomination in the state. As he traveled about the city, Murphy was appalled by working conditions in West Montgomery’s textile mills. In addition to his pioneering work to end child labor, he led his congregation to establish a settlement house to provide hygiene and health care, a library, and children’s programs. He extended his interest to poor blacks in 1899, organizing the Church of the Good Shepherd, with a nursery and kindergarten for black children. He organized a South-wide race conference in Montgomery and often spoke at Tuskegee University. Episcopalians extended their settlement work into the Appalachian foothills in 1923, when Augusta Benning Martin established a settlement house called the House of Happiness. Martin had studied with reformer Julia Tutwiler at the women’s college in Livingston, taught school, worked as a home demonstration agent at Auburn, and served as deputy state prison inspector. But it was her work among desperately poor mountain people near Scottsboro that de¤ned her life. The house she began cared for hundreds of children who were orphaned, abandoned, sick, or abused. Although the Episcopal church tried both evangelical and ministry approaches to its mountain work, the social ministries strategy worked best. Methodists and Baptists were even more active in establishing settlement houses and “institutional” churches that were open every day to provide social ministries. Working through a Social Service Commission begun early in the century, Methodists endorsed limitations on working hours of children, men, and women. The Methodist Woman’s Missionary Society was even more outspoken on behalf of reform. The denomination opened settlement houses in 1903 in Birmingham and the following year in Montgom-


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ery and Mobile. The houses provided children’s programs, literacy classes, nurseries and day care programs, free kindergartens, sewing and hygiene classes, and even free health clinics. Between 1900 and 1905 some 3,000 poor children attended Methodist-sponsored free kindergartens in Birmingham, supported by Christmas offerings. So successful was this ministry that Birmingham Methodists hired a deaconess–social worker in 1908 to expand the work. She began additional facilities, called Wesley Houses, in various industrial neighborhoods. The Mobile Wesley House sponsored a health clinic staffed by ¤ve volunteer physicians who performed minor surgery, and operated the only free library in Mobile. Although not as active as Methodists, Alabama Baptists operated settlement houses in Anniston, Birmingham, and Mobile. Other denominations also joined in social ministries. The Catholic Sisters of Charity organized health care for poor residents of Birmingham in 1899, and various Jewish relief societies ®ourished in the 1890s and early 20th century. Birmingham’s Independent Presbyterian Church hired a woman social worker to coordinate its social ministries and began a 30-acre Children’s Fresh Air Farm on Shades Mountain to provide a place where poor urban children could spend a brief summer vacation. The farm hosted 8,000 poor children between 1920 and 1950, and physicians belonging to the church performed more than 100 free surgical procedures for poor children. The Great Depression deepened the fault lines among Alabama Christians. Many fought desperately to hold onto their property, wealth, and lands. They condemned the New Deal and turned their churches into fortresses. Others organized charitable ventures to help needy members and, when resources allowed, even nonchurch people within their communities. Still others questioned whether capitalism was the most Christian form of economic organization. Most churches responded to the overwhelming need in whatever way they could. The social chairman of Rural Churches in Walker County helped Auburn’s home demonstration agents work with local women. Some churches (Montgomery First Baptist, for instance) organized employment committees to help members ¤nd work. Some black churches became fertile organizing ground for Communists, and some white churches proved equally welcoming to labor union organizers. L. L. Gwaltney, editor of the Alabama


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Baptist and arguably the most in®uential Alabama Baptist between 1920 and 1950, wrote an eloquent editorial in 1937 entitled “A Better Alabama”: We want to see a state where there will be no slums . . . ; a state where no one will have to live in the miserable shacks and hovels that some of our people now call their homes; a state that sees and has compassion for its humblest citizen; a state that has an understanding heart, even when such understanding brings serious unrest. We want to see a state in which unemployment is no longer the ghost at our banquet table; a state in which underemployment and semi-employment are no longer major problems. The unemployed do not want charity any more than the rest of us. They want work that they can provide for their loved ones, just as the rest of us do. There is tragedy when men have no employment and do not know which way to turn for a job. We love Alabama . . . well enough to see her faults as well as her virtues. Such a state as we dream about will come only when one takes seriously this business of building the Kingdom of God on earth, because then only will come a real brotherhood of man, whose foundation will be laid in the Fatherhood of God.11 The social gospel novelist Charles Sheldon could not have said it better. What Jesus would do, at least in Gwaltney’s opinion, was to construct a new, more just society. But Christian unity around such an ennobling, even radical vision proved quite impossible. Church folk felt more comfortable on the familiar terrain of mutual fear, anger, and hostility. Among various Christian values—unity, acceptance, grace, judgment, tolerance, forgiveness, purity, zeal—Alabama evangelicals chose to emphasize purity and zeal. Emphasis upon purity of belief and personal purity, and determination to enforce such purity on others, did not make them a winsome people. They often were aggressively self-righteous and determined to enforce their values on others, beginning with prohibition. Standing in their way were Christians of other persuasions who disagreed with the prohibition ethos so politically ascendent during the half century between 1880 and 1930: liturgical Christians such as Episcopalians,


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Greek and Russian Orthodox; Roman Catholics from southern and eastern Europe, who had no heritage of prohibition in their Christian faith. Catholics had added liabilities at least in the way southern Protestants understood issues: a European history of persecuting Protestants; a blurring of church and state; support of parochial schools; a celibate priesthood; identi¤cation with immigrants who were pouring into America between 1900 and 1924, threatening job security and wages. In earlier years, Catholics had served as mayors of Montgomery and other towns. But anti-Catholicism became increasingly common after 1900, especially among Baptists and Methodists. Even the most liberal-minded Baptist leaders—such as Alabama Baptist editor L. L. Gwaltney and A. J. Dickinson, pastor of Birmingham’s in®uential First Baptist Church— frequently denounced Catholicism as a threat to American liberties. The wife of one of the state’s leading Baptist pastors told a women’s missionary society that unless they converted Catholics, socialists, and immigrants to Protestantism, such people would disrupt the nation. Many Baptists took this advice literally, joining new anti-Catholic organizations such as the Guardians of Liberty. Rev. Sidney J. Catts, a controversial Black Belt Baptist pastor, became so absorbed with the nativist politics of exclusion that barely a half decade after leaving Alabama for a pastorate in west Florida, he was elected governor of his adopted state, running primarily against the state’s tiny Catholic minority. After his election, Catts returned to Alabama often, speaking to fervent supporters in the teeming industrial city of Birmingham. No New South city had been more profoundly in®uenced by the new immigration patterns from southern and eastern Europe. In 1900 Birmingham’s city directory listed only 10 white Baptist churches, compared to 17 Methodist, 16 black Baptist, 9 Presbyterian, 5 Episcopal, 3 Catholic, and 2 Jewish synagogues. The 1906 national religious census revealed an even more startling religious topology: Roman Catholics led all denominations with nearly 8,000 members (29 percent of total city church membership), followed by black Baptists (4,000 members, 15 percent), white Methodists (3,900, 14 percent). White Baptists came in a distant ¤fth (2,100 members, 8 percent). In such a closely balanced religious setting, politicians avoided religious demagoguery as dangerous to their political survival. But by the next religious census in 1916, the in®ux of rural Alabamians and the cessation of European im-


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migration due to disruptions during World War I had transformed the city’s religious landscape into a more traditional pattern: black Baptists were most numerous, followed by white Methodists, Roman Catholics, and white Baptists. Catholics constituted only 16 percent of total church membership and were an increasingly vulnerable target. When the U.S. Public Health Service sent a Catholic physician to coordinate the city’s disease prevention program, Baptists led a successful campaign to drive him out of town. A. J. Dickinson—the theologically liberal, social gospel pastor of First Baptist Church—organized the semisecret, anti-Catholic, True American Society and led opposition to the reelection of tolerant city commission president George B. Ward because he refused to ¤re a Catholic police chief. Their thousand-vote victory broke the back of the old regime’s tolerant, inner-city, working-class administration (tolerance toward legalized alcohol and prostitution as well as religion) and transferred power to anti-Catholic suburbs. Anti-Catholicism became a characteristic feature of Birmingham’s evangelical Christian community between 1915 and 1930. In 1916 night riders burned a Catholic school and church near Pratt City. A controversy erupted in 1920 when Father James E. Coyle, pastor of Saint Paul’s Catholic Church, wrote a rebuttal to a Baptist preacher’s anti-Catholic essay. The local Baptist Ministers Conference backed their colleague—the major struggle in the postwar world, they argued, pitted Baptist democracy against Romanism’s monarchy. Threats against Coyle’s life and his church forced armed guards to patrol church property each night. On the evening of August 11, 1921, Rev. E. R. Stephenson, a Methodist minister and Klansman who specialized in marrying couples at the Jefferson County courthouse, gunned down Father Coyle in front of Saint Paul’s parsonage. Stephenson had both personal and theological reasons for the murder. Coyle had performed a wedding for Stephenson’s daughter and a Catholic from Puerto Rico, whom some accused of being partly black. This affront to southern racial and religious taboos caused a Birmingham jury to acquit Stephenson, who was defended by a prominent Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church and Klan member, Hugo Black. The national press pilloried Birmingham for months after the murder and acquittal, calling the city the “American hotbed of anti-Catholic fanaticism” where the “murder of a priest had been added to the achievements of bigotry.”12


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During subsequent years, evangelicals divided over the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps half the city’s white pastors became Klan members, and the Klan often interrupted worship services of supportive congregations to hold solemn ceremonies and make generous offerings. Other pastors, gingerly at ¤rst, then with increasing fury, denounced Klan violence. When Rev. Henry Edmonds, liberal pastor of Independent Presbyterian Church, announced that he would denounce the murder of Father Coyle in a service held by the church at its downtown location in the Lyric Theater, friends tried to dissuade him. Failing that, they attended the service fully armed and scattered throughout the congregation, determined to protect their pastor, with violence if necessary. Edmonds, Rabbi Morris New¤eld, and Father Eugene Sands, the new priest at Saint Paul’s, also organized a Faith Panel, which toured Alabama on behalf of religious tolerance. Later Edmonds and New¤eld revived the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which also had its origins partly among Alabama Baptists. All this turmoil and con®ict did church membership no good. Between 1906 and 1916 Birmingham church membership grew by 200 percent. During the following decade it increased only 62 percent. And between 1926 and 1936, church membership actually declined by 12 percent, a phenomenon that occurred in only 8 of America’s 50 largest cities. By the post–World War II era, evangelicals had different battles to ¤ght. As racist Catholics and Jews allied with racist Baptists and Methodists, former religious divisions were forgotten in a united struggle against a common foe. And more tolerant Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists found themselves increasingly of one mind and making the ¤rst cautious overtures to their black religious counterparts. Whereas the 1930s challenge to Jim Crow arose mainly from labor unions and political radicals, the post-1940s campaign grew mainly from black Christians. White terrorists understood this point as their bombings in Birmingham made clear: March 24, 1949: Terrorists dynamited the home of AME bishop S. L. Green, who was also chancellor of Daniel Payne College, an African American school in the Birmingham suburbs.


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July 28, 1949: A fuse burned out before it reached three sticks of dynamite at the home of Rev. Milton Curry Jr., a civil rights activist. August 12, 1949: A successful blast damaged Curry’s home. August 12, 1949: A blast damaged the home of Rev. E. B. DeYampert, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church. April 22, 1950: A third bomb demolished Curry’s house. December 25, 1956: A Christmas Day explosion knocked Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s home off its foundations and destroyed the front of the house. April 10, 1957: A dynamite blast damaged the home of Rev. George W. Dickerson, pastor of First Baptist Church of Kingston. April 28, 1957: Dynamite exploded at the rear of Allen Temple AME Church in Bessemer. April 28, 1957: A heavy rain doused the burning fuse to 54 sticks of dynamite next to Temple Beth-El, a Jewish synagogue on Highland Avenue. June 29, 1958: A second bomb exploded at Bethel Baptist, Shuttlesworth’s church. January 16, 1962: A single stick of dynamite caused minor damage at New Bethel Baptist Church. January 16, 1962: Two sticks of dynamite damaged Saint Luke’s AME Zion Church. January 16, 1962: Two more sticks damaged Triumph Church and Kingdom of God and Christ. December 14, 1962: Terrorists bombed Bethel Baptist a third time. May 11, 1963: Bombs exploded two minutes apart at the home of Rev. A. D. W. King, brother of Martin Luther King Jr.


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August 10, 1963: A gasoline ¤rebomb destroyed Saint James United Methodist Church in Warrior. September 15, 1963: Ten sticks of dynamite killed 4 girls and injured 22 other people at 16th Street Baptist Church. March 21, 1965: A bomb expert deactivated 50 sticks of dynamite while a priest celebrated mass for 120 parishioners at Our Lady, Queen of the Universe Catholic Church. March 21, 1965: A second bomb of 50 sticks of dynamite failed to explode outside Rev. A. D. W. King’s pastorate. Had such a wave of terror been conducted by Islamic extremists after September 11, 2001, the nation would have declared war. That Klansmen could have conducted such violence in Birmingham amidst the virtual silence of white evangelical churches, associations, conventions, and conferences does not speak well of the capacity of Christians to transcend their culture. The direct role of Southern Baptists in defending Jim Crow is even more appalling. Dr. Henry L. Lyon Jr. led Montgomery’s Highland Avenue Baptist Church to numerical superiority among capital-city churches and was elected president of the state convention. But he also consistently promoted racial segregation as a central biblical teaching and helped organize the segregationist Baptist Laymen of Alabama. Asked to deliver the invocation at George Wallace’s 1963 gubernatorial inauguration, Lyon thanked God for the Confederacy, states’ rights, and prayer in public schools. Most Baptist ministers either agreed with Lyon or maintained a discreet silence. As late as the 1990s African American students at Samford University were denied access to many Baptist pulpits in the state. But Baptists had no exclusive claim on racism. Dr. Robert Strong, northern born and University of California at Berkeley–educated pastor of Montgomery’s Trinity Presbyterian Church, used Palm Sunday 1965 and the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection to preach that instant integration was both unreasonable and unworkable. The racial gaps in culture, morality, education, psychology, and hygiene were simply too great to permit it. While deploring violence in the South, he focused on similar violence in the North that the media ignored. The fact that six young Negroes had


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been turned away from his church the previous week had provoked the governing session to deny access to “sociological demonstrators,” who were declared to be unwelcome. Quoting Scripture all the while, the church equated its problem with Jesus cleansing the temple of de¤lement, noting that the demonstrators, when asked, seemed to all be members of Baptist churches (“it looks as though all southern Negroes must be Baptists”).13 However much white Baptists might have resented the comparison of themselves to biblical de¤lers of the pure Presbyterian temple, they were generally one with their Presbyterian brothers in turning back blacks who attempted to worship with them. Sol Tepper, a leader of Selma’s Jewish community, believed local blacks had no legitimate reason for their 1965 protests in his city either. He showed up outside the courthouse with an M-1 army ri®e, volunteering to join Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse. Even the hard-line Clark rejected a militant Jewish volunteer. Although Birmingham rabbi Milton Grafman sympathized with many black objectives, he joined other moderate Birmingham clergymen urging M. L. King Jr. not to begin demonstrations in the city during the spring of 1963. All this was quite predictable. The tentacles of two centuries of racial hostility did not loosen their grip simply because someone argued that good Christians and Jews should not believe the way they did. What is remarkable is not that so many white, sincerely religious people were racists; what is remarkable is how many slipped the bonds of racism and courageously worked for change. In Selma, Muriel Lewis, a Jewish native of Manhattan who moved to the Black Belt when her husband became manager of the family business, refused to join him in keeping silent about race relations. She wrote letters to the local newspaper deploring the treatment of blacks. Whites retaliated by boycotting her husband’s car dealership and driving him to a fatal heart attack. Methodists produced the most vigorous internal debates, as young ministers wrestled with the dilemma of personal conscience versus congregational culture. Of 14 white Methodist ministers in Montgomery during the bus boycott, only 2 took public stands, one in opposition to it and the other openly supportive (he was forced to resign within six months). The others remained judiciously silent.


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In 1954 some 300 denominational leaders organized the segregationist Association of Methodist Ministers and Laymen. Within four years, the organization had grown to 34,000, and many individual congregations passed resolutions condemning integration. One liberal Methodist minister recalled at least 40 fellow clerics who left the Alabama–West Florida Conference because of their racial liberalism. One of those ministers, Sam Mann, had begun his preaching career at 15 in the First United Methodist Church of Eufaula. Though raised in a racist home, Mann had been transformed by the mentoring of a group of Methodist ministers at summer youth camps. After graduating from Duke University Divinity School, Mann did not return to Alabama. In 1971 he became pastor of Saint Marks Church, an ecumenical, mostly black congregation in downtown Kansas City launched by Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ. Deeply grounded in the Bible, Mann organized various social ministries and became a national spokesman for major initiatives against racism in white churches. The executive director of the Greater Kansas City Council on Religion and Race described Mann as an enigma: “He was a totally Southern white boy from Alabama who came on so strong for civil rights. And he has never wavered from that task.”14 That Mann had to exercise his ministry in Kansas City and switch ministerial af¤liation from Methodist to Presbyterian was one of the many tragedies of the era. Back home in Alabama, the equivocation of so many Methodist ministers on racial issues increasingly caused laypeople to desert the denomination for more racially reliable Southern Baptists. Between 1960 and 1970, Alabama–West Florida Conference membership dropped from 128,600 to 124,430. Although the black Central Conference of the Methodist Church merged into white conferences during the 1970s, tensions lingered. As late as 1996 the Alabama–West Florida Conference dismissed Rev. Jim Claunch for asking his congregation to stand with him to demonstrate their solidarity in building bridges to other races and denominations. When one woman choir member refused to stand, he rebuked her for unwillingness to ¤ght racism and suggested she might be more comfortable in another church. Two days later the district superintendent asked him to step down. For all their history of racism, Southern Baptists also produced some


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courageous and prophetic voices. No Birmingham white worked harder for racial justice than Baptist layman and Samford University trustee James A. Head Sr. Having attended a Catholic school in Ohio as a boy, Head spent his entire life battling for religious tolerance. In 1932 he helped Henry Edmonds and others organize an Alabama chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. As chapter president, he toured the state with Jewish friends Will Engel and Emil Hess to preach a gospel of racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance. H. O. Hester, a pastor in Mobile and a Samford University graduate, headed a new department of special missions created by the state Baptist convention. It sponsored an annual biracial human relations conference, provided scholarships to black Baptist ministers, and encouraged congregational cooperation between black and white Baptists. By century’s end, the Alabama Baptist Convention had hired several professional black staffers. Many courageous pastors—John Jeffers of Auburn, Dotson M. Nelson Jr., Louis Wilhite, and Herbert J. Gilmore Jr. of Birmingham, Fred Lackey of Jasper—demanded that their congregations squarely face the ethical imperatives of racial exclusion. Ironically or perhaps appropriately, the initial integration of social organizations at both Auburn and the University of Alabama occurred when Christian fraternities pledged black members. The initial black pledge in 2001 at the University of Alabama said he accepted because he was a Christian and the fraternity’s purpose was “glorifying God.” It was a pleasant sentiment after so many years when it seemed that the chief function of white churches was excluding blacks. Although racism was not the only issue igniting the so-called culture wars of the 1960s, it was certainly a contributing factor. It was no coincidence that many conservative congregations of Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Southern Methodists, and the Presbyterian Church in America initially broke away from their denominations because of alleged liberalism about race. Many of these congregations later rede¤ned their grievances to include liberalism in general and speci¤cally ordination of women, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, revised prayer books or genderneutral Bible translations, equal rights for homosexuals, opposition to abortion, racy television programs and movies, rock-and-roll music, or attempts to banish of¤cial prayers in public schools and posting the Ten Command-


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ments in public buildings. These crusades often merged with a militant national fundamentalist movement to check the rise of modernism in literature, music, education, and theology. At a time when religion was losing in®uence everywhere else in the industrialized world, it continued to be a dominant force in American culture. But many American Christians believed (sometimes with substantial evidence) that their faith was under siege, attacked by secular university professors, radical social activists, the secular media, the Democratic Party, and liberals in general. Religious Americans of all persuasions— fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics, even Orthodox Jews— began moving sharply away from the Democratic Party at the same time more secular Americans increasingly identi¤ed with it. In an ominous new development in the history of American politics, the two parties began to take on contrasting religious (or irreligious) identities. Although the point is a generalization, in the 2000 elections regular churchgoers voted heavily for George W. Bush, a former problem drinker with a recent record of bornagain salvation and Methodist af¤liation, while religiously nonobservant voters went strongly for Al Gore, who was Southern Baptist and whose wife was a Baptist deacon. Alabamians processed these issues differently because of race. African Americans, arguably the most theologically conservative Alabama Christians, voted overwhelmingly for Gore. Conservative white Christians, mobilized by the Christian Coalition, voted nearly as solidly for Bush. The culture wars had changed the state’s religious landscape since the 1960s. Although Southern Baptists historically had strongly af¤rmed separation of church and state, denominational leaders had more and more trouble explaining the issue in ways that anxious parishioners understood. To them, Supreme Court decisions striking down prescribed state prayers in New York and elsewhere seemed part of a larger liberal conspiracy to end segregated schools, extend rights to criminals, and grant privacy protection to women that allowed them to choose legal abortions. All this they considered a deep affront to Christian values. Societal changes bothered conservative evangelicals as well. The growing independence of women, their education in disciplines and professions formerly reserved for men, their massive entry into the labor force sug-


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gested that revered traditions of marriage and child rearing were endangered. Many evangelicals believed that godly men should direct families, that women should be subservient, that when children were born, women should leave the labor force and become full-time mothers. Education not only seemed dummied down and denuded of God and Christian values, it also suffered from abuses by teacher unions (which rejected legal background checks on teachers and teacher testing), social promotion, and liberal curriculum experiments that seemed to make education worse, not better (the new math, whole language English, substitution of a social science mishmash for rigorous history and geography classes). As a result, Alabama evangelicals began to strike back. They developed a religious litmus test for political candidates that included not only predictable questions about abortion and school prayer but even seemingly unrelated ones on gun control and property taxes (exactly what the biblical position was on these two contemporary issues seemed hazy to some observers but crystal clear to others). Christian Coalition of Alabama even found itself defending a tax system almost universally denounced as the nation’s most unfair and regressive. In DeKalb County, when a federal judge banned of¤cial school prayers in public schools, the entire crowd at a football game left their seats, went to the center of the ¤eld, held hands, and recited the Lord’s Prayer. On abortion, Alabamians agreed to disagree. Polls throughout the 1990s revealed that nearly two-thirds of citizens believed that abortion should be legal under some, but not all, circumstances. Only about one in eight believed abortion should be outlawed altogether. A large majority favored allowing abortions in cases of rape, when the health of the mother was in danger, or when there was a strong chance that a child would have a serious birth defect. Men were more likely to favor banning abortions than women, whites more likely than blacks. One of the most intriguing public policy–legal entanglements concerned human sexuality. In 1998 the legislature proved it could in fact pass some legislation by banning the sale of sex toys. Unfortunately for legislators, therapists sometimes recommended the toys for legitimate therapeutic reasons, and six women who either used or sold the devices sued the state. One national television network noted as its trivia of the day that in Alabama


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citizens could buy guns over the counter but not sex toys. The courts struck down the law, yet more evidence to many Alabamians of the malevolent purpose of judges. When Americans United for Separation of Church and State (once a venerable organization dominated by Southern Baptists and Jews but increasingly considered subversive by evangelicals) listed the 12 states most at risk for threats to religious freedom in 1997, the director placed Alabama at the top of his list. The state head of the American Civil Liberties Union quipped that there was no problem separating church and state in Alabama because there was no separation. The 1979 fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention gradually ¤ltered down to Alabama as well. As a result, the state’s white Baptists began to pass a stream of resolutions closely identi¤ed with “new right” culture war issues (opposition to ERA, abortion, ordination of women, teaching evolution in public schools). Splits in prominent Episcopal congregations such as Mobile’s Christ Episcopal Church and Mountain Brook’s Saint Luke’s Church demonstrated that these issues perplexed af®uent and well-educated Episcopalians as much as ordinary Southern Baptists. Religious polarization became more cultural and ideological than denominational and theological. Moderate Baptists discovered that they had more in common with similar-minded Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans than with conservatives or fundamentalists within their own denomination. And on matters of public policy and religious tolerance, they were even closer to many liberal Catholics and Jews. Antiabortion Catholics who favored funding parochial schools with state and federal money discovered lots of Baptists and Pentecostals who agreed with them. Pentecostals inhabited separate theological space, often allied to fundamentalists on political and social issues but sharply divided from them on theology and worship practice and the public exercise of gifts of the spirit such as speaking in tongues or divine healing. Three contentious public policy issues revealed these divisions most clearly. The battle over public exercise of religion took new and interesting twists. Brooksville, an unincorporated community of 140 residents south of Huntsville, proposed to govern itself by the hand of God. The town charter would consist of the King James Bible, city ordinances would be the


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Ten Commandments, and each able-bodied citizen would care for weaker members of the community. Voting would be done in the churches. The idea was to unite church and state. Though Brooksville was the only Alabama town proposing to incorporate on the basis of a biblical charter, most Alabamians agreed that the Ten Commandments were the foundation of American law and democracy. When Judge Roy Moore of Gadsden proposed the commandments as the basis for his judicial rulings, he tapped into a national mood to ground jurisprudence in Judeo-Christian principles. Moore took the concepts much farther. In an essay for the 1998–99 Cumberland Law Review, Moore located the origins of American law in recognition of the sovereignty of God. And God was not just any deity, but speci¤cally the Judeo-Christian deity. Hence, the free exercise of religion protected by First Amendment rights did not include Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Muslims, secular humanists, or other new imports. Moore argued that the establishment provision of the First Amendment did not apply to the states, which presumably could establish a religion within their borders if they chose to do so. Rather than acknowledge the 200-year-old principle of judicial review, Moore argued that the Christian majority should determine court rulings. Otherwise, federal courts would remove God from public schools. Moore particularly attacked a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court case, Engel v. Vitale, which struck down a “nondenominational” public school prayer prepared by the state of New York. This ruling, more than any other some argued, had launched America’s culture wars. Ironically, Associate Justice Hugo Black of Alabama (a former Sunday school teacher at Birmingham’s First Baptist Church though at the time an agnostic), wrote the Engel decision, drawing on his Baptist heritage of church-state separation. When Moore was subsequently elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he placed a 5,300-pound granite reproduction of the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the court building in Montgomery. (He placed it at night without conferring with other justices, and the event was ¤lmed by a fundamentalist Florida religious ministry.) Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Alabama chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union ¤led suit against him. More than 40 Alabama clergymen and religious leaders from 7 denominations (including 21 Alabama Baptists) joined an amicus brief opposing the monument, though


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popular religious sentiment in Alabama clearly sided with Moore. In the fall of 2003 a state judicial panel removed Moore as chief justice because he refused to obey a federal court order to remove his granite reproduction. A second controversial issue involved a state lottery. Strapped for money to fund education and blocked from new revenue sources by opposition to taxes, Gov. Don Siegelman proposed a state lottery. Polls consistently indicated a nearly two to one majority in favor of the lottery through the summer of 1999. Even among Republicans and weekly churchgoers, almost half favored the lottery. The prolottery forces outspent their opponents 3 to 1. But when church leaders in both black and white communities began to mobilize their constituencies against the lottery, support began to crumble, especially among black Christians. The lottery lost 54 to 46 percent. Lottery victories in adjacent states (South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee) with similar evangelical populations made Alabama unique and may be a tribute to their better political organization or to low turnout for a special October referendum. Alabama evangelicals did assume a considerable moral responsibility during the lottery campaign. Repeating the mantra that there was a better way to fund schools and aid poor children, they were slow to spell out such options. Few churches agreed to a proposal to voluntarily return a portion of their property tax exemption to assist public schools. Noting the inconsistency, newspaper editorials challenged denominations to propose other solutions if they rejected a lottery. The Alabama Baptist State Convention considered a proposal for tax reform in 1999 but defeated it, partly due to the efforts of Rev. Dan Ireland, who had led the antilottery forces. Ireland also opposed a similar resolution in 2000 advocated by moderate Baptist pastors James Evans and Nick Foster, which passed with considerable fundamentalist support. Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians also endorsed tax reform. But what was notable was how little effort Baptists and Methodists put into implementing their resolutions compared to their vigorous efforts against the lottery. The Methodist laywoman and University of Alabama law professor Susan Pace Hamill wrote a thesis on tax reform based on biblical and JudeoChristian beliefs while a student at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. A relative newcomer to Alabama, Hamill could not understand how a legislature with 136 professed Christians out of 140 members (in-


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cluding 66 Baptists and 34 Methodists) could ignore the unfairness of the nation’s most regressive tax system and its historic neglect of poor children. The answer to Hamill’s question was simple. Like most Alabama Christians, legislators believed that Christian ethics consisted of private moral actions, not the creation of a just society. Despite all this contrarian worry about the religious state of the world, Alabama could generate surprises in religion as well as politics. Twice between 1939 and 1946 two members of Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to obey Alabama civil of¤cials. One, Rosco Jones, was a black man with only an eighth grade education. The other, Grace Marsh, was a slightly better educated white woman. Jones and his wife preached and witnessed door-to-door in Opelika and Auburn until ministers of both races began to complain and had them arrested as nuisances. Marsh ran into trouble witnessing to shipyard workers in Chickasaw on the Gulf Coast. Her child refused to salute the American ®ag, and family members were paci¤sts, in compliance with Witness teachings. She was also arrested. Both appealed their convictions ( Jones v. Opelika and Marsh v. Alabama) to the U.S. Supreme Court. In both instances the high court expanded First Amendment provisions protecting the free exercise of religion by siding with Jones and Marsh. A generation later, the children of an agnostic Mobile attorney Ishmael Jaffree and his Bahai-believing wife (a non-Christian religion that originated in Persia) told their parents that teachers were conducting prayers in their public school classrooms. Jaffree protested, sparking a controversy that moved from Mobile churches to the state legislature. Mobilized by agnosticism as quickly as over sex toys, state legislators rushed through a law encouraging private prayer during a “moment of silence” and providing for teachers to lead students in a state-approved prayer. Local Mobile federal judge William Brevard Hand shocked Jaffree’s lawyers by lecturing the U.S. Supreme Court on the controversial issue of religious freedom instead of following high court precedent. In a decision whose arguments would continue to ¤nd their way into letters-to-the-editor columns for decades, Hand wrote that the First Amendment only prevented the nation from establishing a national religion. A state could do so anytime it wished. He reasoned that keeping speci¤c Christian religion out of schools actually favored a new antigod religion, secular humanism. His decision dismissing


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Jaffree’s case was overruled by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, justices not only unanimously upheld the court’s decision overruling Alabama’s teacher-directed prayer but also lectured Judge Hand about his duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution even in the state of Alabama. That three landmark Supreme Court cases defending religious freedom should have originated in Alabama merely con¤rmed the state’s propensity for freethinking, whatever the majority might decide. Conservative Christian attacks on religious pluralism coexisted with a simple demographic fact: every year that passed Alabama became more religiously diverse. Although black and white Baptists accounted for nearly two-thirds of all church members (Southern Baptists alone accounted for 1.38 million of the state’s 4.3 million people in 2000), the future promised a different religious con¤guration. The number of Catholics increased rapidly due to Hispanic migration and to the movement of northeasterners and midwesterners to Alabama. By 2000, 150,000 Catholics brought that church to third statewide. Mother Angelica developed a worldwide conservative Catholic television ministry from her base in Birmingham. At century’s end she constructed Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Cullman County, one of the South’s most visually stunning religious centers. Mother Angelica had a tycoon’s entrepreneurial spirit—“I learned when you deal with God, think big”—and her 13thcentury-style chapel with sculpted bronze doors, handcrafted details, and a European-style piazza, demonstrated her point.15 Churches of Christ ranked fourth behind Catholics with 119,000 members. Traditional denominations such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Primitive and Free Will Baptists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ hardly registered on the religious radar screen. Pentecostals had edged them out, as the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, reached nearly 69,000 members and Assemblies of God counted 60,000 more. In Montgomery, the city’s white Pentecostal churches accounted for less than a fourth of the city’s total congregations in 1931, but a third by 1940, and 40 percent by 1952. In Birmingham, the Metropolitan Church of God, Alabama’s largest Church of God congregation, built three buildings in 10 years to keep up with growth, ¤nally settling at end-of-century in one of the city’s swankiest neighborhoods across from megasuburban churches Briarwood Presbyterian and Lakeside Baptist. A rapidly growing Pentecostal megachurch in Mountain


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Brook catered to the new Christian revelation that the task of the church was to serve members, not the other way around. Symbolic of an important social transition, Pentecostals by the 1980s and ’90s had moved from blueto white-collar status represented by the $12 million Metropolitan Church “campus” for its 2,300 members. The Church of God, Cleveland, once had deep rural southern roots and a gospel beat to its music. But more and more of its 400-plus Alabama congregations tended to be clustered in big-city suburbs, featuring contemporary music along with a theology rich in glossolalia (tongue speaking), divine healing, and biblical fundamentalism. The Birmingham metro area alone contained 72 Church of God congregations in 2000. Most of the newer suburban Pentecostal churches included a smattering of black members, making them probably the most racially integrated churches in Alabama. Birmingham also boasted a Mormon temple in Gardendale, Hindu temples in Roebuck and Pelham, and nearly 2,000 Muslims af¤liated with three mosques. Religious persecution such as that experienced by Alabama Catholics in the 1920s or some Jews in the 1930s seemed largely a thing of the past. Despite a 1999 incident when Pike County public schools allowed overt Christian activities that led to the harassment of Jewish children (the Jewish family moved to the more tolerant community of Green Bay, Wisconsin), Jews continued to play important roles in the state’s business, cultural, and political leadership despite their small numbers (9,100 in 2000). During the century, Jewish mayors served Mobile, Montgomery, and other cities, and Birmingham residents elected a Jewish congressman. Though some of Alabama’s 19 synagogues struggled to survive, especially in small towns such as Jasper, Selma, and Anniston, Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El carried out a $14 million renovation early in the 21st century. At one level, Jews enjoyed strong evangelical support. Many apocalyptic, fundamentalist Christians including Gov. Fob James’s wife, Bobbie, identi¤ed with Zionism and traveled to Israel frequently. Governor James even held Israel Independence Day celebrations at the governor’s mansion, which the ¤rst lady credited with the state’s receiving a $900 million oil lease windfall weeks later. And in 2000 Alabama voters, with hardly any attention paid to the fact at all, elected Catholic Don Siegelman, whose wife was Jewish, governor over pro-Zionist and fundamentalist Christian Fob James.


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Although external threats seemed to unite Jews, within individual synagogues all the tensions common to other faiths played out. Early in the state’s history, Sephardic Jewish families came to Mobile. Later German Jews began to arrive in Alabama, including some of the nation’s most important Jewish families—the Lehmans, Loebs, Dreyfusses, and Seligmans. Most settled in river towns (Mobile, Demopolis, Selma, Montgomery) and entered the mercantile trade or banking. Many later moved to New York where they became successful merchants and bankers. A third wave of Jews, this one from eastern Europe, arrived around 1900. Many of the earlier German Jews, now secularized, would have little to do with more orthodox and religious newcomers. The separate ethnic groups established their own synagogues (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Sephardic). German Jews mixed easily with Christians (legendary Rabbi Morris New¤eld even taught Hebrew to Baptist ministerial students at Samford University). Internal disagreements surfaced over Zionism, how involved Jews should become in the civil rights movement, and whether individual rabbis were too liberal or too conservative. In short, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Catholics often acted like Baptists and Methodists, arguing about scriptural interpretation, the application of theology to personal and community life, and the ethical constraints of religious belief. Perhaps it was ever so with religion, and perhaps it ever will be.


11 Plain and Fancy Folk and Elite Culture

Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

The lives of three intellectuals—two southern and one northern— converged in Hale County, Alabama. They represented different generations and disparate temperaments. The two visual artists—Walker Evans of Chicago and William Christenberry of Tuscaloosa—were both shy, private men. Though they allowed their cameras to intrude into the lives of strangers, they did so with regret, worrying about whether they had done the right thing or whether their motives would be misinterpreted. James Agee of Tennessee and New York City, the writer among them, had no such scruples. He was a self-indulgent intruder by nature, inclined to snoop into the dusty corners and dark nooks of houses and people, even unsuspecting, trusting people like the three poor white Hale County sharecropper families who befriended him. During a hot summer day in 1936, Evans loitered in Greensboro, Alabama, on assignment for Fortune magazine to do (with Agee) a story on sharecroppers. He struck up a conversation with Frank Tengle, a local sharecropper, who introduced him to Bud Fields and Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs. When Agee joined the group, the three sharecropper families had


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concluded that the friendly strangers might be government representatives come to help them. The Fields family in particular took in the strangers. They became for Agee the noblest and most wretched of people. His prose and Evans’s photographs would give them the immortality their courage and endurance merited. For weeks Agee lived with the families in their dogtrot shacks north of Stewart. Evans, already a respected documentary photographer, laboriously crafted each photo, taking dozens of 8-by-10-inch negatives, while Agee recorded in numbing prose the smallest details of their lives. Fortune chose not to publish the piece, which appeared instead in greatly expanded form in August 1941. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ran to 471 pages and began with 62 stark black-and-white uncaptioned photographs. Taking their cues from Agee’s tortured introduction, critics panned the prose while praising the photographs. Agee’s excruciating detail, fondness for literary ®ourish, and dense social commentary appeared at a bad time. Readers were absorbed with a world on the brink of war and thought less and less about the people left behind by the nation’s rapidly expanding economic recovery. The book sold only 600 copies, was quickly withdrawn from shelves, and never engaged public consciousness. Even Agee regarded the book a failure. Houghton Mif®in reissued the book in 1960 at the beginning of a new and revolutionary age of discontent. Critics in the 1960s hailed it as a lost masterpiece. College students read it with near religious devotion. Reformers declared it to be the harbinger of social change. And the New Journalism applauded the way Agee and Evans opted for subjective truth over cool objectivity, how author and photographer interjected themselves into the narrative and made it their book rather than merely a study of three Alabama sharecropper families. At last, Agee and Evans achieved the fame they had hoped for. In November 1936, only months after the casual meeting in Greensboro that launched Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, William Christenberry was born in Tuscaloosa. His maternal grandparents, with whom he spent many summers, lived on a farm near Akron. Frank Tengle lived in a shack only 300 yards from his grandparents Smith, did odd jobs for them, and was the ¤rst person to reach the elder Smith after his heart attack. Grandparents


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fervently rooted in Baptist and Methodist values anchored the artist, as well, in strong traditional community ways. Following graduation from Tuscaloosa High School in the tumultuous year of 1954, William Christenberry entered the University of Alabama where he majored in art. The art faculty had a number of teachers from other regions, notably Mel Price, a Jewish New Yorker, who introduced Christenberry to expressionism and abstract art. But while Christenberry’s medium was modern, his vision was vernacular. Tenant houses, though rendered in semiabstract style, bespoke the world of his Hale County ancestors. In other ways as well Christenberry was a traditionalist. He became a fervent Crimson Tide football fan with a fondness for southern literature (mainly William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor). While teaching art at the Capstone in 1960, Christenberry purchased a newly reprinted copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at a Birmingham bookstore. Walker Evans’s photographs of the terrain so familiar to his childhood captured Christenberry’s imagination. For years, in fact, he had been recording that same world with his tiny Brownie camera, the most common of cameras to record the most common of sights, one anachronism preserving another. Speaking to his grandmother about the book, the young artist discovered that she knew all the subjects of Evans’s 1936 photographs and offered to introduce them to her grandson. In 1961 Mel Price warned his graduate student to get out of Alabama or be trapped by it. Christenberry had no grievance with the place or the people and was reluctant to leave. But 1961 was a critical year in American art, the boundary between older American impressionism and a newer generation of pop art. Better to experience that transition in New York City than in Tuscaloosa, he reasoned. So, like Harper Lee, Howell Raines, and E. O. Wilson, who also left Alabama in the 1950s and ’60s to ¤nd fame elsewhere, he moved into a ®at in New York and began job hunting. Eight jobs in 12 months left little time for art but did afford him an opportunity to meet one of his idols. Walker Evans still worked for Time/Life, and a telephone call connected them. Evans was ®attered by the attention and got Christenberry a job re¤ling photographs. Their friendship blossomed, and Evans urged the young artist to take his Black Belt photographs seriously.



Despite a childhood accident that had cost Christenberry the sight in his right eye, he had an amazing capacity to make the lens of a camera record more than mere images. He captured a world beyond lens and object: rusting signs adorning buildings; houses, barns, churches, warehouses, and stores, tilting at odd angles or covered by kudzu and vines, abandoned and forlorn; simple graves lovingly adorned with pebbles or plastic ®owers. Vernacular architecture might seem dead framed at the end of a camera lens; but to Christenberry, these material objects were ¤lled with stories and ripe with questions and mysteries. Returning repeatedly to the same sites, Christenberry posited his buildings in time, time sometimes remorseless, as when a building slowly disintegrated over 30 years of photographing; or time resurrected, as when a dilapidated structure received bracing and a new coat of paint. Christenberry’s Black Belt is a world disappearing and reappearing, both at the same time, as if two dimensions of time and history were colliding, each vying for supremacy. In teaching stints at Memphis State University during the chaotic racial upheaval between 1962 and 1968 and later at the more tranquil Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., Christenberry added new subjects (notably the Ku Klux Klan) to his art. But his subject matter remained mainly the ordinary and the vernacular. Christenberry’s mother could never understand his preference for tenant shacks that dotted a county so famous for Greek revival mansions. The answer was simple. He found a kind of divinity in the common and ordinary, neither as subjectively as Agee nor as cooly objective as Evans. Hale County became for Agee, Evans, and Christenberry what Yaknapatawpha County was for William Faulkner: a relatively simple and inviting world that could be contained within prose and photographs; but also an in¤nitely complex and con®icted world that could at a moment’s notice morph into something ugly, dangerous, destructive, anguished, incomprehensible. Study Hale County and one could skip Homer. All history that mattered was right there at Stewart, Akron, or Sprott. Every variety of person, class, race, and condition of humanity lived or had lived there, the mean and the kind, the ignorant and the wise. Hale County became a vast canvass on which they could write and paint the entire human condition. Each of the three artists took hold of a different piece of reality. Evans



captured the stark black-and-white essence through which he told his particular story (though the photos he chose for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men told only one story; the ones he omitted told another). Agee’s ®owery prose told a different story of guilt at being so fascinated by people so poor, of uncertainty that he could accurately render their lives. Christenberry’s sculptures, using precisely the “fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, . . . pieces of wood and iron” that Agee believed essential to full understanding, added color, dimension, variety, and agency to the lives of people he understood so much better than the other two. Agee and Evans seldom returned and never fully reengaged their earlier landscape. In a sense, Christenberry never left it, though after 1961 he never again lived full time in Alabama. Always fearful that some Black Belt residents would fault his art—as the children of the Tengles, Fields, and Burroughs had condemned Agee’s and Evans’s—he vowed to respect the people and their culture. “I love that landscape. Everything I do re®ects how much I love that Alabama landscape.”1 The people and places constantly pulled Christenberry back to Alabama, allowing him to reengage his subjects, revisit sites, record changes. As opposed to Agee’s guilt, attraction, and revulsion, and Evans’s detachment, Christenberry allowed his subjects to have their say, natural and authentic. The natural and man-made coexisted in harmony, belonged together, rested in peace. His renderings in multiple media enriched the landscape, which a single form—whether prose, photograph, or sculpture— could not suf¤ciently reveal. Agee and Evans recorded a world in travail and dying; Christenberry recorded in edifying memory a world sometimes vanishing and other times enduring or reappearing. It is a shame Henry Adams never met James Agee or William Christenberry. They did have minds. Literature Unlike in Mississippi, where it is said that no one reads books but everyone writes them, in Alabama people both read and write. A 1992 poll of Alabamians’ leisure time activities revealed some surprising patterns. Visits to public libraries ranked second among all leisure activities. Alabamians were more likely to read a daily newspaper than other Americans. They were as



likely to regularly read news magazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News) and high-brow periodicals (Forbes, Fortune, Atlantic, Harper’s, and the New Yorker). When asked if they were currently reading a book, almost exactly the same percentage of Alabamians (33 percent) responded af¤rmatively as other Americans. Perhaps the reason so many citizens enjoyed reading books had something to do with the high percentage of Alabamians who wrote them. The South’s oldest book prize—the Lillian Smith Book Awards given by the Southern Regional Council—honored 71 authors between 1968 and 2001, for short stories, novels, memoirs, and history, 11 of them Alabamians by birth or residence. Not surprising in a state so haunted by its past, 7 of the award-winning books consisted of history or memoir. Alabamians had always valued their past, recounting family history in their stories and preserving state history in the nation’s ¤rst state archives. In February 1901 Alabama’s governor signed a law establishing the Alabama Department of Archives and History as the nation’s ¤rst repository of state historical documents. Three years later, the American Historical Association extolled the “Alabama Plan” as the best way to preserve and manage state records. That a state so poor and in many ways so backward should emerge as a national innovator in the care and preservation of public records is one of the many ironies involving its culture. Thomas McAdory Owen, founder of the archives and its initial director, earned a national reputation as an archivist and historian. After graduating from the University of Alabama with highest honors, Owen practiced law and founded or helped establish the Southern History Association, the Alabama Historical Association, the Alabama Library Association, the Alabama Anthropological Society, and the Confederate History Club of Montgomery. His four-volume History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography became the state’s standard biographical guide for a century. After Owen’s death in 1920, his widow, Marie Bankhead Owen, succeeded him as director of the archives. She became one of the highest pro¤le women historians in the South and its premier female archivist. Though her focus on history and heritage came at the expense of preserving public records, she was able to build one of the ¤nest archives buildings of the time. She also edited the woman’s page of the Montgomery Advertiser, wrote six historical plays and four school-oriented histories about Alabama, edited



the Alabama Historical Quarterly, wrote a novel and a ¤ve-volume history of the state. The Hearst newspapers even offered her $10,000 a year to come to New York City and work with their special features staff. Between the two of them, the Owen archivists collected, preserved, and promoted Alabama’s cultural heritage for half a century. The prominence of women historians in a state so inhospitable to females in public life is another of the state’s contradictions. Hallie Farmer served a distinguished career at Alabama College for Women at Montevallo. In addition to her career as an inspiring teacher and community activist, Farmer authored 50 entries in the Dictionary of American Biography, essays for the prestigious South Atlantic Monthly, and an important book about how laws were passed in Alabama. Farmer’s colleague at Montevallo, Lucille Grif¤th, earned a master’s from Tulane but was rejected by a variety of elite southern graduate schools in the 1950s as too old (she was in her midforties) or because graduate study was deemed too strenuous for a woman’s delicate nervous system. Finally admitted into one of the nation’s most demanding doctoral programs at Brown University (where half the male doctoral students failed their preliminary oral exams), Grif¤th passed on her ¤rst try, according to local faculty lore, the best-prepared doctoral student in colonial history in nearly a decade. With her new Ph.D. from Brown, Grif¤th returned to Montevallo to teach. Her numerous published articles and a documentary history of Alabama established Alabama Woman’s College as one of the strongest centers for research about the state. By the 1970s Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton had emerged as the state’s premier historian. Well-written political biographies of Lister Hill and Hugo Black, the Bicentennial History of Alabama, a sprightly history of the state for schoolchildren, a perceptive memoir, and regular essays in the New York Times re®ected her varied career as journalist and historian. As an in®uential professor and administrator in the history department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she excelled in writing local and state history. Men also contributed to the state’s growing reputation for historical research. George Petrie made the Auburn history department fertile ground for bright young students. Although the department did not offer the Ph.D. degree until the 1960s, Petrie began one of the earliest and ¤nest south-



ern graduate programs. Historians such as Walter L. Fleming, W. Watson Davis, A. B. Moore, Frank L. Owsley, Herman C. Nixon, and Alfred Wade Reynolds took their undergraduate and master’s degrees with Petrie, then earned Ph.D.s at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Fleming and Owsley were regarded as two of the most in®uential historians of their generations. Nearly half a century later, William W. Rogers, David Ward, and Alan Harris continued the “Petrie boys” tradition without its founder, clustering for Ph.D.s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. What Auburn and University of Alabama historians shared was a ¤erce affection for Alabama and the South. Though southern history was parochial in some ways, it was no more limiting than artist William Christenberry’s expansive vision of Hale County and the Black Belt. Much important wandering begins with con¤dence in the home place. Auburn gradually carved out for itself and later for its doctoral students the primary role as center for the study of state and local history. Supplemented by the university’s Center for the Arts and Humanities so imaginatively and ef¤ciently run by historian Leah Rawls Atkins, Auburn grafted Alabama culture onto Auburn’s land grant tradition of outreach and took this proud legacy into small towns and communities throughout the state. University of Alabama history faculty such as Charles Summersell, A. B. Moore, James B. Sellers, Frank L. Owsley, James Doster, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, and Robert J. Norrell made important contributions to the writing of Alabama history as did graduates such as Hugh C. Bailey. One common theme in the careers of most of these historians was their selfunderstood role as public intellectuals. Their causes varied. Marie Owen opposed woman suffrage; she and her husband represented the state’s social, economic, and political elites. Farmer, Grif¤th, Roberts, Hamilton, and Wiggins held reformist and feminist values. Petrie, Owsley, and Moore resented the condescending attitudes of elite northern universities and vowed to southernize the writing of American history. Nixon served as secretary of the liberal Southern Conference for Human Welfare and wrote a number of books in the “regionalist” reform tradition that thrived during the 1930s at the University of North Carolina. Fleming, Owsley, and Nixon contributed to the so-called agrarian resurgence at Vanderbilt University



during the 1920s. Norrell, Ward, Rogers, and Harris represented Alabama’s populistic reform tradition. As the careers of Marie Bankhead Owen and Virginia Hamilton demonstrated, some historians sought a more public forum for their writing than historical tomes (a word disconcertingly similar to tombs and too often the fate of weighty historical prose). Journalism served as a ¤ne alternative outlet. As a people who read newspapers more frequently than most Americans and tolerated a fair amount of independent thinking from editors, Alabamians produced a number of distinguished journalists. Beginning with the Hall family that edited papers in Dothan, Montgomery, and Anniston, journalistic excellence ®ourished in the state. Grover Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser and Buford Boone, publisher of the Tuscaloosa News, won Pulitzers for editorial writing in 1928 and 1957, respectively. Rick Bragg, a New York Times reporter and Calhoun County native, won the 1996 Pulitzer for feature writing. The Montgomery Advertiser and Alabama Journal shared a Pulitzer for a series on the use of state prisoners for drug experimentation. In 1991 Ron Casey, Harold Jackson, and Joey Kennedy of the Birmingham News won a Pulitzer for editorials about the state’s dreadful tax system and consequent neglect of education and public services. Birmingham-Southern College graduate and city native Howell Raines (who as executive editor of the New York Times until 2003 held what many considered the most prestigious position in American journalism) directed a paper that won an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes for stories published during 2001 (previously no single newspaper had won more than three). Cynthia Tucker, a talented African American journalist from a distinguished Monroeville family, also left the state to achieve fame. As editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she was syndicated nationally and became one of the South’s most in®uential editorialists. Brandt Ayers represented the third generation of distinguished publishers of the Anniston Star, whose global perspective and international coverage matched that of many big-city dailies. Gadsden native and University of Alabama journalism graduate Hazel Brannon Smith became the ¤rst female editor to win a Pulitzer in 1964. After graduation, she took her beauty queen good looks and antiestablish-



ment opinions to Mississippi, where she purchased the state’s second oldest newspaper. Elected twice to the Democratic National Convention as a segregationist, states’ rights Democrat, she was converted to a different opinion when the Holmes County sheriff shot a young black man in the back for allegedly whooping too loudly. From that time, the ®amboyant editor began to attack the White Citizens’ Council, leading to a 17-year boycott. Kept a®oat ¤nancially mainly by northerners impressed with her courage, Smith had her home vandalized, her newspaper of¤ce set a¤re, and a cross burned in her yard. Hospital administrators ¤red her husband. In a series of 1963 editorials, Smith attacked violations of civil liberties and civil rights, which won her the Pulitzer. At the end of her life—bankrupt, her newspaper ¤nally closed, her mansion auctioned off—Smith became the object of black charity. In addition to talking about their past, Alabamians liked to talk about themselves. Perhaps no aspect of literature reveals this better than memoir. And memoir has an unmistakable relationship to storytelling. On a thousand Alabama front porches, while sitting in swings or with backs braced against posts or door frames, people told their stories. Young people sometimes listened intently and other times let their minds drift aimlessly. Strictly speaking, what occurred in such moments might be considered an inferior form of culture. Nothing was written down or transmitted in forms that could be exactly recalled or carefully studied. Yet culture is generated at many levels. Uneducated, even illiterate, folk produce culture often as rich and satisfying as wealthy, well-educated people. Self-taught art, folk crafts, and oral narrative constitute an alternative folk culture neither unsophisticated nor naive. Southern writers in particular owe much of their ear for language and their gift for storytelling to the rich oral tradition of the region’s poor people. The very poverty that was so much a liability in building decent schools and colleges, educating a literate public, or establishing libraries and book publishers produced its own remarkable culture. Most Alabama families, black or white, could boast a traditional storyteller whose lively narratives recounted the family’s past. Black sharecropper Ned Cobb (“Nate Shaw”) lived near Notasulga in central Alabama. During the 1930s Cobb joined the radical Sharecroppers’ Union and was involved in a gun battle defending his crop from con¤scation. He served



prison time, but incarceration did not break his spirit. When Theodore Rosengarten, a young Harvard student, brought a tape recorder to interview him, the 88-year-old man would sometimes talk for three or four hours in response to a single question. Describing his life as hunter, sharecropper, log cutter, lumber hauler, house builder, mule trainer, beekeeper, hog raiser, blacksmith, maker of ax handles and white oak baskets, Ned Cobb was, according to a review of All God’s Dangers in the New York Times, “a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey.” Though illiterate, Cobb was hardly inarticulate. He began his life story like this: My daddy had three brothers—Hubert, Bob, and Nate—and I’m named after one of em. Now, that Hubert, . . . he was a over-average man. It didn’t do no man no good to take hold of him, so my daddy said. Uncle Hubert didn’t take shit from nobody, colored or white. After my daddy got up to be a big boy he claimed to remember his brother Hubert’s transactions and he even told how his brother talked: he talked in a dry, high-pitched voice. But Uncle Hubert was a grown man, he was much of a man. So one day, Uncle Hubert went up to a white man’s house. I reckon that was after the surrender; my daddy didn’t tell me how old he was when Uncle Hubert done that. And that white man had a bad bulldog and Uncle Hubert knowed—my daddy said his brother Hubert knowed that was a bad dog. God knows I aint tellin no part of a lie, he said it. But used to in them days, I think a heap of this old back yonder stuff was lies, a heap of it. The old folks told so many stories and they told so many funny stories. All of it couldn’t have been true, the way I estimates it. They’d tell stories to have fun and folly and cause a big laugh. But they told a heap that was de¤nite and proved out to be true. If I tell any kind of story that I think was just something told to entertain, I’ll say, ‘That’s what I heard So-and-so say,’ and so on. But my daddy told this for the truth. Uncle Hubert went up to a white man’s house one day. The white man had a bad dog and Uncle Hubert knowed it. And the white man knew he had a bad dog. My daddy said the white man told him, “Come on in. The dog’s wired up, I fenced him.”



It wasn’t a matter de¤nitely understood if Uncle Hubert was askin the white man or the white man was askin him to come in his house. Told him, “Just unlock the latch to the gate and come in the yard,” that’s all. Uncle Hubert looked at the dog and said, “You goin to keep that damn dog off me, aint ya?” Told him, “O, yes, the dog aint going to bother you. Just come on in, come on in.” Hubert unlatched the gate and walked in the yard. And soon as he done that, the dog run up to grab him. The white man had done walked out there to guard the dog off of him. And when the dog runned up to grab Uncle Hubert, he just jumped behind that white man, picked him up by his waist and commenced to sling him at the dog, ¤ghtin the dog with the man. And said, he beat that dog so with that man, one of the man’s shoes ®ew off. Uncle Hubert just knocked that dog down going and a comin until he knocked one of the white man’s shoes off—and hurt the white man a little someway. He whipped that dog down, cleaned that dog up with his master’s legs and feet. Then he put the white man down, the white man told him, “I’m going to have you arrested, I’m going to have you arrested.” Uncle Hubert said, “Have me arrested. I told you to keep that damn dog off me. You knowed he’d eat me up. I told you to keep him off me.” He just stepped on out the gate, he was a over-average man. And they never did meet up no crowd that’d whip up on Uncle Hubert. He left this country before I was born. I heard my daddy say many a time, “I don’t know what become of my brother Hubert and my brother Nate.”2 Telling one’s own story usually occurred in a fashion similar to Ned Cobb’s, and recording such stories became a lucrative cottage industry. Rosengarten’s oral history of Cobb won the 1974 National Book Award. Agee and Evans’s earlier work earned them fame. California journalistphotographer Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson authored a reprise of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men using the same format but focusing on the descendants of the three white sharecropper families. And Their Chil-



dren after Them won the duo a 1989 Pulitzer Prize. J. R. Moehringer, Atlanta bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, won a 2000 Pulitzer for a gripping portrayal of blacks living in Gee’s Bend. If Alabamians obtained suf¤cient education and had a ®air for writing, they preferred to tell their stories through memoir. Mixing the state’s troubled past with the story of their own lives or families, writers produced an impressive literary tradition. Clarence Cason’s 90 Degrees in the Shade set the pattern for books to follow. A native Alabamian teaching at his alma mater in Tuscaloosa, Cason— a self-conscious liberal who deplored the violence and poverty of his beloved state—grew melancholy at the approaching publication of his mildly critical memoir. He frankly described the poverty of mill workers near his Talladega County home and denounced Klan in®uence in Tuscaloosa. He wrote his publisher the week his book was to appear that he might have to move from Tuscaloosa. Three days later he killed himself. Through succeeding decades, some of the state’s best writing followed in the tradition of Cason. Woodlawn native Paul Hemphill, an Auburn graduate and former sportswriter, turned to memoir to record the struggle over race within his working-class family (Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son). Mountain Brook journalist Diane McWhorter won the 2001 Pulitzer for a chilling memoir-history of Birmingham’s 1963 racial disorders (Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution). McWhorter’s memoir proved that literature could divide a city nearly as deeply as the original events, as she directed equal blame at the terrorists who committed murder and the economic establishment that permitted it. Another Birmingham-based memoir, Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage, took a painful look inside a relationship. Both Dennis and Vicki Covington had established their credentials as important novelists and essayists. (Dennis had been a National Book Award ¤nalist for his moving portrait of northeast Alabama snake handlers, Salvation on Sand Mountain.) Some readers concluded from the Covington’s memoir that writers could tell too much, more than readers wanted to know and more than relationships could stand. Judith Hillman Paterson, a Montgomery native, told an evocative story of childhood all too common in Alabama. Sweet Mystery was a survival



story about a ®awed but loving family. Shaped by their role as outsiders in a city quintessentially at war with those who did not conform, her parents slipped into alcoholism and depression. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rick Bragg, at the other end of the socioeconomic ladder from Paterson and McWhorter, eulogized the indomitable spirit of his poor white mother in All Over but the Shoutin’. Alternatively uproariously funny and movingly sad, Bragg (a college dropout) demonstrated that being a college graduate did not make a writer. Barbara Robinette Moss provided a woman’s perspective on the same Calhoun County, poor white childhood in Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter. Possessing skills in telling a story and having a good story to tell helped. So did the capacity to write compelling prose and an ear for irony and humor. Kathryn Tucker Windham made her reputation with books of ghost stories for children (her sales led all books published by the University of Alabama Press) and as weekly storyteller on National Public Radio. But her memoir Odd-Egg Editor was not for children. Like Virginia Hamilton’s memoir, Windham relates an un®inching account of a southern woman journalist inside a male-dominated newsroom. Albert Murray, a Mobile native and Tuskegee University graduate, proved that good memoirists come in all colors. His South to a Very Old Place was a loving tribute to a variety of Alabama people and places who made life bearable for him during the Jim Crow era. Idyllic, ¤re®y evenings and jive-talking friends, observing the world from the branches of a chinaberry tree, studying Latin by moonlight shaped Murray’s life. Though he never became as famous as his Tuskegee University friend Ralph Ellison, Murray did use the idiom of jazz to speak profoundly to America. Musician Wynton Marsalis considered Murray his cultural mentor, and Count Basie wanted Murray to write his biography. Duke Ellington called Murray the “unsquarist person I know,” and one critic called Murray’s 1976 book Stomping the Blues, “the most eloquent book ever written about AfricanAmerican music.”3 Accolades included a full spread on him in the “ArtsIdeas” section of Newsweek magazine. If black writer Albert Murray viewed the world from the chaotic perspective of jazz, memoirist Edward O. Wilson viewed it from the orderly platform of science. The product of a con®icted childhood on Alabama’s



Gulf Coast, Wilson lost an eye in a ¤shing accident and a family to divorce. Packed off to military school, he initially rebelled but soon learned to appreciate the orderliness of the military. In fact, the regimen perfectly suited his social conservatism and high regard for tradition, civility, and good manners. It also left him with lifelong contempt for the “arrogance and doting self-regard so frequently found among the very bright.” This was a curious observation from a man who would become arguably the most famous evolutionary biologist in the world. It was also the observation of an introspective scientist who could write superb prose. Describing his childhood regard for Alabama’s martial tradition, the Pulitzer Prize–winner wrote in his memoir Naturalist: “Medicine, law, and engineering made admirable careers for a southern man, and business and the ministry were all right of course. Golf champions and quarterbacks who came from Alabama were heroes, and we were all proud when one of our relatives (his nickname Skeeter or T.C. or something like that, in any case your third cousin Hank’s oldest boy) was elected to Congress. But military command was the profession that bore the cachet of strength and honor.”4 Born again in a tearful Baptist conversion (evangelicalism, Wilson observed, “does not waste time with philosophy. It speaks straight to the heart”), Wilson seemed set for a traditional southern life. But his vision of the universe changed when he began to peer down into the earth instead of up toward the heavens. Perhaps the orderly armies of ants he saw there became a surrogate for the military career Alabamians so highly valued. Whatever his motive, Wilson entered the University of Alabama as passionately devoted to biology as most fellow students were to Crimson Tide football (an enthusiasm Wilson shared with William Christenberry). There he came under the spell of faculty characteristic of those who labored in the state’s colleges and universities, more renowned for teaching and inspiring undergraduate students than for their own scholarship. As Wilson wrote in his memoir, what counts most in education is the accessibility and approval of respected faculty, plus the desire and ability of the student. Properly prepared and inspired, Wilson was soon off to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. and staked out a specialization in ants that would ultimately lead to a book that won another Pulitzer Prize. Wilson also won the National Medal of Science, wrote 23 books, and created a new science



called sociobiology. Time magazine pronounced him among the 25 most in®uential Americans of his era. E. O. Wilson was a rarity: a man of science gifted in the language of prose. But Alabama produced a remarkable array of world-class scientists even before the University of Alabama at Birmingham furnished them hospitable academic surroundings. The New York Times Review of Books began a review of Naturalist by noting that nothing in literature is so fascinating as the trajectory of a human life. By that standard, Percy Lavon Julian shared much with E. O. Wilson. The son of a railroad clerk and schoolteacher, grandson of a slave whose right hand was mutilated for illegally acquiring the skill of reading and writing, Julian and his two brothers earned doctorates and their three sisters took master’s degrees. Like Wilson, he completed a graduate degree at Harvard, then added a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna. To pay his way through college, Julian waited tables, slept in the attic of a white fraternity house, and played in a jazz band. After completing his Ph.D. and a brief teaching stint, Julian entered industrial research where he invented an aerofoam ¤re extinguisher used by the navy in World War II, synthetic cortisone, and hormone treatments from soybean sterols, in a sense continuing the applied scienti¤c research of Tuskegee’s George Washington Carver. The “miracle drug” cortisone relieved pain for innumerable sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. Publisher of 162 scienti¤c papers and recipient of 105 patents, Julian’s discoveries made him the fourth black Alabamian to appear on a U.S. postage stamp. Eric Wieschaus grew up in Birmingham, where he won the science fair at John Carroll High School. After completing his education at Notre Dame, Yale, and in Switzerland, he began teaching at Princeton and publishing specialized studies about how genes affect embryonic development, sometimes causing miscarriages and birth defects. In 1995 his research and publications earned him the Nobel Prize in medicine. That a state so mired in educational backwardness and so dominated by a religious culture hostile to evolutionary science could produce such remarkable scientists is yet more evidence that Alabamians often marched to their own drummer however much they were ordered to stay in line. Although growing up in Alabama taught Wilson, Julian, and Wieschaus different lessons, it left an imprint on all of them. Wilson said it best:



The standards I use for my heroes were ¤rst implanted by a tough military academy, whose instructors believed that little boys should be treated essentially like big boys. It was an accident of timing with an odd result. For the rest of my childhood and through adolescence I assumed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that hard work and punishingly high standards are demanded of all grown men, that life is tough and unforgiving, that slipups and disgrace are irreparable. This ethic stirs faint and deep within me even now, although I know it is not entirely reasonable. There are certain experiences in childhood that surge up through the limbic system to preempt the thinking brain and hold fast for a lifetime to shape value and motivation. For better or for worse, they are what we call character.5 Many Alabama writers escaped the con¤ning boundaries of history, journalism, memoir, and academic journals for the liberating world of their own imaginations. As in other realms of the mind, the state’s ¤ction writers excelled beyond reasonable expectation. Fiction was no new interest for Alabama writers. Many 19th-century authors had specialized in a wry frontier-style wit that attracted readers worldwide. And the Mobile writer Augusta Evans Wilson had mobilized the Victorian novel in defense of southern nationalism and even a kind of feminism. Although Wilson lived into the 20th century, her literary productivity belongs to an earlier era. So successful was Wilson as a novelist that she allegedly became the ¤rst American female writer to earn more than $100,000 for her novels, three of which remained in print at the end of the 20th century. The decades between 1900 and 1930 constituted a renaissance of American letters, and Alabama was neither avant garde nor cow’s tail to the nation’s literary explosion. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and Sara Haardt Mencken tried unsuccessfully to ¤nd a spot in their famous husbands’ literary comets. In Birmingham, Octavus Roy Cohen was more successful. He gathered a dozen or so aspiring writers who referred to themselves as “the Loafers.” They met each Wednesday at Cohen’s apartment on Twenty-¤rst Street to discuss their stories. Much of their success resulted from exploration of social and racial injustice. Cohen described black life in Tuxedo Junction, a Birmingham suburb that jazz musician Erskine Hawkins would immortal-



ize a decade later. Edgar Valentine Smith, another member of the group, won the 1923 O. Henry Prize for America’s best short story (he would win it twice more during a long career as copy editor for the Birmingham News). Jack Bethea, a city native and Birmingham Post editor, wrote a number of novels centered around social and political reform (dealing with the convict lease system, tenancy, and the exploitation of coal miners). The “Loafers” also in®uenced James Saxon Childers, a Birmingham native and Rhodes Scholar who earned a Ph.D. in literature, wrote for the Birmingham News, and taught literature at Birmingham-Southern College. Childers’s most celebrated book—In the Deep South—concerned an interracial friendship in Birmingham. Together with Hudson Strode, who joined the University of Alabama English faculty in 1924, Childers inspired a generation of young writers. The next few decades brought Alabama even greater literary attention. In 1933 T. S. Stribling won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Store. Although born in Tennessee, Stribling spent summers with his maternal grandparents in Gravelly Springs (Lauderdale County), graduated from the University of North Alabama and the University of Alabama Law School, and brie®y practiced law in Florence. A series of 1920s novels brought him critical acclaim, but it was a trilogy set in the Tennessee Valley that established his reputation as a major American writer. His stark portrayal of poverty and race relations rankled southern sensibilities, but also sold a quarter of a million books, outpacing even Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. William Bradford Huie of Hartselle—like E. O. Wilson and William Christenberry, a University of Alabama graduate and Crimson Tide football fan—used the Second World War as a backdrop for his early ¤ction. Mud on the Stars, The Execution of Private Slovik, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, and The Americanization of Emily sold in the millions of copies and found their way onto movie screens. Mobile’s William March called upon an earlier war for inspiration. Some consider Company K the ¤nest antiwar novel penned by an American. Five novels followed between 1933 and 1954, including The Looking Glass and The Bad Seed. A new generation of writers followed March and Huie. Auburn University writer-in-residence Madison Jones published his ¤rst novel, The Inno-



cent, earning praise from critics and fellow writers alike. A dozen novels followed over the next four decades. In 1960 Harper Lee of Monroeville published the most in®uential and beloved Alabama novel of the century. At one level, To Kill A Mockingbird is a tender coming-of-age story about a small southern town suffocated by racism and redeemed by the refusal of a single courageous lawyer either to succumb to inappropriate community standards or allow his children to be imprinted by them. At a different level, it is a sociologically complex novel about crevices of ideology and class within both black and white communities. Winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, the book also became an Academy Award–winning movie starring Gregory Peck. Obviously, a 1960 novel in which a white woman from Alabama’s Black Belt challenged racial taboos would have created a stir. But the enduring fame of the novel has much to do with its larger themes: don’t judge the community eccentric until you have placed yourself in his position; majority rule should not govern a person’s conscience; pride of family is neither altogether good nor bad; a father does not have to be perfect to be good. As a generation of shifting social issues redirected public discourse in America, Atticus Finch’s wisdom made him a man for all seasons. A poll in 1989 found Harper Lee to be the only living American author with a novel in the top 10 most frequently assigned titles in U.S. public, Catholic, and private high schools. High schools in Ireland, Great Britain, Australia, Austria, and many other countries assigned it as well, boosting sales toward 40 million copies by century’s end. As resurgent anti-Semitism swept across Europe, attacks on religious minorities spread worldwide, and homophobia plagued American communities, the tolerance at the core of To Kill A Mockingbird gained new relevancy with each passing generation. Among books cited by 5,000 respondents to a Library of Congress study of the book that had made the biggest difference in their lives, Mockingbird rated second only to the Bible. In September 2001, four decades after its publication, the novel still ranked forty-¤rst on the USA Today best-selling books list. Perhaps Harper Lee’s admonition not to judge others until you have stood in their place was designed to address the tragic life of her childhood friend Truman Capote. Like William March and Eugene Walter, Capote was gay. Most of his ¤ction was set in Alabama, where he spent a part of his childhood with aunts and an uncle in Monroeville. His ¤rst novel, Other



Voices, Other Rooms (1948), is an anguished plea for love by a child largely abandoned by his parents. His tomboy playmates Florabel and Idabel ridicule him as “sissy-britches”; he ¤lls his letters to friends with fabrications about how happy his cousin and father have made him; and his closest chums are black. Invited to an irregular and impromptu worship service by his black friends who implore him to pray, the small, effeminate boy bowed his head and contemplated praying for a bicycle or knife or oil paints. He choked back the words he most longed to pray: “Only how, how, could you say something so inde¤nite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.”6 Most Alabamians learned of Capote through two beautifully crafted short stories, “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” both set in Monroeville during the boy’s rare moments of tranquility. But it would be his fascination with alienation, violence, death, and murder—In Cold Blood, The Grass Harp, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s—that would establish him as one of the nation’s premier writers. Unfortunately, alcohol, drug addiction, and his ®amboyant efforts to be loved led Capote down a long path of self-destruction. Shirley Ann Grau is best known as a Louisiana writer, but her family lived in Alabama during the Second World War. While her father served as a military physician in Montgomery, she attended a local girl’s school and began to cultivate her interest in writing. In 1965 she won the Pulitzer for Keepers of the House, a bold novel inspired by her time in Alabama, detailing the life of a politically ambitious white family and a tender love affair between its white patriarch and his Negro maid. Troy native Jesse Hill Ford added his considerable talents to Alabama’s literary renaissance with the publication of the Liberation of Lord Byron Jones in 1965, and Walker Percy burst upon the literary landscape that same decade. Percy, born in Birmingham, the son of a U.S. Steel executive, became a physician before the family’s genetic predisposition for bipolar disease and depression sent him reeling into the therapy of literature. The Moviegoer won yet another Pulitzer for literature’s “Alabama gang,” and became harbinger of a series of brilliant novels—The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Second Coming, which explored the spiritual shallowness of a people convinced of their own Christian righteousness. It also mirrored the rise of the Sunbelt South, demonstrating if anyone doubted it that business tycoons and successful lawyers, moviegoers and



golf players could live lives as full of quiet desperation as sharecroppers and textile workers. His characters never outgrow their religious dogmas because in rising suburbia they never had any to outgrow. They are religious only in the shallowest and most super¤cial sense; they actually believe in nothing. As the major character in The Moviegoer explains: “My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.”7 Though these were the chief stars in Alabama’s literary galaxy, others left their mark. Babs Deal won an Edgar Award in 1966 for best ¤rst novel and would go on to a productive literary career, as would her husband, Borden. Mobile’s Eugene Walter won the 1954 Lippincott Prize for Young Novelists for a delightful novel set in Mobile entitled The Untidy Pilgrim. Though limited in formal education, Walter was a self-taught iconoclast who edited the Paris Review, became a gourmet cook and wine expert, rubbed shoulders with literati in Paris and Rome, played bit parts in dozens of movies, and richly entertained all who knew him. Walter’s contemporaries enjoyed equally productive careers. Like Walker Percy, poet John Beecher grew up in Birmingham, the son of a U.S. Steel of¤cial, but chose revolutionary poetry instead of Percy’s neo-Catholicism as his vehicle for making the world right. Elise Sanguinetti of Anniston, Joe David Brown, Elizabeth Dewberry, Fannie Flagg, and Vicki Covington of Birmingham, Mark Childress of Monroeville, Anne Rivers Siddon and Paul Hemphill (who were contemporaries at Auburn University), William Cobb of Montevallo, Robert Inman of Elba, Helen Norris of Montgomery broadened the audience for Alabama literature. Perhaps the most unusual contributor by century’s end was Mary Ward Brown of Hamburg in Perry County. Although the widowed grandmother often made light of her genius—she once told a reporter for People magazine that her strength as a writer resulted from her philosophy: “I try to be plain. I’ve had enough of this fame business. It’ll kill you”—she mastered what many writers consider the most dif¤cult genre of literature, the short story. Short stories allow no margin for error. Every word must be measured, precise, crafted exactly, and inserted at the proper location. Few grandmothers perfect the art in their 60s. But having sublimated her yen to write while tending her ancestral home, helping her husband, and raising her son, Mary Ward Brown cultivated the most important storehouse of



writing, her imagination. Drawing upon the Black Belt’s amazing capacity to endure as well as its racial upheaval for inspiration, Brown began to sell stories to prestigious literary magazines. In 1987 her ¤rst collection of short stories, Tongues of Flame, won the Pen–Hemingway Foundation Award for a ¤rst book of ¤ction, an award widely considered the nation’s premier prize for emerging authors. Two years later, a committee selected her to participate with American authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Penn Warren in a joint Russian-U.S. writers symposium. Her second collection of short stories, It Wasn’t All Dancing, won her the coveted Hillsdale Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, particularly valued because the South’s most distinguished authors award the prize to one of their own. Ensconced in a house built by her Primitive Baptist preacher grandfather with his own hands, its walls covered by bookcases ¤lled with Faulker, Chekhov, and James Joyce, the octogenarian Judson College graduate began the new century working on her third volume of short stories. Her soul inspired by CDs of her favorite musician, Thelonious Monk (the high priest of jazz dissonance), Brown proved conclusively that the literary muse could work its wonder at any age. Only slightly less remarkable than Brown’s accomplishment was an explosion of black creativity. As with Brown, racial change bound together the work of these artists. Although Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, she spent her creative years in Florida. Nonetheless, her masterpiece of the Harlem renaissance, Their Eyes Were Watching God, could as easily have been set in the racially conscious and hurricane-wracked Alabama Gulf Coast as in south Florida. More particularly associated with Alabama, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee has been called “the Negro Gone with the Wind.” Born in Birmingham into a middle-class academic family, Walker earned an English degree from Northwestern University, where she met Richard Wright and became part of Chicago’s black literary circle. In 1942 she won the Yale Award for Younger Poets and became the ¤rst African American poet to publish with the Yale University Press. Returning to graduate school, she wrote “Jubilee” as her doctoral dissertation. A different venue produced what many critics consider the ¤nest novel ever written by an African American. Although Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma, he was a student at Tuskegee, and the school heavily in®uenced his masterful novel Invisible Man, which won the prestigious Na-



tional Book Award. Moving between the South and New York City, the Negro protagonist without name or visibility seems to come from nowhere and everywhere. Adrift in time and space, he is visible enough to be constantly harassed but insuf¤ciently real to be understood or even misunderstood. Exploited by whites (and by blacks who depend on their largesse), the invisible man is betrayed by those who should have cared most about him. The novel dissected the reality of African American life at midcentury on the eve of the civil rights movement. Theater Like many southern states not shackled by the constraints of New England puritanism, theater had thrived in the early history of Mobile and other Alabama river towns. Although Baptists occasionally railed against thespians and their art, they did no serious damage (perhaps, in fact, creating as much drama as they banished). Towns such as Montgomery, Mobile, and later Anniston and Birmingham welcomed touring theater companies and developed their own circle of amateurs. Few Alabamians cut as wide a swath across the American stage as Tallulah Bankhead, but more than a few gave it a try. Children’s Theater opened in Birmingham in 1946. Four years later legendary director James Hatcher began Town and Gown Theater, the city’s longest-running professional institution. In 1961 Muscle Shoals began producing William Gibson’s drama The Miracle Worker, based on the life of Helen Keller. Ten years later, Annistonians Josephine Ayers and Juliette Doster, together with others devoted to theater, began the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF). Run on a ¤nancial shoestring with volunteers to sew costumes and operating six weeks each summer on a borrowed Anniston High School stage, the professional repertory company brought the Bard to tens of thousands of Alabamians. By the mid-1980s ASF was so deeply in debt that its demise seemed only a matter of time. At this critical juncture, the troupe found a savior in the person of Carolyn Hood Self Blount. A native of Auburn, Blount had compiled a near-perfect academic record at Auburn University majoring in literature with special interest in theater. Shakespeare in particular seemed to her to encapsulate the entire human experience. After her children entered col-



lege, Blount earned certi¤cation and began teaching literature at Montgomery’s Sidney Lanier High School. Each summer she and a friend drove to Anniston, where they attended three plays over a weekend. A modest contribution to ASF earned her the dubious distinction of an invitation to serve on the board of a collapsing enterprise. Fellow board members wondered if her philanthropic husband, Winton “Red” Blount, might help rescue the theater, and she encouraged them to speak with him. Red Blount saw no particular future for the theater if it remained in Anniston but offered to ¤nance a new building if ASF would relocate to Montgomery. Blount’s investment, consisting of a $22 million state-of-the-art facility, was partly designed in the 16th-century style of architect Andrea Palladio. The 750-seat Festival Stage and the 250-seat Octagon provided a home for one of only ¤ve major Shakespeare companies in the world and the only full-time professional classical repertory theater in the Southeast. It produced more than 400 performances a year, attracting 300,000 visitors annually. Under the artistic direction of ASF founder and native Californian Martin L. Platt, the theater established a ¤rm subscriber base and began an innovative program of introducing schoolchildren to serious drama. Platt’s successor, Kent Thompson, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the College of William and Mary and a Draper’s Company Scholar at the famous Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, carried ASF to greater heights. He reached out to the black community by producing many plays written by African Americans and thoroughly integrated the ASF company. His 1990 production of Moliere’s Tartuffe featured what may have been the ¤rst public interracial kiss in Alabama history when a black Valere expressed his love for a white Mariane. Thompson also began the Southern Writers’ Project in 1991. This initiative became one of the region’s most important efforts to showcase the aesthetic genius of a new generation of southerners bidding for national and international recognition. The project commissioned and premiered plays by veteran dramatists such as Horton Foote, Ernest Gaines, and Regina Taylor, as well as by novice regional writers such as Dennis Covington and Randy Hall. The project’s premieres—such as Grover, Lizard, The Moving of Lilla Barton, All God’s Dangers—particularly delighted ASF audiences



and won critical acclaim. Cleavon Little’s virtuoso one-man performance in All God’s Dangers moved to a New York City stage where he won rave reviews in the New Yorker and from theater critics. ASF’s coproduction of It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues also moved on to New York, where it won four Tony Award nominations. Music One reason ASF enjoyed increasing success during the 1990s was a source of embarrassment to some. It limited its repertoire to three plays per season by the Bard and increasingly produced musicals based on country, jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll. Plays featuring the music of Patsy Cline, Billie Holliday, and other famous musicians packed theaters often sparsely attended when Shakespeare was the fare. Music obviously had a tight hold on Alabama’s soul. Although the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, based in Birmingham, and smaller symphonies in Huntsville and Montgomery, struggled to maintain an adequate retinue of professional players, folk music thrived in a thousand venues and forms. Southern music emerged from the convergence of British and African folk elements. In time, other overlays—Cajun, Mexican, German—enriched the earlier traditions. As with food, folklore, crafts, and religion, it is hard to sort out where white music ended and black music began, so enmeshed are they. The banjo apparently came from Africa, but a southern white man added the ¤fth drone string that gave rise to a distinctly southern sound. Fiddles were the primary instrument for country dances, though guitars (famously played by black musicians in early southern history) became an important secondary instrument. By the 1920s outsiders had collected a rich heritage of English ballads, primarily in the Appalachian Mountains (many of them played and sung in north Alabama). The Fisk University Singers (and increasingly choirs at Tuskegee, Stillman, and other Alabama black colleges) had popularized Negro spirituals as well. But beneath these two layers of recognized southern music, an incredibly varied set of rhythms pulsated: ragtime, blues, jazz, hillbilly, honky-tonk, gospel, close harmony duets, quartets, sacred harp. Alabamians not only inherited songs from earlier generations, they also



made up their own. Morris Slater, a light-skinned black man who had worked out West on railroad construction, appeared in Escambia County turpentine camps in the 1880s, his treasured Winchester repeating ri®e always near. Well liked by both black and white residents of the Brewton area because of his magic tricks and acrobatic ability, Slater was often referred to by his nickname “Railroad Bill.” Slater’s troubles began when Florida passed a law requiring anyone carrying a repeating ri®e to buy a license. Late in the 20th century, Slater’s contempt for the new law would have made him a celebrated hero. In the mid-1890s it made him a hunted fugitive. After Slater had a brush with the law in Florida, Escambia County’s sheriff tried to arrest him, but instead was shot through the heart. For two years, Railroad Bill eluded law enforcement of¤cers, robbing freight trains to sustain himself. The L&N Railroad took a dim view of such activities and posted a $1,250 reward. A posse from Louisville, Kentucky, ¤nally ambushed and killed Slater inside an Atmore store. Embalmed and exhibited at railroad stations from Atmore to Greenville, Railroad Bill attracted thousands of gawkers on his last journey, while inspiring one of the nation’s ¤nest folk songs. Not all folk music was so secular or violent. One of the most enduring memories of rural Alabama life consisted of August singing schools, where itinerant instructors taught a haunting, plaintive music variously called shape note (each note had a different shape), FASOLA (for the ¤rst notes on the scale), or sacred harp (the name of the most famous oblong song books used to instruct singers). Although white sacred harp music is relatively well known in Alabama, even if largely con¤ned to rural, mainly Primitive Baptist churches, sacred harp thrived in black churches as well. Judge Jackson (who, despite his name was a farmer, not a judge) compiled a 98-page work containing 77 songs, published in 1934. He taught four-shape note, as well as compiling and composing it, in®uencing white sacred harp as he progressed. In 1922 Jackson helped organize the Alabama and Florida Union State Sacred Harp Singing Convention. The oldest of Negro sacred harp conventions dates to Henry County in 1880 just seven years after the state’s oldest known white convention began. Dewey Williams became even more famous during the last half of the 20th century, leading the Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers, which featured



some 40 traditional black singers. Centered in Henry, Houston, and Dale Counties, it became so well known that National Public Television producer Bill Moyers ¤lmed a long segment of his critically acclaimed documentary Amazing Grace with Dewey Williams. So popular was sacred harp in the tristate corners of southeastern Alabama, southwestern Georgia, and northwestern Florida that it slowed the spread of secular music among black musicians. During later decades, shape note inspired black gospel and quartet music, especially in Birmingham. Many collectors mined the rich load of Alabama folk melody. Byron Arnold collected some 200 traditional songs between 1945 and 1948. Alabama native Ray B. Browne earned a Ph.D. at the University of California and later headed the popular culture program at Bowling Green University in Ohio. Among the lyrics he collected mainly in north Alabama were songs of social commentary re®ecting the state’s ¤erce class divisions. (“It’s the Fashion,” collected in Lamar County, explored class animosities: “when a poor man asks for bread or a place to lay his head, He will get a kick instead. That’s the fash-ion. But a poo-dle dog they’ll keep, in their arms they’ll let him sleep; When he dies oh how they’ll weep. That’s the fash-ion. Oh, the fash-ion, dressed in fash-ion. To be fash-ioned like a king, with the an-gels we will sing. . . . We’ll be in fash-ion.”) But Browne also collected music with a lighter message: “There was a man in our town whose name was Si-Mon Slick. Owned a mule with a de-mon eye. Oh, how that mule could kick. Wink his eye and swish his tail and greet you with a smile. Gently tel-e-graph his leg and raise you half a mile.”8 The most important collector of Alabama songs had unimpressive academic credentials. Ruby Pickens Tartt was a fourth-generation resident of the Livingston area of Sumter County. Allowed a college education by Julia Tutwiler’s new women’s college, Tartt learned to ignore local prejudices about white women being seen in the presence of black men. After continuing her education in English and art at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, she returned to Livingston to head the art department at her alma mater. She began visiting black churches to enjoy the unusual cadences of music and sermon and found that she enjoyed them better than her ancestral white Methodist and Baptist churches. In time, virtually all intellectuals interested in Black Belt African American culture consulted Tartt. The most famous such consultation was with John Lomax in 1937. Lomax



(soon to become director of the new Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress) credited Tartt with introducing him to the incredibly rich musical heritage of Sumter County, which he considered perhaps unparalleled in America. He recorded more than 100 songs in a single week’s session. Lomax returned two years later and again in 1940, recording more than 200 songs that found their way into the new American archive in Washington, D.C. Byron Arnold also used Tartt’s contacts later in the decade. An artist of no small ability, Tartt also illustrated some song collections. Both the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte shared royalties with her for songs she discovered and they recorded. Ruby Tartt and John Lomax transformed Dock Reed from an obscure Sumter County sharecropper and basket maker into a national celebrity. Tartt introduced Reed to Lomax, who considered the black man’s songs some of the ¤nest he ever collected. Astounded both by Reed’s resonant voice and his incredible repertory of songs, Lomax became so fond of him that he used one of Reed’s songs to end his autobiography. Deeply religious, Reed would not sing blues or secular lyrics. When Ruby Tartt died in 1974, the black man sang at her funeral. And when Alan Lomax presided at the 50th anniversary of the Archive of Folk Song, he paid tribute to Reed (who died in 1979) as one of the ¤nest singers and kindest men he and his father ever met. Although he came from outside the state and spent only a few years in Alabama, Newman I. White was Tartt’s male counterpart as a song collector. Completing graduate work at Harvard, White’s ¤rst job in 1915 was at Auburn University. During his years teaching English, he urged white students to teach him songs they had learned from African Americans. Other songs he collected directly from black acquaintances. After he left Auburn in 1919, White continued to study folk songs at Cambridge, Saint Louis, and in Maine. Later as a professor at Duke, he published what became the seminal study of African American music, American Negro Folk Songs. He collected nearly half the songs in that monumental anthology while at Auburn. As White’s collection made clear, Christian conviction did not eradicate secular music. In fact, sinners’ music thrived in Alabama. When legendary documentary ¤lmmaker Ken Burns produced an award-winning, multi-



part national special on jazz, he began his story with an Alabamian, James Reese Europe. Born in Mobile in 1884, son of a postal of¤cial, Europe would likely have remained in Mobile had his father not resisted the imposition of segregation and moved his family to Washington, D.C. James Reese was about 10 at the time. The boy early demonstrated an aptitude for music, studying violin under the grandson of Frederick Douglass in Washington. In 1902 he moved to New York City where he composed and arranged music, founded the Clef Club to foster black musicians, and established the Music School Settlement for Colored People in Harlem. A decade after arriving in the city, he presented the ¤rst Concert of Negro Music at Carnegie Hall, a hugely successful review featuring Clef Club musicians, strings, pianos, and black compositions. National tours by his orchestra introduced new dances such as the fox-trot to Americans. Europe enlisted in the 15th (Colored) Infantry in 1916 and was asked to form a military band. His unit was the ¤rst to embark in France, and Lieutenant Europe became the ¤rst African American of¤cer to lead troops into combat. His 2,000-man unit suffered 800 casualties, and Europe himself was gassed and hospitalized. More important in musical history, Europe’s band introduced ragtime, blues, and syncopated music that was the precursor of the big band sound soon to take America and Europe by storm. One musician who sent congratulations to Europe when his unit returned from the war was fellow Alabamian W. C. Handy, whose composition “Saint Louis Blues” had become a staple in the Europe orchestral repertoire. Handy grew up in Florence, Alabama. Rebelling against his deeply religious middle-class parents’ resistance to the trumpet (his father was pastor of Greater Saint Paul AME Church), he saved a dollar and a half to buy a guitar. His father forced him to exchange it for a dictionary instead. But the boy would not surrender his dream and secretly purchased a cornet and played in a dance band. Finally free of his parents’ constraints after ¤nishing high school and moving to Bessemer to take a foundry job, Handy formed a brass band. From there he got a job directing music at Alabama A&M College in Huntsville. A national depression sent him to Saint Louis, where he composed his ¤rst famous blues song, then on to Memphis. In Memphis, political chief E. H. “Boss” Crump hired Handy’s band to entertain at political rallies. The band leader’s composition “Mister Crump,” rechristened as “Memphis Blues,” became the ¤rst song to include a jazz



break. Playing along Beale Street, at funerals, saloons, and political rallies, Handy also began a music publishing business. The “father of the blues” never forgot Florence, often returning to speak to black schoolchildren about the pride they should have as the originators of so much great American music. W. C. Handy and James Reece Europe inspired an entire generation of young black musicians who would make their mark on the musical world. Charles Melvin “Cootie” Williams became the most acclaimed Alabama jazz musician. Born in Mobile, Williams was a self-taught trumpeter who joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1929. Regarded by some music critics as the best jazz trumpeter ever, Williams also played with Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. In 1945 he won the Esquire magazine Gold Award for musical excellence. Clarence “Pine Top” Smith Sr., though born in Troy, grew up in Birmingham. Like so many other black musicians and athletes, he earned fame after leaving Alabama. In Pittsburgh he named a form of blues that inspired dancing, boogie-woogie, cutting the ¤rst record including the new name in 1928. Along with blues legend Ma Rainey, he made boogie-woogie famous on the vaudeville circuit. Fame came to all these musicians outside Alabama; inside the state Fess Whatley, music professor at Birmingham’s Industrial High School, began his own musical dynasty. Unable to hire Whatley of¤cially as a music instructor because that might suggest blacks were forgetting their appropriate place in the social hierarchy, the school hired him as a printing instructor. But his students were under no illusions about what he taught. “Fess” (short for professor) trained an entire generation of jazz musicians, for whom improvisation was the foundational element, despite his requiring students to play music exactly the way it was written. When his band students played a note incorrectly, Whatley would thump them on the head. This was his crude way of training disciplined musicians. Whatley organized his own big band, recruiting his best students as members. Attired in tuxedos, Whatley piled his band in his seven-passenger Cadillac and another car, pulling a trailer full of instruments behind. When his alumni returned home for vacations after playing with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Cab Calloway, Whatley would draft them into his local band. Musicians from coast to coast recognized his skill. Those



who trained with him often got jobs without auditions. Many music critics believe the Whatley band was the state’s best during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. If not, that honor probably belonged to the ‘Bama State Collegians, a band formed by Whatley alumnus Erskine Hawkins and containing other Industrial High School products such as Sammy Lowe and Avery Parrish. Hawkins was a phenomenal trumpeter. One musician counted 50 highC notes played by Louis Armstrong on a record of “Shine” and recalled Hawkins blowing a hundred while playing the same song, plus an F-note at the end for good measure. Hawkins’s composition “Tuxedo Junction,” named for a Birmingham trolley stop, electri¤ed black audiences (although it only became popular among whites when the Glenn Miller Band recorded it). During the 1930s Hawkins moved to New York City and renamed his band for himself. They played the Apollo Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, the Harlem Opera House, and other great big band venues of the time. Band member and pianist Avery Parrish contributed “After Hours,” described during the 1940s as the “Negro National Anthem.” Fess Whatley’s band traveled less extensively but with greater suspense. Whites seemed to put aside their racism for the Whatley band, even when it played in Cullman, a community renowned for its racial exclusion. After pondering whether or not to accept an invitation to play a dance in Cullman, Whatley agreed upon the condition that police would escort the band. The white audience was courteous, orderly, and appreciative. One band member remembered incredulously a white girl retrieving a mute dropped by one of the trumpeters. The reaction caused the band member to speculate that black musicians and athletes seemed often to escape the Jim Crow extremes meted out to other blacks. Through the years, Alabama produced other distinguished black musicians. Charles Bridges and Ed Sherrill formed the Birmingham Jubilee Singers in 1925, the initial quartet to export a unique a cappella gospel style beyond Alabama. Nat “King” Cole was born in Montgomery in 1919. His father was the bivocational pastor of Beulah Baptist Church and his mother sang in the choir. The family soon joined the black exodus to Chicago, where Nat formed his ¤rst band during the 1930s. As a pianist, Cole introduced a light, streamline style that formed an important transition from



swing to modern jazz, characterized by his initial 1944 hit song “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Although his King Cole Trio appeared mainly in the “race market” (on black radio stations), Cole broke into the white audience in 1948, one of the ¤rst black male singers to “cross over.” As he concentrated more on singing love ballads and less on piano jazz, his fame increased. Before his tragic death of lung cancer at 46, King had established himself as one of the nation’s most beloved popular singers. Nor did the tradition of distinguished black musicians end with Cole. In 1981 Alabama native and Yale University music professor Willie Ruff took his jazz ensemble to the People’s Republic of China, the ¤rst such group to be allowed in the country during the thaw following the Cultural Revolution. Lionel Richie, born in Tuskegee in 1949, burst onto national pop charts about the same time. While attending Tuskegee Institute, Richie formed a band called the Commodores. In 1969 they followed the famous passage from Tuskegee to New York City blazed by writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, playing Small’s Paradise Club in Harlem. Their initial recording contract with Motown Records in 1971 began a phenomenal string of hits: “Three Times a Lady,” “Endless Love,” “We Are the World.” In 1985 Richie won a Grammy Award for album of the year and an American Music Award for best pop male vocalist. The following year he won an Oscar for best song in a movie and best song of the year. Not all Alabama whites cheered such achievements. During the Jim Crow era, three Klansmen led by Kenneth L. Adams of Anniston jumped onto the stage of Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium and beat Nat King Cole. Later many white racists and Christian conservatives attacked rock and roll, burning piles of records. In Wetumpka 75 carloads of Citizens’ Council members surrounded a drive-in movie showing Islands in the Sun, starring Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine. They cut off power to the theater, attacked journalists, and announced de¤antly in a tradition that anticipated cultural ethnic cleansing from later in the century: “Niggers may run wild in Montgomery, but Elmore County is going to take care of itself.”9 Poor whites might dislike the latter-day music of poor blacks, but their musical histories ran along parallel lines. As with black musicians, sacred harp a cappella harmonies stood in the shadows of popular white music. Alton (1908) and Rabon (1916) Delmore were the 8th and 10th children



born to an Elkmont tenant farm family. Their uncle wrote hymns and taught singing, and the Delmore brothers learned four-part harmony by reading shape notes. In®uenced also by the bluesy style of Jimmie Rodgers, the Delmore brothers began singing duets in the 1920s and won the 1930 Athens ¤ddle festival. Signed to a contract by Columbia Records in 1931, they recorded two original songs, “Alabama Lullaby” and “Got the Kansas City Blues.” While performing on the Grand Ole Opry during the 1930s, they made more records than any other group and received more fan mail than any performer other than Dave Macon. They brought their highpitched voices and bluesy guitar-picking to Birmingham in 1940, then to Cincinnati’s famous Boone County Jamboree, where they added Pine Top Smith’s boogie-woogie beat to their repertoire. Never sophisticated musicians nor shrewd businessmen, they lost legal control of many of their hits but still emerged as one of the most important groups in country music history: the ¤rst successful country duet; one of the ¤rst to have music crossover from one audience to another; the ¤rst to introduce a boogie beat to country music, thus anticipating rockabilly. The Delmore brothers strongly in®uenced the Louvin brothers. Descended from a German immigrant whose son moved to Sand Mountain, Ira (1924) and Charlie (1927) Loudermilk grew up on a hardscrabble farm near Henagar. Their father played a ¤ve-string banjo in the traditional “claw-hammer” Appalachian style; an uncle played the guitar, ¤ddle, and mandolin; and their mother’s family were renowned shape note singers. Without formal musical training, they began to play a variety of instruments and sing close harmony. In®uenced by the A. P. Carter family, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, and the Delmore brothers, they began to perform professionally in 1940 under the stage name the Louvin brothers. After service in World War II and Korea, the brothers returned to the stage. Their popularity peaked during the 1950s, when they earned as much as $2,000 a performance and worked with a young Elvis Presley. Voted the most frequently played country group by disc jockeys, fans also selected them the best country and gospel duet. They recorded 22 top country hits, including “When I Stop Dreaming,” and in®uenced such country stars as Emmylou Harris. Hank Williams was a contemporary of the Louvin brothers, born in Georgiana to a disabled World War I veteran and church musician in 1923.



His mother taught him gospel music, and a trained black musician, Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, introduced Williams to blues. He made his public debut in 1939, singing “WPA Blues” at Montgomery’s Empire Theater. After Williams moved to Nashville during the 1940s, he began to write songs that earned him the nickname bestowed by Time magazine, the “hillbilly Shakespeare.” An instant hit on the Grand Ole Opry, Williams could electrify an audience like few other country musicians. His songs ran the gamut from gospel to honky-tonk, sentimental lonesome to beer-drinking womanizing. Grafting new electri¤ed instruments onto traditional church music produced a new sound, just as his mixture of white and black forms did. The Acuff-Rose list of his complete works included “Jesus Died for Me,” “Jesus Remembered Me,” “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels,” as well as “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “I Can’t Help It,” “Jambalaya,” “Kaw-Liga,” “Ramblin’ Man,” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” At the peak of his career in 1952 he dominated country music charts. A musician poorly educated in basic techniques and without melodic subtleties, Williams concentrated on lyrics and warned about “good guitar players who’ve educated themselves right out of a job.”10 But his lyrics at their best justi¤ed his nickname: “Did you ever see a robin weep when leaves begin to die? That means he’s lost the will to live. I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Offstage Williams’s life disintegrated. Af®icted with a spinal birth defect, he lived in constant pain, which he sought to deaden with alcohol and drugs. His marriage disintegrated; he fathered an illegitimate daughter; he appeared before adoring audiences so drunk he could not remember his own lyrics and they began to boo him offstage. The Opry ¤red him, and on New Year’s Day 1953 (or perhaps the night before), he died in the backseat of his car at the age of 29 on the way to a performance. For the 25,000 who crowded Montgomery for his funeral and the 11 million southerners who left the region for northern industrial jobs after 1945 (people “stuck up here with Dixie” on their minds) Williams became an authentic voice of protest and identity. One of the most popular venues for young Alabama musicians was the Athens ¤ddler’s convention. Begun in 1924, the event propelled numerous groups like the Delmore brothers to fame and a few to fortune. Mainly, though, it afforded important recognition that the winner was a talented person, highly regarded by friends and neighbors. In 1967 the Athens fes-



tival became the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention and was considered one of the nation’s premier old-time musical events. Winners included ¤ddlers such as Charlie Stripling (1896–1966) of Pickens County who recorded 16 tunes in Chicago in 1929 (including “Wolves a-Howling,” which established him as one of the greatest American ¤ddlers of all time). When Carl Carmer, a New York native teaching at the University of Alabama, set out to capture the essence of Alabama culture in his 1934 book Stars Fell on Alabama, he spent much space describing a barn dance and ¤ddle contest in Valleyhead, a community tucked into the mountains of northeastern Alabama. His account did justice to the frenzied excitement that Stripling, D. Dix Hollis, Y. Z. Hamilton, “Fiddling” Tom Freeman, and “Monkey” Brown could generate with “¤ddle and well-rosined bow.” The fact that the Athens festival thrived on the ¤rst Saturday of October, a day normally reserved for Auburn or Alabama football, demonstrated as no other evidence could how much ordinary people valued traditional country music. During the 1930s Alabama’s white folk music tradition found its way out of state in a new way. A band and square dance group formed by white sharecroppers in the new Skyline Farms Resettlement Community northwest of Scottsboro received an invitation to play at the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt invited them to entertain 2,300 women government executives at a lawn party in 1937. The band, playing old-time favorites like “Alabama Jubilee” and “Old Rattler,” wowed the ladies as well as music critics and earned an encore, playing for FDR and guests on the presidential yacht sailing down the Potomac. Alan Lomax recorded them for the Archive of American Folk Music; Charles Seeger praised them; and pioneer folk music specialist Bascom Lunsford of Asheville, North Carolina, became their unof¤cial promoter. Though none of the musicians turned professional and only two of the Skyline farm families (out of 200) obtained ownership of their own farms, they immensely enjoyed their legendary 15 minutes of fame. One of Alabama’s most famous musical ¤gures was not a performer himself. But he was America’s preeminent musical facilitator. Sam Phillips, a native of Florence, founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952. He literally ful¤lled his motto, We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, working with untrained musicians and marketing their unique talents. Ignoring



racial divisions, he blended the South’s racial music—blues, rhythm and blues, country and western, gospel—into a new form: rock and roll. In 1951 he recorded the ¤rst rock-and-roll song, and later discovered, recorded, or both Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Howlin’ Wolf, and Charlie Rich. Though none matched the fame or in®uence of Sun Studio, a series of recording studios in Muscle Shoals provided other avenues to fame. Dexter Johnson began the ¤rst Shoals-era studio in 1951. In time, a half dozen others recorded musical groups from around the world (including Baldwin County’s Jimmy Buffett, Tuscaloosa’s Dinah Washington, Birmingham’s Emmylou Harris, the band Alabama, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan). British rock stars such as the Rolling Stones and Stevie Winwood picked up the Muscle Shoals sound, as did some Motown artists who came south looking for new music. That white, mainly rural and small-town musicians supplied that sound is another irony in the cultural intersection of black and white worlds. Founded by Randy Owen and cousins Jeffrey Alan Cook, Mark Herndon, and Teddy Wayne Gentry, the popular band Alabama originated on Sand Mountain, where the fertility of the musical heritage so greatly exceeded the fertility of the soil. Gentry originally named his band for the area’s most successful agricultural business, the Sand Mountain Chicken Pluckers; happily the name did not stick. Band members ¤nally settled on a simpler title for their group: Alabama. All members of the band came from working-class families in the Fort Payne area. Randy Owens’s father was a tenant farmer who loved poetry and read the Bible aloud to his family despite having no high school education. Randy Owen dropped out of high school as well, but two years of picking cotton convinced him school was not such a bad idea. By the 1980s Alabama had become a super nova in the ¤rmament of country music. Hits such as “Mountain Music,” “My Home’s in Alabama,” and “Dixieland Delight” won the group entertainer of the year awards from the Country Music Association for ¤ve consecutive years. Heavily in®uenced by their neighbors, the Louvin brothers, Alabama had sold 16 million albums by 1986 and drew more than 50,000 fans to Fort Payne for their annual June Jam, which funded local charities. When the Alabama Music Hall of Fame opened at Muscle Shoals in



1990, it had no shortage of candidates: W. C. Handy, Nat King Cole, Erskine Hawkins, Fess Whatley, James Reece Europe, Hank Williams Jr. and Sr., Toni Tennille, Sam Phillips, Randy Owen, Mark Herndon, Teddy Gentry, Jeff Cook, Lionel Richie, Jim Nabors, Emmylou Harris, and Tammy Wynette. The names suggest how country morphed into popular music. But even the Grand Ole Opry never featured “pure” country music, which is one reason old-timers such as the Delmore brothers never felt entirely comfortable there. Old-time ¤ddle and gospel tunes gave way to bluegrass, then evolved into other forms—rockabilly, outlaw, honky-tonk. Fiddling John Carson’s 1934 tune “Ain’t No Bugs on Me” ridiculed evolutionary biology and the Ku Klux Klan, and lampooned the commercialism of popular revivalists like Billy Sunday, all in the same song. Even liberated (at least slightly) women got in their licks: Loretta Lynn recorded a 1966 hit “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind.” By the 1990s country music had become one of the most unifying cultural elements of American life, matched ironically by jazz. It told in lyrical form—like Ned Cobb and a thousand other ordinary Alabama storytellers —accounts of people, places, experiences, and feelings. It was less and less related to rural places such as Sand Mountain, though its genesis may have been there. Screechy ¤ddles and high-pitched nasal twangs might still be heard at the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention but not in Muscle Shoals recording studios. And one is as likely to hear the music on a station in New York City as in Northport, Alabama. If a family from Shef¤eld is driving to Seattle, there are two threads that will be constant in their journey. They will always be able to tune their radio to National Public Radio or ¤nd a country music station. And if they listen long enough to country stations in Oklahoma, Kansas, Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming, sooner or later they will hear the familiar twang of some singer from downhome Alabama. Crafts The nature of time and the absence of money in rural societies combined to create a rich craft heritage. What poor rural people needed, they either made or traded for. Especially after crops were laid by in summer and dur-



ing winter months, they turned their attention to quilting, pottery, basket making, or some other useful enterprise. Some became so pro¤cient that their efforts produced a specialized cottage industry from which they derived precious income. Occasionally, a craftsperson became so expert he or she could forsake farming altogether. The interaction between folk and elite cultures is always complicated, especially in the world of arts and crafts. Although ordinary black and white families had crafted specialized baskets to carry cotton, eggs, wool, and other objects for generations, the practice had declined with the rise of standardized mass-produced products. Then in the 1920s home demonstration agents from land grant colleges began to teach rural women how to make and market pine-needle baskets. Woven from the needles of the disappearing longleaf pine, the baskets quickly became a staple of rural women. By 1929 four women in Perry and Pickens counties made $74 selling pine-needle baskets. A woman in Autauga County made 37 baskets that earned her $36 and won ¤rst prize at the state fair. The craft reached its zenith in Clay County. In 1927 500 women organized the Clay County Basket Association and marketed $13,000 dollars worth of pine-needle baskets at 13 farmers’ markets. The project was so successful that the state home demonstration director added a home industries specialist to her staff. Home demonstration agents uni¤ed, coordinated, and expanded the craft beginning in 1926. Two Chicago women became interested in marketing pine-needle baskets in the Windy City, accounting for many of the sales in department stores there. In New York City, shops on 5th Avenue, Broadway, and Savoy Plaza sold the baskets. Articles about the women and their craft appeared in Alabama newspapers as well as papers in Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Progressive Farmer magazine also carried a story about basketry. Fame did not often reach into Clay County, especially to its poor white women, so the attention was as welcome as the income. So was the bonding of rural women who often worked together at their “basket shop,” socializing as they labored. But the money was not incidental to their lives either. The $31,000 dollars they earned between 1926 and 1929 resulted in signi¤cant improvements in 500 Clay County homes. By 1935 nearly 5,000 Alabama



women were engaged in handicraft programs, making baskets, bedspreads, and hooked rugs. White oak baskets were considered largely man’s work though some women made them as well. Cutting straight white oak trees, carrying them out of the woods, quartering the tree, and separating splints to weave was arduous, exacting work. But the result was a large, sturdy cotton basket that was both aesthetically attractive and amazingly durable. Widespread early in the century among both black and white rural people (including storyteller Ned Cobb), the craft declined after 1940 with the perfection of the automatic cotton-picking machine, which made cotton baskets unnecessary. In rural Lee County, Emphel Paradise (nicknamed “Hump” by his father after a character in a children’s song) began making white oak baskets when a heart condition disabled him from picking cotton. He made enough to send all of his children to college, though not one of them practiced his craft. Pottery, like basket making, had a venerable history but slowly gave way to standardized machine-produced vessels sold in department stores. Miller’s pottery near Centreville traced its history back to the Civil War, and Steve Miller represented the sixth generation of potters to make beautiful, utilitarian jugs, churns, and decorative clay items. Jerry Brown of Hamilton, a ninth-generation potter, was honored at the National Heritage Fellowship Program of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. Lane Latham lived south of Centreville and learned how to build rocking chairs from Hamp Barnett, a neighbor. After a temporary job in New Orleans ended, Latham returned to his 40-acre Chilton County farm near Maplesville and began making rocking chairs during the spring and summer around winter work driving a bulldozer. It took him two days to craft a large rocking chair from ash, oak or hickory, and he produced between 100 and 150 a year, advertising only by word of mouth and a sign on a main road near his house. Other rural craftsmen also survived through high-quality, handcrafted workmanship. In Flat Rock on Sand Mountain, Elbert “Moe” Poore was one of 12 leather saddle makers on his stretch of highway alone. Broom maker George Jones Jr. of Florence continued a family craft begun by his great-grandfather, selling handmade brooms at shops and festivals through-



out the Southeast. Arlin Moon of Holly Pond began making musical instruments during the Depression. In addition to forming a family band, Moon made ¤ddles, mandolins, and banjos from local cherry, dogwood, and walnut. Of all the folk crafts surviving in Alabama, none had more aesthetic appeal and variety than quilting. Although local quilting guilds sprang up across Alabama to preserve a laborious women’s craft in danger of disappearing, the most famous traditional quilters group was the Freedom Quilting Bee of Wilcox County. Gee’s Bend was a small, remote, black community located in a bend of the Alabama River south of Camden. In the 1930s Gee’s Bend contained 700 blacks and 1 white family. Most of the blacks were sharecroppers. Attention turned to the community in the late 1930s when the Resettlement Administration bought 10,000 acres and began to prepare black families for private ownership of small plots. Although the community remained tight-knit—centered in the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church whose music and worship re®ected the individuality and spirituality of the residents—prosperity eluded them. Quilting was a part of Gee’s Bend culture that not only endured but thrived. Built around marriage traditions (quilts were provided to newly formed families), utility (cold nights in poorly constructed cabins with wood-burning stoves or ¤replaces required lots of cover), and aesthetics (women handed down traditional patterns from generation to generation), quilts combined black traditions familiar to jazz and folk art: immediacy, spontaneity, individualism, religious visions, invention, improvisation, ingenuity, humor, contemplation, sentimentality, emotion, nostalgia, and a culture that used every scrap of salvage materials. Black language, ¤lled with metaphor, allusion, double entendre, riddle, and pun, found aesthetic expression in quilts. The relationship of women to nature and to each other also ¤gured in the quilting tradition, because quilting could be a solitary or a collective endeavor. Individual patterns drew on tradition, nature, religion, and current events. Intricate geometric ¤gures crafted from strips of color created magni¤cent bursts of light to illuminate a world that could be frighteningly bleak, drab, and harsh. Familiar patterns, especially among numerous members of the Pettway family, reappeared in quilts from generation to generation. Yet each woman expressed her individuality in stitches, material, form, and



color. And some used no pattern at all, giving way entirely to the utilitarian urgency for a crazy quilt on a cold Alabama night. During the civil rights movement, white of¤cials in Wilcox County (which had not a single registered black voter) cut off ferry service across the Alabama River to Gee’s Bend, leaving the community isolated. The former ¤ve-mile ferry trip became a two-and-a-half hour round-trip ride to Camden in order to shop, register, attend school, or vote. Episcopal priest and civil rights activist Francis X. Walter, head of the Selma Inter-religious Project, conceived the idea of Freedom Quilting Bee in 1965 as a way to supplement income for the community’s traditional quilters. He established a cooperative at Camden’s black Antioch Baptist Church and obtained a $20,000 contract from Bloomingdale’s in New York City to sell quilts. The Gee’s Bend sewing center provided a home for new sewing machines and a place to store fabrics, frames, and quilts. Following the building’s dedication, the women went to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church for a worship service of thanksgiving. Bloomingdale’s sales, beginning in 1969, were initially brisk; but problems soon developed. Women in Gee’s Bend resented standardization and pressure to produce large numbers of quilts in a short time. Department stores complained about inconsistent workmanship and inadequate quality control. Foreign-made quilts undercut the market, and Freedom Quilting Bee increasingly turned to mass-produced potholders, aprons, and smaller, cheaper products. Although Gee’s Bend women exhibited their quilts at the Smithsonian Museum and had them featured in magazines and newspapers such as Vogue, House and Garden, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, they could not sustain the work ¤nancially. But the best of Alabama’s quilters—women such as Nora Ezell, who was honored in 1992 with a National Heritage Fellowship—won national recognition. In 1995 the Birmingham Museum produced a catalog to accompany its Made in Alabama exhibit, the ¤rst systematic attempt to record and display the state’s phenomenal heritage of craftsmanship. Citizens were surprised at the breadth and variety of the state’s traditional crafts, and took justi¤able pride in folk traditions still alive in Alabama. Other museums—especially the Archives of American Minority Cultures at the University of Alabama and the Montgomery Museum of Art—began to collect folk crafts. The Alabama Folklife Association began in 1980 to celebrate, preserve, and en-



courage folk arts and crafts. The Alabama State Council on the Arts focused attention on the folkish component of Alabama aesthetics, leveraging important publicity, resources, and state endorsement for craftspeople. Such recognition allowed craftspeople to earn signi¤cant income from their work. For descendants of such people, the attention was a reminder that rural poverty was a two-edged sword, requiring aesthetic ingenuity and improvisation even as it deprived people of standardized, store-bought items. Self-Taught Art No single art form demonstrated this point better than self-taught, or outsider, art. So-called because the artists had no formal art training, this sub¤eld ®ourished in the post–Second World War era. Like storyteller Ned Cobb, outsider artists related their own narrative, though visually. Known by a variety of names—self-taught art, visionary art, art brut, outsider art, contemporary folk art—the genre became highly valued by contemporary art collectors even if little appreciated by less-informed Americans. Casual observers often compared primitive art to drawings their children did, which found their way to a million of¤ce walls and refrigerator doors but not to museums. Actually, many self-taught artists produced extraordinary art with ordinary materials: mud, hay, clay, Masonite, surplus metal, plywood, sticks, sugar, and paint. During the last half of the 20th century, the best Alabama outsider artists—Howard Finster, Bill Traylor, Mose Tolliver (Mose T), Jimmie Lee Sudduth, Charlie Lucas, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Bernice Sims, Myrtice West—gained a place within mainstream American art and were purchased by private collectors as well as by prestigious museums. Nancy Reagan owned paintings by Mose T; the Yard Dog Folk Art Gallery in Austin, Texas, promoted and sold Alabama outsider art; and the Smithsonian featured their work at art festivals. Outsider art tended to be intensely personal, autobiographical, and direct. Many artists expressed a sense of divine calling, interpreting prophetic visions to a world on the way to damnation. Alabama’s strong heritage of ruralism, poverty, poor education, the importance of unconventional religion, literalistic biblical revelation, acceptance of eccentric people and ideas, all made the state a particularly fertile womb for such artists.



Howard Finster, though born in Valley Head (northeast Alabama), made his reputation with a visionary two-acre sculpture park called Paradise Garden near Summerville, Georgia. One of 13 children of a timber worker, Finster completed only six years of schooling before dropping out and preaching in country churches. His work in carpentry factories and mills taught him techniques useful in his visionary paintings of heaven and hell. Often using Scripture as an intrinsic part of his creations, Finster crafted art from religious visions. Bill Traylor and Mose T epitomized black traditions of self-taught art. Traylor was born a slave in 1856 in Lowndes County. Trapped into the world of sharecropping by his illiteracy, he ¤nally left the plantation in the mid-1930s when the last descendants of the plantation owners died and he no longer felt loyalty to the family. He moved to Montgomery where he set up a “sidewalk studio,” sleeping in the back of a funeral home and shoe repair shop. White artist Charles Shannon “discovered” Traylor’s pencil and straightedge drawings on scraps of cardboard during the 1930s and mounted an exhibition of his work in 1940. Traylor produced 1,200 to 1,500 drawings during a burst of energy between 1939 and 1942, most based on memories of his early life—hunting, ¤shing, drinking—but creating as well fantastical geometrical creatures born from within his imagination. The connection of Traylor’s art to Ned Cobb’s stories is obvious; one related the narrative in words, the other in art. The prestigious Corcoran Gallery in Washington staged a famous exhibition, Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980, in 1982 that featured many of Traylor’s drawings and established him as a major ¤gure in 20th-century folk art. The career of Bill Traylor also raised the important issue of the relationship between folk artist and elite patron. Charles Shannon, a gifted artist himself, bought a thousand or so of Traylor’s drawings, which became a priceless collection by the time of Traylor’s death in 1949. Some critics claimed such relationships were inherently exploitative; others just as ¤ercely disagreed, leaving the issue unresolved in art circles. As self-taught art matured, it also became more diverse. Like Traylor, Thornton Dial of Bessemer was illiterate, though he learned enough to hold down a steady job at Pullman Standard making railroad cars. Using tin cans, cement, spare parts, and other salvage materials, he specialized in



painting wild animals because, he said, life is a struggle. He enjoyed an unusual one-man show at the Museum of American Folk Art and sold a single piece of art for nearly $100,000. Lonnie B. Holley of Birmingham and Charlie Lucas of Lowndes and Autauga Counties used salvage materials in their sculptures. Holley crafted sandstone creations in his yard near the city’s airport, and Lucas welded metal pieces in his yard. Jimmie Lee Sudduth of Fayette County, one of two Alabama artists invited to the 1976 Bicentennial Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, used charcoal and mud as the medium for his art. Son of a herb doctor mother, he also lacked formal education. Mose Tolliver of Montgomery, like Sudduth, Lucas, and Holley, was a poorly educated black man. He used house paint on plywood to depict birds, snakes, and people. His work, like Traylor’s, found its way into the 1982 Corcoran exhibition. Bernice Sims of Georgiana drew her inspiration not only from religion but also from the civil rights movement. Her bright colors added an inspirational, almost visionary dimension to the 1965 attack on marchers at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and to assaults on Birmingham’s child demonstrators. Myrtice West, born at Centre in Cherokee County, preached the gospel as well as painted it. Called by God to paint as surely as she felt called to preach, much of her art incorporated the apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation. West, a white woman, quit school at 17 to marry a sharecropper and completed only the eighth grade. Like Bernice Sims, civil rights events shaped her art, but from another angle. She painted numerous portraits of George C. Wallace, her favorite politician. Dozens of other self-taught artists, both black and white, thrived in the state by century’s end. Alabama, in fact, became one of the seedbeds for such art, a testimony to the richness, vitality, persistence, and variety of its folk culture. Although Alabama’s trained artists did not ®ourish in the same way as folk artists, the state was no wasteland for them either. At the beginning of the century, the poet-painter Maria Howard Weeden dominated the state’s art scene. Born into a wealthy Huntsville family in 1847, she studied art with William Frye. Her artistic vision was rooted in slavery and the Jim Crow era. Her poetry was often patronizing, in some cases even racially



insulting. But her accompanying illustrations of black men and women broke with minstrel show stereotypes, depicting resilient survivors of a variety of abuses. Her articles and illustrations began appearing in a Presbyterian newspaper in the late 1860s, and she survived Reconstruction by selling hand-painted cards. But her ®owering came early in the next century. Beginning with Shadows on the Wall, which contained 11 exquisite portraits of African Americans and won acclaim from New York Times art critics, she produced a number of books combining illustrations with poetry before her death in 1905: Bandanna Ballads, Songs of the Old South, Old Voices. The state’s premier professionally trained artist, William Christenberry, was also its most eclectic. Mastering abstract as well as traditional art forms, equally comfortable with camera, paint, or Black Belt clay, wood, or metal, he sculpted, painted, assembled, and crafted a phenomenal testament to Alabama’s Black Belt. For all its economic decline, racial polarization, and environmental degradation, the old plantation belt received kind and tender treatment from its chief interpreter. Annually returning to the Black Belt to recharge his aesthetic batteries, Christenberry would promptly leave again to afford himself the objectivity that was dif¤cult to achieve when living in the state among relatives so shaped by the region. By recording the loss of familiar signs, buildings, guideposts, and people, he captured the tragedy and contingency of life as well as its persistence and endurance. Like award-winning Perry and Dallas Counties author Mary Ward Brown’s short stories, Christenberry’s art reminded Alabamians that they could draw from the past but must not live in it or let it de¤ne them. Among the nostalgia for home place, Brown and Christenberry remind us that home could be a grim, mean, unkind residence for both blacks and whites. And try as hard as they can to shed a hoary racial past, modern Alabamians will be a long time slipping out of the old skin. In one of Christenberry’s ¤nest artistic metaphors, he rescued his grandfather’s wall calendar, which recorded both the daily events and celebrations of life as well as his son’s suicide. If Ward was the Black Belt’s Shakespeare and Christenberry its Vincent van Gogh, Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee was its Christopher Wren. Though a native Mississippian, Mockbee graduated from Auburn University’s College of Architecture. After designing buildings for wealthy businessmen



and private clients, he returned to his alma mater to teach, seeking a different de¤nition of architecture. His vision was both educational and social: to remove students from the materialistic world of wealthy clients and introduce them to poor people who wanted decent, aesthetic, pleasing houses to live in; to teach them how to design economical but beautiful structures out of salvage materials for the state’s poorest black residents. Taking his Rural Studio to the symbolic capital of the Black Belt, Hale County (where Agee, Evans, and Christenberry had preceded him), Mockbee and his students built an enduring architectural legacy and de¤ned how universities must reach out beyond traditional constituencies. No single Alabama academic program of the late 20th century attracted so much favorable press: the New York Times did a multiple-page article; Architectural Digest featured the Rural Studio; documentary ¤lmmakers recorded the projects; the MacArthur Foundation awarded Mockbee one of its richly endowed genius awards in 2000, which Mockbee characteristically used to help fund his work. Before his tragic death early in the new century, Mockbee was well on his way to rede¤ning the relationship of architecture to poor Americans. In 2003 the American Institute of Architects awarded him posthumously its Gold Medal for lifetime achievements, recognizing him as one of the nation’s most in®uential architects. Previous award recipients include Thomas Jefferson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I. M. Pei. The photographer Chip Cooper, along with Christenberry, recorded the Black Belt’s natural beauty. Preferring color to black-and-white ¤lm, Cooper sought to balance the racism of the past with the beauty and decency of a new generation of Alabamians. An environmentalist by commitment and head of photography for University Relations at the University of Alabama, Cooper’s books—Hunting: The Southern Tradition, Alabama Memories, Silent in the Land—demonstrated not only the excellence of his photography but also the high level of ¤ne book production in the state. If the Black Belt seemed both Alabama’s most intractable socioeconomic problem and the seedbed for so much of its aesthetic sensibility, other places spawned ¤ne art as well. In 1926 Roderick MacKenzie began painting a mural depicting the state’s history on the interior rotunda of the capitol. Seven years later, P. H. Polk became head of Tuskegee Institute’s photography division. His two-decades-long career documenting rural Alabama is unexcelled as a photographic narrative of the state, matching the marvel-



ous work by nonsouthern artists working for the Farm Security Administration. In 1933 Kelly Fitzpatrick established the Dixie Art Colony near Wetumpka as a training ground and launching pad for young artists. Birmingham belatedly founded an art museum in 1951, and 15 years later opened the Alabama School of Fine Arts (the same year the state established the Alabama State Council on the Arts). Northport began its highly successful Kentuck Festival of the Arts in 1971, and the following year Huntsville artist David Parrish held a one-man show in New York City, marking his emergence as a leading painter in the photorealistic style. The art museum in his hometown moved into a new $8 million building in 1998, and that same year the Alabama State Board of Education approved the ¤rst comprehensive art curriculum for the state’s public schools. In 1987 Montgomery philanthropist Winton Blount donated 35 acres in his ASF cultural park for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, contributing much of his $15 million collection of American art in addition to some $20 million for the cultural park. Alabama’s cultural triumphs balanced the sullied reputation of a state that trailed, languished, and failed in so many political, economic, and educational categories during the 20th century. Well-educated, formally trained writers and artists produced a fair share of those triumphs. Even more emanated from folk artists. They seemed to tap into some subterranean aesthetic river, releasing a seemingly inexhaustible spring of the spirit. Like healing waters, their stories, music, and art repaired wounds of poverty, deprivation, racial division, negative stereotypes, and a reputation for backwardness. And in a sense, what was worst about Alabama and what was best traced their origins to a common place: the ordinary people of an extraordinary state.



Notes

Introduction 1. Mobile Daily Register, December 30, 1899. 2. Ibid., January 1, 1901. 3. Birmingham Age-Herald, December 30, 1900, January 1, 1901.

Chapter One Dabney Palmer’s letter to his granddaughter at the University of Alabama, which begins this chapter, courtesy of Roselyn Martindale. 1. Quoted in Malcolm C. McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798–1901: A Study of Politics, Sectionalism, and the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 225 n. 49. Though half a century old, McMillan’s work remains the most thorough treatment of the 1901 constitution. 2. Of¤cial Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama, May 21, 1901, to September 3, 1901, 1:538–42. 3. Quoted in McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 293, 295 n. 67. 4. Tuscaloosa American, July 28, 1898, quoted in McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 254. 5. Quoted in McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 305. 6. Montgomery Advertiser, November 5, 7, 10, 1901. 7. Choctaw Advocate, quoted in Montgomery Advertiser, November 6, 1901; Mobile Daily Register, November 3, 1901; Birmingham Age-Herald, November 5, 6, 10, 1901. 8. Quoted in McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 269, esp. n. 41. 9. Bailey Thomson, “Absurd in Alabama,” “Century of Shame,” Mobile Register, October 20, 2000. A shorter version of my chapter, incorporating many of


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Thomson’s ¤ndings, was published in A Century of Controversy: Constitutional Reform in Alabama, ed. Bailey Thomson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

Chapter Two 1. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 36. 2. John Hayman with Clara Ruth Hayman, A Judge in the Senate: Howell He®in’s Career of Politics and Principle (Montgomery: New South Books, 2001), 365. 3. Sam Hodges, B-Four (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 29. 4. James F. Doster, Railroads in Alabama Politics, 1875–1914 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1957), 177. 5. MS of speech by Edgar Gardner Murphy to Alabama Legislature on July 8, 1907, Edgar Gardner Murphy Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 6. Quoted in David A. Harris, “Racists and Reformers: A Study of Progressivism in Alabama, 1896–1911,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1967, 315. 7. Hugh Reagan, “The Presidential Campaign of 1928 in Alabama,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1961, 411. 8. Quoted in Elizabeth Bower Clark, “The Abolition of the Convict Lease System in Alabama, 1913–1928,” master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1949, 54–57. 9. These quotations are found in Clark, “Abolition of the Convict Lease System,” 94–96. 10. Quoted in Ralph M. Tanner, “James Thomas He®in: United States Senator, 1920–1931,” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1967, 6. 11. Quoted in Ralph M. Tanner, “The Wonderful World of Tom He®in,” Alabama Review 36 (July 1983), 100, 113–14, 117, 147. 12. Quoted in Lee N. Allen, “The 1924 Underwood Campaign in Alabama,” Alabama Review 9 (July 1956): 88. 13. J. A. Estes to O. W. Underwood, April 26, 1920, Oscar Underwood Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 14. Birmingham News, March 28, 1920. 15. Oscar W. Underwood to Thomas F. Ryan, May 14, 1920, Underwood Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 16. Daniel W. Hollis III, “The Hall Family and Twentieth-Century Journalism in Alabama,” Alabama Review 32 (April 1979): 125–26, 129. 17. Daniel W. Hollis III, An Alabama Newspaper Tradition: Grover C. Hall and the Hall Family (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983), 135.


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18. Mrs. John Van Vorst, The Cry of the Children: A Study of Child Labor (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908), 20–21. 19. Dwayne Cox, “Luther N. Duncan, the Extension Service, and the Farm Bureau, 1921–1932,” Alabama Review 51 (July 1998), 197. 20. Owen Dees, “A General Review of the Miller Administration, 1931–1935,” master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1936, 60, 83. 21. John A. Salmond, “‘Aubrey Williams Remembers’: A Note on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Attitude toward Negro Rights,” Alabama Review 25 (January 1972): 62. 22. John A. Salmond, A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Willis Williams, 1890–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 279–80. 23. Quoted in Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, “James E. Folsom, 1947– 1951, 1955–1959,” in Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State, ed. Samuel L. Webb and Margaret E. Armbrester (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2001), 203. 24. Quoted in Hugh Merrill, “Jim Folsom,” Atlanta Weekly, April 25, 1982. 25. Quoted in Allen Cronenberg, Forth to the Mighty Con®ict: Alabama and World War II (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 63. 26. Both quotes in William D. Barnard, Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942–1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 58, 3. 27. Quoted in Nicholas H. Cobbs Jr., “Hamner Cobbs as Editor of the Greensboro Watchman,” Alabama Review 39 (October 1986): 264. 28. Oral history by Dwayne Cox with J. D. Hayes, Auburn University Archives, 4. 29. Quoted in William A. Nunnelly, Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 30. 30. Quoted in Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 137. 31. Birmingham News, December 22, 1996. 32. David L. Martin, “Alabama: Personalities and Factionalism,” in Interest Group Politics in the Southern States, ed. Ronald J. Hrebenar and Clive S. Thomas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 261–62. 33. New York Times, April 25, 1993; Birmingham Post-Herald, January 3, 1993. 34. Birmingham News, July 15, 1990; Mobile Register, July 30, 1995. 35. New York Times, March 20, 2001. 36. Quoted in Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George C. Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 103, 105. 37. George O. McMillan to Governor Wallace, March 15, 1965, State Sovereignty Commission Papers, Administrative Files, Box 5.


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38. J. M. Bell to George Wallace, September 18, 1965, ibid. 39. Eli Howell to Board of Directors, LECRA, September 6, 1967, ibid., Box 1. 40. Mrs. William F. Keppy to George C. Wallace, April 28, 1965, ibid., Box 5. 41. Quoted in Carter, The Politics of Rage, 211. 42. Birmingham Post-Herald, April 15, 2000. 43. Montgomery Advertiser, May 1, 1970. 44. Carl Elliott to Albert Brewer, June 3, 1970, Governor Albert Brewer Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History. 45. Birmingham News, November 15, 1989.

Chapter Three 1. I am grateful to Professor David Carlton of Vanderbilt University for sharing an excellent paper that he presented to the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Saint George Tucker Society in August 2000. The paper, entitled “The American South and the American Manufacturing Belt,” forms the framework for my introduction to Alabama’s economy. Indeed many of Carlton’s generalizations ¤t Alabama even better than they do the South as a whole. 2. I compiled these economic data from a variety of sources over forty years. The most useful were State Rankings Reporter, Statistical Abstract of the United States, and annual reports of the Center for Demographic Research, Auburn University at Montgomery. See also “Educational Activity and Its Relationship to Economic Growth: A Study of the Southeastern United States,” Center for Economic Development and Business Research, Jacksonville State University, 1987. Newspaper coverage of the economy was also helpful. See, for instance, articles and editorials in the Birmingham News, August 16, 1998; April 25, October 5, 2001; May 24, 2002. 3. Almanac of American Politics, 1983, 1985, 1987. 4. Quoted in Theodore Saloutos, “The Alabama Farm Bureau Federation: Early Beginnings,” Alabama Review 13 (July 1960): 188. 5. Quoted in Richard W. Massey Jr., “A History of the Lumber Industry in Alabama and West Florida, 1880–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1960, 132, 136. 6. These quotes are all found in Donald Comer, Braxton Bragg Comer: An Alabamian Whose Avondale Mills Opened New Paths for Southern Progress (New York: Newcomen Society of England, American Branch, 1947), 16; quoted in Joyce M. Smith, “When the Yankees Came to Huntsville, Again, and Again, and Again . . . ,” Alabama Review 54 (April 2001): 98; Huntsville Mercury Centennial, July 23, 1916.


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7. Oral history with Mae R. N. T. (Mrs. L. A.) House by Wayne Flynt, Sylacauga, Alabama, July 10, 1974, Oral History Collection, Samford University Archives, Birmingham, Alabama. 8. Quoted in Birmingham News, October 12, 1991. 9. Quoted in Marlene H. Rikard, “George Gordon Crawford: Man of the New South,” master’s thesis, Samford University, 1971, 97. 10. Paul Terry and Verner Sims, They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama: Bureau of Education Research, 1940), 261. 11. Harold Hoffsommer to Dr. E. D. Tetreau Jr., January 10, 1934, Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) State Series, Alabama, Box 8, Record Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 12. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley, eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 212. 13. Lowitt and Beasley, One Third of a Nation, 212. 14. Quoted in Marlene Rikard, “An Experiment in Welfare Capitalism: The Health Care Service of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company,” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1983, 268–69, 276. 15. Rick Bragg, “Brown Lungs, Lost Fingers; Now a Lost Mill,” New York Times, May 16, 2001. 16. Quoted in Birmingham News, February 9, 1997. 17. Economist, March 16, 2002, 33. 18. Birmingham Post-Herald, February 19, 1996. 19. Independent, February 9, 1993. 20. Birmingham Post-Herald, November 18, 1996. 21. Quoted in the New York Times, June 24, 1997. 22. Alabama Baptist, February 13, 1941.

Chapter Four 1. Quoted in Blaine Allison Brownell, “The Urban Mind in the South: The Growth of Urban Consciousness in Southern Cities, 1920–1927,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1969, 181. 2. Quoted in Elisa Moore Baldwin, ed., Where the Wild Animals Is Plentiful: Diary of an Alabama Fur Trader’s Daughter, 1912–1914 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 26. 3. Quoted in Arthur M. Ford, The Political Economics of Rural Poverty in the South (Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing, 1973), 10.


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4. Marvin Malley Champion, “And They Called It Independent,” undated MS. in author’s possession, provided by Jean Butterworth. 5. Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin’ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), vii, xx–xxi. 6. Quoted in Edward S. LaMonte, “Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1974,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976, 117. 7. Joseph G. Kohlenberg to Harry L. Hopkins, December 18, 1934, FERA State Series, Alabama, Box 7, Record Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 8. Mobile Daily Item, October 15, 1908. 9. Quoted in Glenn Sisk, “The Poor in Provincial Alabama,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 22 (spring–summer, 1960): 101–2. 10. Alabama Baptist, December 12, 1940. 11. Quoted in Mary Dixie Dysart, “‘No Place for a Christian’: Women Inmates in Alabama Prisons, 1901–1943,” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999, 163. 12. This remarkable episode was related to me in an account made by the family. Thomas D. Hagood to Wayne Flynt, August 28, 1990, letter in author’s possession. 13. “The Power of a Grateful Life,” sermon MS, clipping from November 30, 1900, in vol. 1, scrapbooks, Edgar Gardner Murphy Papers, Alabama State Archives.

Chapter Five 1. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 398. 2. Eleanor De La Vergne Risley, The Road to Wildcat: A Tale of Southern Mountaineering (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), 40. 3. Alabama State Department of Education, Report on Illiteracy by Division of Exceptional Education, 1927 (Birmingham Printing, 1927), 14–15.

Chapter Six 1. Pattie Ruffner Jacobs diary, on micro¤lm at Samford University Archives, Birmingham, Alabama. 2. Sara May¤eld, Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971), 2. 3. Sara May¤eld, The Constant Circle: H. L. Mencken and His Friends (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 21. 4. Ibid., 166


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5. For quotations in this section on Zelda, see May¤eld, Exiles from Paradise, 11; Eleanor Lanahan, ed., Zelda: An Illustrated Life (Burlington: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), esp. 19–22. 6. Quoted in Carolyn Terry Bashaw, “‘I Shall Make Good Big’: The Algonquin Correspondence of Tallulah Bankhead, 1918–1920,” Alabama Review 54 (October 2000): 292. 7. May¤eld, The Constant Circle, 25. 8. Ibid., 26. 9. Myrtle R. Rockett to Eleanor Roosevelt, August 28, 1934, FERA State Series, Alabama, Box 6, Record Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 10. Mildred Grif¤n Yelverton, They Also Served: Twenty-¤ve Remarkable Alabama Women (Dothan: Ampersand Publishing, 1993), 156. 11. For the relationship of Alabama Farm Bureau to home demonstration work, see Elizabeth Lynne Anderson, “Improving Rural Life in Alabama: The Home Demonstration Program, 1911–1972,” master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1984, esp. 61, 63. 12. Syndicated column by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, Opelika-Auburn News, December 14, 2001. 13. Quoted in Leah Rawls Atkins, Blossoms amid the Deep Verdure: A Century of Women at Auburn (Auburn: Auburn University, [1992]), 27. 14. Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Looking for Clark Gable and Other Twentieth-Century Pursuits: Collected Essays (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 134. 15. Ruby Welsh Wilkins to Wayne Flynt, December 5, 13, 1991. 16. Birmingham News, September 30, 2002. 17. Montgomery Advertiser, November 7, 1996. 18. Virginia Durr to Jim Dombrowski, May 14, 1968, Virginia Durr Papers, Radcliffe College.

Chapter Seven 1. Quoted in Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 144. 2. Eric Lincoln, Coming through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 18, 23–25. 3. Brian Kelly, “Policing the ‘Negro Eden’: Racial Paternalism in the Alabama Coal¤elds, 1908–1921, Part 2,” Alabama Review 51 (October 1998): 255. 4. William H. Chafe et al., eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001), 231.


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5. Laborer’s Banner, February 1, 1902, in Taft Research Notes, Birmingham Public Library Archives. 6. Chafe et al., Remembering Jim Crow, 46–47. 7. Frank W. Boykin to Richard M. Nixon, November 11, 1959; Boykin to Harry S. Truman, March 28, 1960; Boykin to J. Ed Livingston, July 3, 1964; Boykin to J. Edgar Hoover, November 19, 1964; Frank W. Boykin Papers, courtesy of Hardy Jackson. 8. Quoted in Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 61. 9. Boykin to Harry S. Truman, March 28, 1960. 10. Eugene “Bull” Connor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 7, 1942; Mr. McIntyre to Eugene Connor, undated; Of¤cial File 4245g, Of¤ce of Production Management, 1941–44 (FEPC), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 11. “Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States: Section One,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover to Edwin M. Watson, September 24, 1943; FBI, Of¤cial File 10–3, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. 12. George R. Stewart, “Birmingham’s Reaction to the 1954 Desegregation Crisis,” master’s thesis, Samford University, 1967, 68, 93. 13. Quoted in Paul Hemphill, Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son (New York: Viking, 1993), 115–16. 14. William A. Nunnelley, Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 130–31. 15. Quoted in S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 242. 16. Charles Morgan Jr. A Time to Speak (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 162. 17. Quoted in John R. Snow, “The Selma Campaign: A Chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement,” master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1974, 104. 18. Quoted in ibid., 116–17, 125–26. 19. Quoted in ibid., 132. 20. New York Times, August 8, 1994. 21. Birmingham News, May 23, 2002. 22. Newsweek, December 8, 1969. 23. Birmingham News, May 12, 2000.

Chapter Eight 1. Quoted in Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 299–300.


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2. Ibid., 300. 3. William H. Amerine, Alabama’s Own in France: War Stories of the 167th U.S. Infantry (New York: Eaton and Gettinger, 1919), 56. 4. Ibid., 98. 5. Ibid., 290. 6. Ibid., 257. 7. Holland M. Smith and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 52. 8. Ibid., 14. 9. Ibid., 21, 50, 66, 137. 10. Samuel Eliot Morison, Aleutians, Gilberts, and Marshalls, June 1942–April 1944, vol. 7 in History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 88. 11. Smith and Finch, Coral and Brass, 237. 12. E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981), 28, 49. 13. Ibid., 85. 14. Ibid., 91. 15. Erik Shilling, Destiny: A Flying Tiger’s Rendezvous with Fate (privately published, 1993), 39–40. 16. Ibid., 41. 17. Birmingham News, January 18, 2001. 18. Wesley Newton, Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939–1946 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), quote on 259. 19. All casualty reports in this chapter came from the Alabama Of¤ce of Veteran’s Affairs. Other sources provide amazingly inconsistent numbers of Alabama men and women killed in U.S. wars.

Chapter Nine 1. New York Times, February 27, 2001; Birmingham News, May 16, 2001. 2. Mobile Register, November 13, 1997. 3. Montgomery Advertiser, June 23, 1937. 4. Leo Andrew Doyle, “Causes Won, Not Lost: Football and Southern Culture, 1892–1983,” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1998, 3. I have used Doyle’s excellent dissertation frequently in this section and recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection of college football and southern culture. 5. Ibid., 34–35. 6. Ibid., 195.


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7. Ibid., 196. 8. Ibid., 204. 9. Paul W. Bryant and John Underwood, Bear: The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 153. 10. Nanci Kincaid, Balls: A Novel (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1998), 237–38. 11. Ibid., 73. 12. Dallas Morning News, December 4, 1993. 13. William Bradford Huie, “How to Keep Football Stars in College,” Collier’s, January 4, 1941, 18–20, 48–49. 14. Interview with Terry Bowden, April 25, 2001, by the author; OpelikaAuburn News, September 14, 17, 18, 19, 2003. 15. Quoted in Doyle, “Causes Won, Not Lost,” 151. 16. Onion, April 12, 2000. 17. Birmingham Post-Herald, January 4, 1990. 18. For an excellent essay about Alabama’s role in NASCAR, see Pete Daniel, “Fast and Furious,” in Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 91–120. The books by Clyde Bolton, cited at the end of this work, offer a marvelous and balanced insight into the world of Alabama sports. Recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award in Sportswriting (1996), Alabama Sports Columnist of the Year (1988, 1992), and numerous other awards, especially for his articles about NASCAR and the Winston Cup, Bolton’s writing transcends athletics as a mere physical experience and examines sport for the larger role it plays in Alabama society.

Chapter Ten 1. Birmingham News, February 10, 2002. 2. Ibid., July 10, 2001. 3. Quoted in ibid., September 21, 2002. 4. Quoted in Wayne Flynt, “A Special Feeling of Closeness: Mt. Hebron Baptist Church, Leeds, Alabama,” in Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities, vol. 1 in American Congregations, ed. James Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 143, 154. 5. Paul W. Terry and Verner M. Sims, They Live on the Land: Life in an OpenCountry Southern Community (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 180. 6. Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 376.


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7. Kathleen Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 7, 11–12. 8. Herman C. Nixon, Lower Piedmont Country (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946), 85. 9. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 23, 1995. 10. Arthur F. Howington, “John Barley Corn Subdued: The Enforcement of Prohibition in Alabama,” Alabama Review 23 (July 1970): 216. 11. Alabama Baptist, September 30, 1937. 12. Charles Sweeney, “Bigotry Turns to Murder,” Nation 113 (August 31, 1921): 232. 13. Robert Strong, “Holy Week and the Civil Rights Demonstrations at the Churches,” text of sermon delivered at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Montgomery, April 11, 1965, copy in George C. Wallace Papers, Alabama State Archives. 14. Kansas City Star, February 9, 2000. 15. Birmingham News, December 19, 1999.

Chapter Eleven 1. Interview with William Christenberry, November 5, 2002, Washington, D.C., by the author. 2. Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Avon Books, 1974), 3–4. 3. “Renaissance Riffs,” Newsweek, February 5, 1996, 60–61. 4. Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (Washington: Island Press, 1994), 18, 24–25. 5. Ibid., 32. 6. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Random House, 1948), 73–74. 7. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 23. 8. “It’s the Fashion,” in The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins on Media of Dissemination, collected and ed. Ray B. Brown (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), 133, 442–43. 9. Quoted in Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 165. 10. Kent Blaser, “‘Pictures from Life’s Other Side’: Hank Williams, Country Music, and Popular Culture in America,” South Atlantic Quarterly 84 (winter 1985): 22.



Selected Bibliography

I list here only the sources from which I derived my opinions and analysis. This bibliography is in no way a comprehensive list of the works I consulted in writing this book. The list is intended for readers who wish to pursue further inquiry into the history of Alabama in the 20th century.

Chapter One Feldman, Glenn. “Toward Disfranchisement.” In undated MS tentatively entitled “Race, Class, and Politics in Alabama, 1896–1960.” I am grateful to Professor Feldman for permission to use his insightful study. Flynt, Wayne, and Keith Ward. “Taxes, Taxes, Taxes: The History of a Problem.” Alabama Heritage (spring 1992): 6–21. Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. McMillan, Malcolm C. Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798–1901: A Study of Politics, Sectionalism, and the Negro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. “A New Century, a New Constitution.” Series on 1901 Constitution and its consequences, published by Birmingham News and as special pamphlet, January 28– February 4, 2001. Proceedings and Selected Papers from the Symposium on the Alabama Constitution December 13–15, 1995. Center for Governmental Services at Auburn University with assistance from Mobile Press-Register. Rogers, William Warren. The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865–1896. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. Seidmann, Henry P. Report on a Survey of the Organization and Administration of the State and County Government of Alabama. Brookings Institution, Institute for Government Research. Montgomery: Wilson Printing, 1932. “Sin of the Fathers.” Special series on 1901 Constitution and its consequences, published by Mobile Register and as special pamphlet, December 11, 1994.


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Sparks, John. “Alabama Negro Reaction to Disfranchisement, 1901–1904.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1973. “Symposium: Celebrating the Centennial of the Alabama Constitution: An Impetus for Re®ection.” Alabama Law Review 53 (fall 2001). “Testament to a Travesty: Legacy of a Flawed Document.” Series on 1901 Constitution, published by Anniston Star, April 1–7, 2002. Thomson, Bailey. “Century of Shame: Alabama’s 1901 Constitution.” Series of editorials published in Mobile Register, October 15–22, 2000, and then separately published as pamphlet. 1, ed. A Century of Controversy: Constitutional Reform in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. “What They Won’t Tell You about Your Taxes.” Series on tax policy, published by Birmingham News and as special pamphlet, August 26–September 2, 1990.

Chapter Two Administrative Files. State Sovereignty Commission Papers. Alabama Department of History and Archives. The Alabama Report: An Independent Analysis of Trends Affecting Business and Politics. Polling analysis by year. Allen, Lee N. “The 1924 Underwood Campaign in Alabama.” Alabama Review 9 (1956): 176–87. 1. “The Underwood Presidential Movement of 1924.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1955. 1. “The Woman Suffrage Movement in Alabama, 1910–1920.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1949. Armbrester, Margaret England. “John Temple Graves II: A Southern Liberal Views the New Deal.” Alabama Review 32 (July 1979): 203–13. Ashby, Irene M. Child Labor in Alabama. Document no. 1. Report to the Executive Committee of the State, on the History of Child Labor Legislation in Alabama. Montgomery, July 1901. 1. “The Fight against Child Labor in Alabama.” American Federationist (May 1901): 150–57. Atkins, Leah R. “Senator James A. Simpson and Birmingham Politics of the 1930s: His Fight against the Spoilsmen and the Pie-Men.” Alabama Review 41 (January 1988): 3–29. Aucoin, Brent Jude. “Thomas Goode Jones, Redeemer and Reformer: The Racial Policies of a Conservative Democrat in Pursuit of a ‘New’ South, 1874–1914.” Master’s thesis, Miami University, 1993.


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Bailey, Hugh C. Edgar Gardner Murphy: Gentle Progressive. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1968. 1. Liberalism in the New South: Southern Social Reformers and the Progressive Movement. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1969. Barnard, Hollinger F., ed. Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Barnard, William D. Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942–1950. University: University of Alabama Press, 1974. 1. “George Huddleston Sr. and the Political Tradition of Birmingham.” Alabama Review 36 (October 1983): 243–58. Battles, Jason J. “Racial Politics and the 1966 Alabama Gubernatorial Election.” Alabama Review 49 (April 1996): 108–22. Bevis, John D. “Frank M. Dixon: Alabama’s Reform Governor.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1968. Biles, Roger. “The Urban South in the Great Depression.” Journal of Southern History 56 (February 1990): 91–100. Brannen, Ralph Neal. “John McDuf¤e: State Legislator, Congressman, Federal Judge, 1883–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1975. Burns, Gladys. “The Alabama Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1965. Carlton, David L., and Peter A. Coclanis. “Another Great Migration: From Region to Race in Southern Liberalism, 1938–1945.” Southern Cultures 3 (winter 1997): 37–62. Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 1. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Clark, Elizabeth Boner. “The Abolition of the Convict Lease System in Alabama, 1913–1928.” Master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1949. Cobbs, Nicholas H., Jr. “Hamner Cobbs as Editor of the Greensboro Watchman.” Alabama Review 39 (October 1986): 261–70. Cooke, Leonard C. “The Development of the Road System in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1935. Cox, Dwayne. “Luther N. Duncan, the Extension Service, and the Farm Bureau, 1921–1932.” Alabama Review 51 (July 1998): 184–97. Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Dees, Owen. “A General Review of the Miller Administration, 1931–1935.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1936.



“Dixie’s Broken Heart.” Series on tax reform in Mobile Register, October 11–18, 1998. Dodge, Timothy. “State Convict Road Gangs in Alabama.” Alabama Review 53 (October 2000): 243–70. Dooley, Vincent J. “United States Senator James Thomas He®in and the Democratic Party Revolt in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1963. Doster, James F. Railroads in Alabama Politics, 1875–1914. University: University of Alabama Press, 1957. Doyle, Alice Nelson. Compendium of Alabama Laws Relating to Women and Children. N.p.: Alabama League of Women Voters, 1921. Duke, Frank M. “The United Mine Workers of America in Alabama: Industrial Unionism and Reform Legislation, 1890–1911.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1979. Eddins, Don. AEA: Head of the Class in Alabama Politics. Montgomery: Alabama Education Association, 1997. Elliott, Carl, Sr., and Michael D’orso. The Cost of Courage: The Journey of an American Congressman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Feldman, Glenn. From Demagogue to Dixiecrat: Horace Wilkinson and the Politics of Race. New York: University Press of America, 1995. 1. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Flynt, Wayne. “The Ethics of Democratic Persuasion and the Birmingham Crisis.” Southern Speech Journal 35 (fall 1969): 40–53. 1. “Organized Labor, Reform, and Alabama Politics, 1920.” Alabama Review 23 (July 1970): 163–80. 1. Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Frederick, Jeff. “Command and Control: George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, 1963–1972.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 2003. Frederickson, Kari. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gilbert, William E. “The First Administration of Governor Bibb Graves, 1927– 1930.” Master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1953. Gilliam, Thomas J., Jr. “The Second Folsom Administration: The Destruction of Alabama Liberalism, 1954–1958.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1975. Grafton, Carl, and Anne Permaloff. “The Big Mule Alliance’s Last Good Year: Thwarting the Patterson Reforms.” Alabama Review 47 (October 1994): 243–66. 1. Big Mules and Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.



Grantham, Dewey W. Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Green, Johnny. “The Big Mules and Mercedes-Benz: Applying Regime Theory to Alabama’s Modern Political Economy.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1998. Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer. Hugo Black: The Alabama Years. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. 1. Lister Hill: Statesman from the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Harris, Carl V. Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970. Harris, David A. “Racists and Reformers: A Study of Progressivism in Alabama, 1896–1911.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1967. Hart, Hastings H. Social Progress of Alabama: A Second Study of the Social Institutions and Agencies of the State of Alabama. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1922. Harvey, Gordon E. “New South Governors and Education Reform, 1968–1976: Albert Brewer, Reubin Askew, and John West.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1998. 1. A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968–1976. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Havard, William C., ed. The Changing Politics of the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Hayman, John, with Clara Ruth Hayman. A Judge in the Senate: Howell He®in’s Career of Politics and Principle. Montgomery: New South Books, 2001. Hobbs, Dolores A. “The States’ Rights Movement of 1948.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1968. Hodges, Sam. “Frank Boykin.” Series in Mobile Register, December 16–22, 2001. Hollis, Daniel W., III. An Alabama Newspaper Tradition: Grover C. Hall and the Hall Family. University: University of Alabama Press, 1983. 1. “The Hall Family and Twentieth-Century Journalism in Alabama.” Alabama Review 32 (April 1979): 119–40. Horton, Paul. “Testing the Limits of Class Politics in Postbellum Alabama: Agrarian Radicalism in Lawrence County.” Journal of Southern History 57 (February 1991): 63–84. “How Alabama Taxes Compare.” PARCA Report 31 (fall 1997): 1–6; and 37 (fall 1999): 1–6. Ingalls, Robert P. “Antiradical Violence in Birmingham during the 1930s.” Journal of Southern History 47 (November 1981): 521–44.



Johnson, Evans C. “John H. Bankhead, 2nd: Advocate of Cotton.” Alabama Review 41 (January 1988): 30–58. 1. Oscar W. Underwood: A Political Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Kabat, Ric A. “From Camp Hill to Harvard Yard: The Early Years of Claude D. Pepper.” Florida Historical Review 72 (October 1993): 153–79. Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Key, Jack Brien. “Henry B. Steagall: The Conservative as a Reformer.” Alabama Review 17 (July 1964): 198–209. Key, V. O., Jr. Southern Politics in State and Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. King, Gladys. “History of the Alabama Convict Department.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1937. Kundahl, George G., Jr. “Organized Labor in Alabama Politics.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1967. Lamis, Alexander P. Southern Politics in the 1990s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Larson, Edward J. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Lesher, Stephan. George Wallace: American Populist. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Mancini, Matthew J. One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Martin, Charles H. “Southern Labor Relations in Transition: Gadsden, Alabama, 1930–1943.” Journal of Southern History 47 (November 1981): 545–68. Martin, David L. “Alabama: Personalities and Factionalism.” In Interest Group Politics in the Southern States, ed. Ronald J. Hreberar and Clive S. Thomas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. 1. Alabama’s State and Local Governments. 3rd ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Massey, Richard M., Jr. “A History of the Lumber Industry in Alabama and West Florida, 1880–1914.” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1960. McLeod, Jimmy R. “Methodist and Baptist Reaction to the 1928 Presidential Campaign in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1972. McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Miller, Mary Swenson. “Lobbyist for the People: The League of Women Voters in Alabama, 1920–1975.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1978.



“Money Tree or Money Pit?” Series on tax reform in Anniston Star, April 22–May 7, 2000. Newman, Roger K. Hugo Black: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Norrell, Robert J. “Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama.” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 669–94. 1. “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement.” Journal of Southern History 57 (May 1991): 201–34. Nunnelly, William A. Bull Connor. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Owen, Emily. “The Career of Thomas E. Kilby in Local and State Politics.” Master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1942. Painter, Nell Irvin. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Pegram, Thomas R. “Temperance Politics and Regional Political Culture: The Anti-Saloon League in Maryland and the South, 1907–1915.” Journal of Southern History 63 (February 1997): 57–90. Pendleton, Debbie. “New Deal Labor Policy and Alabama Textile Unionism.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1988. Pintagro, Michael R. “States’ Rights Democracy in Alabama: The Dixiecrat Rebellion of 1948.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1996. Pruitt, Paul M., Jr. “Suffer the Children: Child Labor Reform in Alabama.” Alabama Heritage 58 (fall 2000): 16–27. Ray, Susan Ingram Hunt. The Major Harwell G. Davis: Alabama Statesman and Baptist Leader. Birmingham: Samford University Press, 1996. Reagan, Hugh D. “The Presidential Campaign of 1928 in Alabama.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1961. Rogers, William Warren. The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865–1896. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. Salmond, John A. “‘Aubrey Williams Remembers’: A Note on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Attitude toward Negro Rights.” Alabama Review 25 (January 1972): 62–77. 1. The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–1975. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. 1. A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Willis Williams, 1890– 1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Schoonover, Shirley Garrett. “Alabama’s Quest for Social Justice during the Progressive Era.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1970. Sheldon, Richard N. “Richmond Pearson Hobson as a Progressive Reformer.” Alabama Review 25 (October 1972): 243–61.



Shouse, Sarah Newman. Hillbilly Realist: Herman Clarence Nixon of Possum Trot. University: University of Alabama Press, 1986. Sims, George E. The Little Man’s Big Friend: James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946–1958. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Smith, Dale C., and James Everett Voyles. “New Coalitions in Alabama Voting Patterns.” Alabama Review 27 (July 1974): 197–212. Smith, Paul M. “Loyalists and States’ Righters in the Democratic Party of Alabama, 1949–1954.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1966. Snell, William R. “The Ku Klux Klan in Jefferson County, Alabama, 1916–1930.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1967. Stein, Judith. “Southern Workers in National Unions: Birmingham Steelworkers, 1936–1951.” In Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South, ed. Robert H. Zieger, 183–222. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Sterne, Ellin. “Prostitution in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890–1925.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1977. Stovall, James G., Patrick R. Cotter, and Samuel H. Fisher III. Alabama Political Almanac. 2nd ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Streb, Matthew J. The New Electoral Politics of Race. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Tanner, Ralph M. “James Thomas He®in: United States Senator, 1920–1931.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1967. 1. “The Wonderful World of Tom He®in.” Alabama Review 36 (July 1983): 163–74. Taylor, James S. “John M. Patterson and the 1958 Alabama Gubernatorial Race.” Alabama Review 23 (July 1970): 226–34. Thomas, Mary Martha. The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Thornton, J. Mills, III. “Alabama Politics, J. Thomas He®in, and the Expulsion Movement of 1929.” Alabama Review 21 (April 1968): 83–112. 1. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 1. Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1978. U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Department of Commerce. Population, 1910. Vol. 4. Washington. D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1914. Webb, Samuel L. Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South: Alabama’s Hill Country, 1874–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Webb, Samuel L., and Margaret E. Armbrester, eds. Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.



Ward, Robert David. “The Political Career of Stanley Hubert Dent, Jr.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1951. Ware, Stephen J. “Money, Politics, and Judicial Decisions: A Case Study of Arbitration Law in Alabama.” Journal of Law and Politics 15 (fall 1999): 645–86. “What They Won’t Tell You about Your Taxes.” Series on tax reform, published by Birmingham News and as special pamphlet, August 26–September 2, 1990. Van Vorst, John, Mrs. The Cry of the Children: A Study of Child Labor. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908.

Chapter Three Adamson, Wendell M. Industrial Activity in Alabama, 1913–1932. Tuscaloosa: Bureau of Business Research, University of Alabama, 1933. Aiken, Charles S. The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Alabama, State of. Report of the Governor’s Task Force on the Development of Economically Distressed Counties. Formed Under Executive Order 15. February 22, 2001. Arrington, Richard. “Birmingham: Reality of a New South Experience.” Honors convocation address at University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1985. Backman, Jules. Bituminous Coal Wages, Pro¤ts, and Productivity. N.p., 1950. Bergstresser, Jack R., Sr. “Raw Material Constraints and Technological Options in the Mines and Furnaces of the Birmingham District, 1876–1930.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1993. Blackmon, Douglas A. “From Alabama’s Past, Capitalism Teamed with Racism to Create Cruel Partnership.” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2001. Blevins, Brooks. Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Boyte, Harry. “The Textile Industry, Keel of Southern Industrialization.” Radical America 6 (March–April 1972): 4–49. Brandes, Stuart D. American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Braunhut, Herman J. “Farm Labor Wage Rates in the South, 1909–1948.” Southern Economic Journal 16 (October 1949): 189–99. Brennan, James R. “Sawn Timber and Straw Hats: The Development of the Lumber Industry in Escambia County, Alabama, 1880–1910.” Gulf Coast Historical Review 11 (spring 1996): 41–67. Brownell, Blaine. “Birmingham, Alabama: New South City in the 1920s.” Journal of Southern History 38 (February 1972): 21–48.



Center for Business and Economic Research, University of Alabama. Economic Abstract of Alabama. Division of Research and Service, College of Commerce and Business Administration, University of Alabama, [1990?]. Chapman, Herman H. The Iron and Steel Industries of the South. University: University of Alabama Press, 1953. Childers, James Saxon. Erskine Ramsay: His Life and Achievements. New York: Cartwright and Ewing, 1942. Cobb, James C. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. 1. The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Comer, Donald. Braxton Bragg Comer (1848–1927): An Alabamian Whose Avondale Mills Opened New Paths for Southern Progress. New York: Newcomen Society, 1947. Couch, Jim F., and Gina H. Couch. “New Deal Expenditures in Alabama: Was Economic Need Addressed?” Alabama Review 50 (July 1997): 181–84. Curtis, Verna P., and Stanley Mallach. Photography and Reform: Lewis Hine and the National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984. Daniel, Pete. “The Transformation of the Rural South, 1930 to the Present.” Agricultural History 55 (July 1981): 231–48. Draper, Alan. “The New Southern Labor History Revisited: The Success of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union in Birmingham, 1934–1938.” Journal of Southern History 62 (February 1996): 87–108. Dunbar, Andrew J., and Stephen P. Waring. Power to Explore: A History of Marshall Space Flight Center. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration History Of¤ce, 1999. Fite, Gilbert C. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984. Flick, Warren. “The Wood Dealer System.” MS, February 28, 1985, in author’s possession. Fuller, Justin. “Alabama Business Leaders, 1865–1900.” Pts. 1 and 2. Alabama Review 16 (October 1963): 279–86; 17 (January 1964): 63–75. Gaston, Arthur G. Green Power: The Successful Way of A. G. Gaston. Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing, 1968. Gates, Grace Hooten. The Model City of the New South: Anniston, Alabama, 1872– 1900. Huntsville: Strode, 1978. Gioiello, John. Oral history by Selena Cason, Birmingham, Alabama, August 14, 1975. Oral History Collection, Samford University Archives, Birmingham, Alabama.



Gittler, Joseph B., and Roscoe R. Grif¤n. “Changing Patterns of Employment in Five Southeastern States, 1930–1940.” Southern Economic Journal 11 (October 1944): 169–82. Goss, Ernst P. “High Technology Employment in Huntsville and Selected U.S. Cities.” Center for High Technology, Management, and Economic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville, September 1985. Gregory, James N. “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use of Microdata Samples.” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 111–34. Gross, Jimmie F. “Strikers in the Coal, Steel, and Railroad Industries in Birmingham from 1918 to 1922.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1962. Guillory, Ferrell, et al. The State of the South 2002: Shadows in the Sunbelt Revisited. Chapel Hill: MDC, 2002. Hart, Hastings H. Social Problems of Alabama: A Study of the Social Institutions and Agencies of the State of Alabama as Related to Its War Activities. Montgomery: State of Alabama, 1918. Harvill, Richard A. “The Economy of the South.” Journal of Political Economy 48 (February 1940): 33–61. Hodges, James A. “The New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1933–1941.” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1963. Hoffsommer, Harold. “The AAA and the Cropper.” Social Forces 13 (May 1935): 494–502. 1. Landlord-Tenant Relations and Relief in Alabama. Research Bulletin, series 2, no. 9, Division of Research, Statistics, and Finance. November 14, 1935. House, Mae R. N. T. (Mrs. L. A. House). Oral history by Wayne Flynt, Sylacauga, Alabama, July 10, 1974. Oral History Collection, Samford University Archives, Birmingham, Alabama. Ingalls, Robert P. “Antiradical Violence in Birmingham during the 1930s.” Journal of Southern History 47 (November 1981): 521–44. Jackson, Carlton. The Dreadful Month. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. Johnson, Charles S., Edwin R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander. The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Field Studies and Statistical Surveys, 1933–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935. Kelly, Brian. Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coal¤elds, 1908–21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Kerr, Norwood. A History of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 1883– 1983. Auburn: Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, Auburn University, 1985.



Lee, Larry, and Joe A. Sumners. Beyond the Interstate: The Crisis in Rural Alabama. Auburn University Economic Development Institute, January 2003. Lewis, W. David. Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Massey, Richard W., Jr. “A History of the Lumber Industry in Alabama and West Florida, 1880–1914.” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1960. McCluskey, Sybil Talley. “Howard Gardner Nichols and Dwight Manufacturing Company.” Alabama Review 46 (January 1993): 24–36. McKiven, Henry M., Jr. Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Mertz, Paul E. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Mickle, Will. “Huntsville, Alabama: Cotton Textile Center of the New South.” Cotton History Review 2 (April 1961): 92–102. Miller, Massie. Diary, 1920s–1940s. University of Alabama Archives, Tuscaloosa. Mitchell, Broadus. “Why Cheap Labor Down South?” Virginia Quarterly Review 5 (October 1929): 481–91. Molnar, Joseph J., ed. Agricultural Change: Consequences for Southern Farms and Rural Communities. Boulder: Westview Press, 1986. Morley, Burton R. Characteristics of the Labor Market in Alabama Related to the Administration of Unemployment Compensation. Tuscaloosa: Bureau of Business Research, University of Alabama, 1937. Paul, Chris. “The Economic Impact of Madison County’s High-Technology Industry on the Alabama Economy.” Alabama Business and Economic Journal 7 (October 1983): 32–43. Payne, Elizabeth Anne. “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.” Southern Cultures 4, no. 2, 5–17. Perry, Charles S., and Christian Ritter. Dying to Dig Coal: Fatalities in Deep and Surface Coal Mining in Appalachian States, 1930–1978. Lexington: Department of Sociology, University of Kentucky, 1981. Poindexter, W. G., Jr. “Sharecroppers in the South.” Southern Workman 66 (April 1937): 118–26. Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. “The Fiscal Impacts of Alabama’s Tax Incentives.” November 1998. Rikard, Marlene Hunt. “An Experiment in Welfare Capitalism: The Health Care Services of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1983. 1. “George Gordon Crawford: Man of the New South.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1971.



Royce, Edward C. “Social Change and the Constriction of Possibilities: The Rise of Southern Sharecropping.” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1983. Saloutos, Theodore. “The Alabama Farm Bureau Federation: Early Beginnings.” Alabama Review 13 (July 1960): 185–98. Smith, Joyce M. “When the Yankees Came to Huntsville, Again, and Again, and Again . . . ” Alabama Review 54 (April 2001): 83–103. Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy, Joint Economic Committee, Congress. “Location of High Technology Firms and Regional Economic Development.” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, June 1, 1982. Terry, Paul, and Verner Sims. They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, Bureau of Education Research, 1940. Thomas, Mary Martha. Riveting and Rationing in Dixie: Alabama Women and the Second World War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Thomas, Rebecca. “The Narrow Path: John J. Eagan and the Social Gospel in the New South.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1988. Weldon, Ethel V. “History of the West Point Manufacturing Company.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1953. Wilhelm, Dwight M. A History of the Cotton Textile Industry of Alabama, 1809– 1950. Montgomery, 1950. Wilson, Roger. “State Business Incentives and Economic Growth: Are They Effective? A Review of the Literature.” N.p.: Council of State Governments., n.d. “Workers in Southern Manufactures.” American Federationist 36 (May 1929): 588. U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Department of Commerce. Agriculture, 1930. Vol. 2, pt. 2, “The Southern States.” Washington, D.C. Government Printing Of¤ce, 1932. Also, vol. 3, pt. 2. U.S. Manpower. Study of Appalachian Alabama. Auburn University. 1968.

Chapter Four Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1941. The Alabama Report. Vol. 1, no. 3, May 1992. 1. Vol. 1, no. 12, February 1993. Baldwin, Elisa Moore, ed. Where the Wild Animals Is Plentiful: Diary of an Alabama Fur Trader’s Daughter, 1912–1914. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Bragg, Rick. All Over but the Shoutin’. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.



Browne, Ray B. Popular Beliefs and Practices from Alabama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Carmichael, Odelle. “A Decade of Aid to Dependent Children in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Tulane University, 1946. Center for Demographic Research, Auburn University Montgomery. Alabama Population Data Sheet, December 2001. Champion, Marvin Malley. “And They Called It Independent.” Undated MS in author’s possession, provided by Jean Butterworth. “Clay Eating Proves Widespread but Reason Is Uncertain.” New York Times, July 22, 1986. Crellin, John K., ed. Plain Southern Eating: From the Reminiscences of A. L. Tommie Bass, Herbalist. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Denison, George A. “The History of Public Health in Alabama.” Undated MS in Alabama State Archives. Dill, Nelwyn Huff. “Monument to Willie.” Atlanta Weekly, November 27, 1983, 75–82. Dodd, Donald B. Historical Atlas of Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1974. Dodd, Donald B., and Wynelle S. Dodd. Historical Statistics of the South, 1790– 1970. University: University of Alabama Press, 1973. Dohoney, Jo M. The Picture of Poverty. Birmingham: Alabama Poverty Project, Samford University, n.d. Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947. Duncan, Lillian Ward. Transcript of interview, May 17, 1982, by Myra W. Crenshaw. In Butler County, People-Personalities ¤le, Alabama State Archives. Dysart, Mary Dixie. “‘No Place for a Christian’: Women Inmates in Alabama Prisons, 1901–1943.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999. 1. “‘Us Poor Country People Need Help’: The Impact of Federal Maternity and Infancy Legislation in Alabama, 1920–1935.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1991. Ford, Arthur M. The Political Economics of Rural Poverty in the South. Cambridge: Ballinger, 1973. Garrett, Mitchell B. Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchett Creek. University: University of Alabama Press, 1957.



Gill, D. G. “How Alabama Meets Her Social Hygiene Problems.” Journal of Social Hygiene 16 (1930): 530–31. Green, Elna C. Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830–1930. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Hart, Hastings. Social Problems of Alabama: A Study of the Social Institutions and Agencies of the State of Alabama as Related to Its War Activities. Montgomery: State of Alabama, 1918. Hughes, John S., ed. The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Jennings, Knox Gilmore. “Almshouses in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Florida State University, 1964. Johnson, Frank M., Jr. “The Role of the Federal Courts in Institutional Litigation.” Alabama Law Review 32 (winter 1981): 271–79. LaMonte, Edward S. Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Larson, Edward J. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Lineback, Neal G. Atlas of Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1973. Link, William A. “Privies, Progressivism, and Public Schools: Health Reform and Education in the Rural South, 1909–1920.” Journal of Southern History 54 (November 1988): 623–42. Lofton, J. Mack, Jr. Healing Hands: An Alabama Medical Mosaic. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Logue, John, and Gary McCalla. Life at Southern Living: A Sort of Memoir. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Maharidge, Dale, and Michael Williamson. And Their Children after Them. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. McCormick, J. H. “Public Health.” In Inquiry by the National Child Labor Committee under the Auspices and with the Cooperation of the University of Alabama, ed. Edward N. Clopper. New York: National Child Labor Committee, 1918. McIntyre, Patrick. “‘That Dirt Was Good!’: Memories of Geophagy among Alabama Black Belt Tenant Farmers.” Tributaries no. 3 (2000): 59–73. Nixon, Herman C. Lower Piedmont Country. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946. 1. Possum Trot: Rural Community, South. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941. “Record of Inmates of Poor Farm, 1910.” Birmingham Public Library and Archives. Reissman, Leonard. Class in American Society. New York: Free Press, 1959.



Rowe, Elizabeth. “Alabama’s Disappearing Almshouses.” Master’s thesis, Tulane University, 1946. Simmons, Lily Leona. “Some of the Inmates at Mobile County Poor Asylum.” Undated MS in author’s possession. Sisk, Glenn. “The Poor in Provincial Alabama.” Alabama Historical Quarterly 22 (spring–summer 1960): 101–2. Teel, Troy C. “Poverty and Programs: The Alabama Department of Human Resources.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1994. U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Department of Commerce. Population, 1950. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1952. 1. Population, 1970: Characteristics of Population. Vol. 1, pt. 2. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1973. Vickery, Katherine. A History of Mental Health in Alabama. N.p., n.d. Warner, W. Lloyd, Marcia Meeker, and Kenneth Eells. Social Class in America: The Evaluation of Status. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949. Weaver, Bill L. “An Analysis of the Patient Population at the Alabama Insane Hospital, 1861–1892.” Alabama Review 51 (January 1998): 37–51. 1. “Establishing and Organizing the Alabama Insane Hospital, 1846–1861.” Alabama Review 48 (July 1995): 219–32. Weaver, Bill L., and James A. Thompson. “Women in Medicine and the Issue in Late Nineteenth-Century Alabama.” Alabama Historical Quarterly 43 (winter 1981): 292–314. “The Wyatt Case: Implementation of a Judicial Decree Ordering Institutional Change.” Yale Law Journal 84 (May 1975): 1338–79. Yarbrough, Tinsley. Judge Frank Johnson and Human Rights in Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1981.

Chapter Five Adshead, Mary Lois. “Marietta Johnson, Visionary.” Alabama Heritage 58 (fall 2000): 28–35. Akenson, James E., and Harvey G. Neufelt. “Alabama’s Illiteracy Campaign for Black Adults, 1915–1930: An Analysis.” Journal of Negro Education 54 (spring 1985): 189–95. Alabama State Department of Education. Annual Report for 1921. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1921. 1. Annual Report for the Scholastic Year Ending September 30, 1920. Part 1. 1920. 1. Annual Report, 1913. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1913.



1. Annual Report, 1922. 1922. 1. Annual Report, 1925. 1925. 1. Annual Report, 1929. 1929. 1. History of Education in Alabama. Bulletin 1975, no. 7. 1. Literacy and Illiteracy in Alabama: Biennial Census, 1914. Montgomery: Department of Education, 1914. 1. Opportunity Schools for White Adults: Course of Study and Suggestions to Teachers. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1929. 1. Report of Special Drive against Illiteracy among Men of Draft Age, 1918. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1918. 1. Report on Illiteracy by Division of Exceptional Education, 1927. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1927. Alsobrook, David E. “Mobile v. Birmingham: The Alabama Medical College Controversy, 1912–1920.” Alabama Review 36 (January 1983): 37–56. Bible, Krista. “Education in Chambers County, 1900–1914.” 1988 Auburn University research paper in author’s possession. Bond, Horace Mann. Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Boyle, Charles J., ed. Twice Remembered: Moments in the History of Spring Hill College. Mobile: Friends of the Spring Hill College Library, 1993. Clopper, Edward N., ed. Child Labor in Alabama: An Inquiry by the National Child Labor Committee under the Auspices and with the Cooperation of the University of Alabama. New York: National Child Labor Committee, 1918. Dennis, Michael. Lessons in Progress: State Universities and Progressivism in the New South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Fairclough, Adam. Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Flynt, Wayne. “Leadership Patterns in Birmingham’s History.” Birmingham: Leadership Birmingham, 1988. Gainous, Fred. “The Alabama College System: A Partner in Economic Development—A White Paper.” March 30, 1999, in author’s possession. Harper, Roland M. “Rural Standards of Living in the South.” Social Forces 2 (January 1924): 253–65. Harris, Carl V. “Stability and Change in Discrimination against Black Public Schools: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871–1931.” Journal of Southern History 51 (August 1985): 373–416. “Higher Education.” Mobile Register, July 9, 1995. Holley, Howard L. The History of Medicine in Alabama. Birmingham: University of Alabama School of Medicine, 1982.



1. “Medical Education in Alabama (1852–1946).” Alabama Review 7 (October 1954): 245–64. Hunt, Robert E. “Home, Domesticity, and School Reform in Antebellum Alabama.” Alabama Review 49 (October 1996): 253–75. Jones, Maxine D., and Joe Richardson. Talladega College: The First Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Katsinas, Stephen, and Curtis P. Sellers. “Governor George C. Wallace and the Creation of Alabama’s Public Two-Year Colleges.” MS, 1987, in author’s possession. Laster, B. John. “‘Lure, Traps, Pitfalls, Lies, and Propaganda’: The Growth of Anticommunist Education in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 2000. Mathews, David. Why Public Schools? Whose Public Schools? What Early Communities Have to Tell Us. Montgomery: New South Books, 2003. Parks, Joseph H., and Oliver C. Weaver. Birmingham Southern College, 1856–1956. Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1957. Risley, Eleanor De La Vergne. The Road to Wildcat: A Tale of Southern Mountaineering. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Sherer, Robert G. Subordination or Liberation: The Development and Con®icting Theories of Black Education in Nineteenth-Century Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1977. “The Struggle beyond the Basics,” Series in Birmingham News, January 22–29, 1989. Taylor, Mary Lou. “History of Pinson Schools, 1860–1945.” Undated MS in author’s possession. Terry, Paul W., and Verner M. Sims. They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, Bureau of Education Research, 1940. Weeks, Stephen B. History of Public School Education in Alabama. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1915.

Chapter Six Adshead, Mary Lois. “Marietta Johnson, Visionary.” Alabama Heritage 58 (fall 2000): 28–35. Allen, Lee N. “The Woman Suffrage Movement in Alabama.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1949. Atkins, Leah Rawls. Blossoms amid the Deep Verdure: A Century of Women at Auburn. Auburn: Auburn University, [1992].



1. “Coeducation in Alabama: In Accord with Nature.” Alabama Heritage 30 (fall 1993): 6–16. Bashaw, Carolyn Terry. “‘I Shall Make Good Big’: The Algonquin Correspondence of Tallulah Bankhead, 1918–1920.” Alabama Review 54 (October 2000): 276–99. Boucher, Ann W. Alabama Women: Roles and Rebels. Troy: Troy State University Press, 1978. Craighead, Lula Harris. History of the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1895– 1918. Montgomery: Paragon Press, 1936. Cruse, Irma R. The First Ten Years: An Informal History of Metropolitan Business and Professional Women’s Club of Birmingham. Birmingham: Author, 1973. Dysart, Mary Dixie. “‘No Place for a Christian’: Women Inmates in Alabama Prisons, 1901–1943.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999. 1. “‘Us Poor Country People Need Help’: The Impact of Federal Maternity and Infancy Legislation in Alabama, 1920–1935.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1991. Edwards, Carolyn Hinshaw. Hallie Farmer: Crusader for Legislative Reform in Alabama. Huntsville: Strode, 1979. Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fairhope. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Goodrich, Gillian W. Romance and Reality: The Birmingham Suffragists, 1892– 1920. Birmingham: Birmingham Metropolitan Studies Project, 1976. Hamilton, Virginia Van Der Veer. Looking for Clark Gable and Other TwentiethCentury Pursuits. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Harrison, Patricia G. “Riveters, Volunteers, and WACs: Women in Mobile during WWII.” Gulf Coast Historical Review (spring 1986): 33–54. Hawks, Joanne Varner. “A Select Few: Alabama’s Women Legislators, 1922–1983.” Alabama Review 38 (July 1985): 175–201. Keller, Rebecca T. “Alva Belmont: Exacting Benefactor for Women’s Suffrage.” Alabama Review 41 (April 1988): 132–45. Kerr, Mary Lee. “Women in Politics.” Southern Exposure 23 (spring 1995): 64. League of Women Voters of Alabama, comp. Women Who Made a Difference in Alabama. Birmingham: League of Women Voters of Alabama, 1995. Miller, Mary S. “Lobbyist for the People: The League of Women Voters of Alabama, 1920–1975.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1978. Newman, Cynthia. Maud McLure Kelly: Alabama’s First Woman Lawyer. Birmingham: Samford University Library Research Series, Paper no. 6, 1984. Pannell, Anne Gray, and Dorothea E. Wyatt. Julia S. Tutwiler and Social Progress in Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1961.



Pruitt, Paul M., Jr. “Suffer the Children: Child Labor Reform in Alabama.” Alabama Heritage 58 (fall 2000): 16–27. Rieff, Lynne Anderson. “‘Rousing the People of the Land’: Home Demonstration Work in the Deep South, 1914–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1995. Sterne, Ellin. “Prostitution in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890–1925.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1977. Taylor, Lola, comp. A History of the Alabama Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, 1919–1953. Birmingham: A. H. Cather, 1953. Thomas, Mary M. The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. 1. Riveting and Rationing in Dixie: Alabama Women and the Second World War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. 1, ed. Stepping Out of the Shadows: Alabama Women, 1819–1990. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. U.S. Women’s Bureau. Women in Alabama Industries: A Study of Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1924. Vaughan, Amanda Hiley. Portraits: Needs Assessment of Women and Girls in Birmingham, January 2000. Birmingham: Women’s Fund, 2000. Wells, Mildred W. History of the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1917–1968. Montgomery: Paragon Press, 1968. Wilbanks, Elizabeth J. “Women in Law in Alabama.” Alabama Lawyer 12 (January 1951): 43–46. Wilkerson-Freeman, Sarah. “The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and V. O. Key’s Master Narrative of Southern Politics.” Journal of Southern History 68 (May 2002): 333–74. Yelverton, Mildred Grif¤n. They Also Served: Twenty-¤ve Remarkable Alabama Women. Dothan: Ampersand, 1993.

Chapter Seven Ahmed, Nah¤za. “A City Too Respectable to Hate: Mobile during the Era of Desegregation, 1961–1965.” Gulf South Historical Review 15, no. 1 (2000): 49–67. Aiken, Charles S. The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Ashmore, Susan Youngblood. “Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1970.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999. Austin, Deborah W. “Thomas Monroe Campbell and the Development of Negro



Agriculture Extension Work, 1883–1956.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1975. Bailey, Richard. They Too Call Alabama Home: African American Pro¤les, 1800– 1999. Montgomery: Pyramid, 1999. Bass, Jonathan. Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Briles, Timothy H. “The Brown Decision in Alabama: Rationale behind Reaction, 1954–57.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1984. Campbell, Thomas Monroe. The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer. Tuskegee: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1936. Chafe, William H., et al., eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001. Chestnut, J. L., Jr., and Julia Cass. Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Clark, E. Culpepper. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Crowther, Edward R. “Alabama’s Fight to Maintain Segregated Schools, 1953– 1956.” Alabama Review 43 (July 1990): 206–25. Dees, Morris, with Steve Fiffer. A Season for Justice: The Life and Times of Civil Rights Lawyer Morris Dees. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Eagles, Charles W. Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Fairclough, Adam. “The Preachers and the People: The Origins and Early Years of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–1959.” Journal of Southern History 52 (August 1986): 403–40. 1. Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow. Athens: University of Georgia, 2001. Feldman, Glenn. “Lynching in Alabama, 1889–1921.” Alabama Review 48 (April 1995): 114–41. Franklin, Jimmie L. Back to Birmingham: Richard Arrington, Jr., and His Times. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–1968. New York: Morrow, 1986.



Graves, Richard L. “Language Differences among Upper- and Lower-Class Negro and White Eighth Graders in East Central Alabama.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1967. Hayman, John. Bitter Harvest: Richmond Flowers and the Civil Rights Revolution. Montgomery: Black Belt Press, 1996. Hemphill, Paul. Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son. New York: Viking, 1993. Horowitz, David A. “White Southerners’ Alienation and Civil Rights: The Response to Corporate Liberalism, 1956–1965.” Journal of Southern History 54 (May 1988): 173–200. Hunter, James. They Didn’t Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley!: A Vagabond Reporter Encounters the New South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Kelly, Brian. “Policing the ‘Negro Eden’: Racial Paternalism in the Alabama Coal¤elds, 1908–1921, Part Two.” Alabama Review 51 (October 1998): 243–65. 1. Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coal¤elds, 1908–21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Kelly, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 1. “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75–112. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper, 1958. Knopke, Harry J., Robert J. Norrell, and Ronald W. Rogers, eds. Opening Doors: Perspectives on Race Relations in Contemporary America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Letwin, Daniel. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878– 1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Lewis, Ronald L. “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Migration of Southern Blacks to the Central Appalachian Coal¤elds.” Journal of Southern History 55 (February 1989): 77–102. Lichtenstein, Alex. “Racial Con®ict and Racial Solidarity in the Alabama Coal Strike of 1894: New Evidence for the Gutman-Hill Debate.” Labor History 36 (winter 1995): 63–76. Lincoln, Eric. Coming through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Loftin, J. Mack, Jr. Voices from Alabama: A Twentieth-Century Mosaic. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.



Logan, Onnie Lee, as told to Katherine Clark. Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989. Manis, Andy. A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Marks, Carole. Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. McCarty, Clinton. The Reins of Power: Racial Change and Challenge in a Southern Community. Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 1999. McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Minchin, Timothy J. The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Morgan, Charles, Jr. A Time To Speak. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Murari, Timeri. Goin’ Home. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980. Nelson, Bruce. “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II.” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 952–88. Norrell, Robert J. “Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama.” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 669–94. 1. “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement.” Journal of Southern History 62 (May 1991): 201–34. 1. Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Norwood, Stephen H. “Bogalusa Burning: The War against Biracial Unionism in the Deep South, 1919.” Journal of Southern History 63 (August 1997): 591–628. Nunnelley, William A. Bull Connor. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Perez, Karni R., Conner Bailey, and John C. Bliss. “Race and Unions in Alabama’s Pulp and Paper Mills.” Undated MS in author’s possession. Phillips, Kimberley L. Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Raines, Howell. My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered. New York: Putnam, 1977. Rieff, Burt M. “Browder v. Gayle: The Legal Vehicle of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Alabama Review 41 (July 1988): 193–208. Robinson, Jo Ann. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It:



The Memoir of Jo Ann Robinson, ed. David J. Garrow. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Sikora, Frank. Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Snow, John R. “The Selma Campaign: A Chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1974. Stewart, George R. “Birmingham’s Reaction to the 1954 Desegregation Crisis.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1967. Straw, Richard A. “The United Mine Workers of America and the 1920 Coal Strike in Alabama.” Alabama Review 28 (April 1975): 104–28. Strong, Donald S. “Alabama Transition and Alienation.” In The Changing Politics of the South, ed. William Havard. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Taft Research Notes. Birmingham Public Library Archives. Thomas, Mary Martha. The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Thompson, Jan G. “A History of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, from Roots to Redirection, 1920–1968.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1983. Thornton, J. Mills, III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Westling, Louise, ed. He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. White, Marjorie L., and Andrew Manis, eds. Birmingham Revolutionaries: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2000. Wilson, Bobby M. America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham. New York: Rowman and Little¤eld, 2000. Worthman, Paul B. “Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897–1904.” Labor History 10 (summer 1969): 375–407.

Chapter Eight Amerine, William H. Alabama’s Own in France: War Stories of the 167th U.S. Infantry. New York: Eaton and Gettinger, 1919. Bailey, Karon S. “Harriet Englehardt: A Job Worth Having.” Alabama Heritage 57 (summer 2000): 26–35. Cronenberg, Allen. Forth to the Mighty Con®ict: Alabama and World War II. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.



1. “U-Boats in the Gulf: The Undersea War in 1942.” Gulf Coast Historical Review 5 (spring 1990): 163–78. Davis, Benjamin O., Jr. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American: An Autobiography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1991. Draughon, Ralph B. “General Holland M. Smith, U.S.M.C.” Alabama Review 21 (January 1968): 64–76. Dryden, Charles W. A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Hoole, William S. “Alabama’s World War II Prisoner of War Camps.” Alabama Review 20 (April 1967): 83–114. Jakeman, Robert J. The Divided Skies: Establishing Segregated Flight Training at Tuskegee, Alabama, 1934–1942. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Keith, Jeanette. “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South.” Journal of American History 87 (March 2001): 1335–61. McMillen, Neil R., ed. Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Morison, Samuel E. Aleutians, Gilberts, and Marshalls, June 1942–April 1944. Vol. 7 in History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. 1. New Guinea and the Marianas. Vol. 8 in History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Napier, John H., Lt. Col. “History of the Military at Auburn University.” Pamphlet for one-hundredth anniversary of military science instruction at Auburn University. Nelson, Bruce. “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II.” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 952–88. Newton, Wesley P. Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939– 1946. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Rickman, Sarah Byrn. “Nancy Batson, Pursuit Pilot Extraordinaire.” Alabama Heritage 65 (summer 2002): 14–23. Robertson, Joseph T. “Fort McClellan’s POW Camp, 1943–1946.” Alabama Review 49 (October 1996): 276–91. Sellers, James B., ed. “Alabama’s Losses in the Korean War.” Alabama Review 13 (July 1960): 210–15; 13 (October 1960): 258–79. Shilling, Erik. Destiny: A Flying Tiger’s Rendezvous with Fate. Privately published, 1993. Sledge, E. B. With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981.



Smith, Holland M., and Percy Finch. Coral and Brass. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949. Thomas, Mary Martha. Riveting and Rationing in Dixie: Alabama Women and the Second World War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Truss, Ruth Smith. “The Alabama National Guard’s 167th Infantry Regiment in World War I.” Alabama Review 56 (January 2003): 3–34. Whitten, Clinton W. “Alabama Editorial Opinion on American Entry into World War II.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1961. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Chapter Nine Aaron, Hank, with Furman Bisher. Aaron. New York: Crowell, 1974. “Alabama’s Bear Bryant.” Time, September 29, 1980, 70. Anniston Star series on the integration of sports in Alabama, December 22–26, 1991. Astor, Gerald. “And a Credit to His Race”: The Hard Life and Times of Joseph Louis Barrow, a.k.a. Joe Louis. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974. Baker, William J. Jesse Owens: An American Life. New York: Free Press, 1986. Birmingham News, October 20, 1991. This issue reproduced parts of the incriminating Eric Ramsey tapes. Bryant, Paul W. Bear Bryant on Winning Football. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1983. Bryant, Paul W., and John Underwood. Bear: The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. “Cash Crunch Imperils High School Football.” New York Times, February 27, 2001. Daniels, Pete. “Fast and Furious.” In Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s, 91– 120. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Deford, Frank. “I Do Love the Football.” Sports Illustrated, November 23, 1981, 94–108. Donaldson, Anthony. “‘I Have Done My Duty as I Saw It’: Auburn President Spright Dowell and the Politics of Football, 1924–1928.” Graduate seminar paper for HY 7160, Auburn University, spring 2001. Doyle, Leo Andrew. “Causes Won, Not Lost: Football and Southern Culture, 1892–1983.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1998. Duderstadt, James L. Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Einstein, Charles. Willie’s Time: A Memoir. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979.



Ernsberger, Richard, Jr. Bragging Rights: A Season inside the SEC, College Football’s Toughest Conference. New York: M. Evans, 2000. Evans, Christopher H., and William R. Herzog II, eds. The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Golenbock, Peter. The Last Lap: The Life and Times of NASCAR’s Legendary Heroes. New York: MacMillan, 1998. Groom, Winston. The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Gumprecht, Blake. “Stadium Culture: College Athletics and the Making of Place in the American College Town [Auburn, Ala.].” Southeastern Geographer 43 (May 2003): 28–53. Hall, Randal L. “Before NASCAR: The Corporate and Civic Promotion of Automobile Racing in the American South, 1903–1927.” Journal of Southern History 68 (August 2002): 629–68. Herskowitz, Mickey. The Legend of Bear Bryant. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. Higgs, Robert J. God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Holway, John B. Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991. Huie, William Bradford. “How to Keep Football Stars in College.” Collier’s, January 4, 1941. Humphrey, Kathryn Long. Satchel Paige. New York: Watts, 1988. Junod, Tom. “A New Head of State.” Sports Illustrated, October 7, 1991, 96–102. Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education. Miami: Knight Foundation Commission of Intercollegiate Athletics, June 2001. 1. Keeping the Faith with the Student-Athlete. Charlotte, N.C.: Knight Foundation on Intercollegiate Athletics, 1991. Martin, Charles H. “Integrating New Year’s Day: The Racial Politics of College Bowl Games in the American South.” Journal of Sport History 24 (fall 1997): 358–77. 1. “Jim Crow in the Gymnasium: The Integration of College Basketball in the American South.” International Journal of the History of Sport 10 (April 1993): 68–86. 1. More Than a Game: Intercollegiate Sports, Race Relations, and the American South, 1890–1980. Forthcoming. Mays, Willie, with Lou Sahadi. Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.



McWhirter, Norris, comp. Norris McWhirter’s Book of Millennium Records: The Story of Human Achievement in the Last Two Thousand Years. London: Virgin, 1999. Mead, Chris. Champion: Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1985. Mercurio, John A. Record Pro¤les of Baseball’s Hall of Famers: The Records by Baseball’s Greatest Players. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Montgomery Advertiser, September 27, 1991. This issue details Eric Ramsay and Alex Strong’s initial charges of a pay-for-play scheme at Auburn University. Novak, Michael. “Regional Religions.” In The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit. New York: Hamilton Press, 1998. Owens, Jesse, with Paul G. Niemark. Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man. New York: Morrow, 1970. Pierce, Dan. “The Most Southern Sport on Earth: NASCAR and the Unions.” Southern Cultures (summer 2001): 8–33. Price, S. L. “Bear Tracks.” Sports Illustrated, November 21, 1994, 40–46. Ribowsky, Marko. Don’t Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Sack, Allen, L., Ellen J. Staurowsky, and Kent Waldrep. College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth. New York: Praeger, 1998. Shulman, James L., and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Smith, Gary. Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. 1. “Crime and Punishment.” Sports Illustrated, June 24, 1996. Smith, Ronald A. Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sperber, Murray. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Telander, Rick, Richard Warch, and Murray Sperber. The Hundred Yard Lie: The Corruption of College Football and What We Can Do To Stop It. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Thelin, John R. Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Wilson, Charles R. “The Death of Bear Bryant: Myth and Ritual in the Modern South.” South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (summer 1987): 282–95.



Chapter Ten Bailey, Hugh C. Edgar Gardner Murphy: Gentle Progressive. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1968. Brasher, J. Lawrence. The Sancti¤ed South: John Lakin Brasher and the Holiness Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Clemens, Joan S. “The House of Happiness: An Episcopal Mission in Jackson County, Alabama.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 1990. Collins, Donald E. When the Church Bell Rang Racist: The Methodist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998. Covington, Dennis. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Cowett, Mark. Birmingham’s Rabbi: Morris New¤eld and Alabama, 1895–1940. University: University of Alabama Press, 1986. Crews, Mickey. The Church of God: A Social History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Elovitz, Mark H. A Century of Jewish Life in Dixie: The Birmingham Experience. University: University of Alabama Press, 1974. Fallin, Wilson, Jr. The African American Church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1815– 1963. New York: Garland, 1997. Flynt, Wayne. “Alabama.” In Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study, ed. Samuel S. Hill. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983. 1. Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. 1. “Alabama White Protestantism and Labor, 1900–1914.” Alabama Review 25 (July 1972): 192–217. 1. “The Cry of the Children: Alabama Baptists and Child Labor, 1900– 1920.” Alabama Baptist, November 15, 1973. 1. “Dissent in Zion: Alabama Baptists and Social Issues, 1900–1914.” Journal of Southern History 35 (November 1969): 523–542. 1. “Organized Labor, Reform, and Alabama Politics, 1920.” Alabama Review 23 (July 1970): 163–80. 1. “Religion in the Urban South: The Divided Religious Mind of Birmingham, 1900–1930.” Alabama Review 30 (April 1977): 108–34. 1. “‘A Special Feeling of Closeness’: Mt. Hebron Baptist Church, Leeds, Alabama.” In Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities. Vol. 1 in American Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Fry, C. Luther. The U.S. Looks at Its Churches. New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1930.



Gilmore, J. Herbert, Jr. They Chose to Live: The Racial Agony of an American Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972. Howington, Arthur F. “John Barley Corn Subdued: The Enforcement of Prohibition in Alabama.” Alabama Review 23 (July 1970): 212–25. Jones, Laura M. Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones. Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1907. Koch, Jacob. “A Special Heritage: The Demopolis Jewish Community.” In Clearings in the Thicket, ed. Jerry Elijah Brown. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985. Lazenby, Marion E. History of Methodism in Alabama and West Florida. N.p., 1960. Lofton, J. Mack, Jr. Voices from Alabama: A Twentieth-Century Mosaic. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Lovett, Rose G. The Catholic Church in the Deep South: The Diocese of Birmingham in Alabama, 1540–1976. Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing, 1981. Marshall, James W. The Presbyterian Church in Alabama. Montgomery: Presbyterian Historical Society of Alabama, 1977. McConnell, Charles M. “Farm Tenants and Sharecroppers.” Missionary Review of the World 60 (June 1937): 287–93. Minnix, Kathleen. Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Moore, Roy S. “Religion in the Public Square.” Cumberland Law Review 29 (1998– 99): 347–78. Newton, Merlin Owen. Armed with the Constitution: Jehovah’s Witnesses in Alabama and the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939–1946. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Nixon, Herman C. Lower Piedmont Country. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946. Pegram, Thomas R. “Temperance Politics and Regional Political Culture: The Anti-Saloon League in Maryland and the South, 1907–1915.” Journal of Southern History 63 (February 1997): 57–90. Sellers, James B. The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 1702 to 1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943. Siegel, Jerry. “History of Selma Jewry.” Undated MS, in author’s possession. Snell, William Robert. “The Ku Klux Klan in Jefferson County, Alabama, 1916– 1930.” Master’s thesis, Samford University, 1967. Sweeney, Charles P. “Bigotry in the South.” Nation, November 24, 1920, 586. 1. “Bigotry Turns to Murder.” Nation, August 31, 1921, 232. Terry, Paul W., and Verner M. Sims. They Live on the Land: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Treutel, William G., Jr. “Episcopal Mission Styles: A Study of Evangelical and Pa-



rochial Missions in Northeast Alabama and North Georgia, 1920–1970.” Master’s thesis, Auburn University, 1992. U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Department of Commerce. Religious Bodies, 1926. Vols. 1 and 2. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of¤ce, 1929, 1930. Webb, Clive. Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Chapter Eleven Adams, E. Bryding, ed. Made in Alabama: A State Legacy. Exhibit catalogue, Birmingham Museum of Art, 1995. Arnold, Byron, collector. Folksongs of Alabama. University: University of Alabama Press, 1950. Badger, Reid. A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Beardsley, John, et al. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2002. Beecher, John. Hear the Wind Blow!: Poems of Protest and Prophecy. New York: International Publishers, 1968. 1. To Live and Die in Dixie. Birmingham: Red Mountain Editions, 1966. Birmingham Quartet Scrapbook: A Quartet Reunion in Jefferson County, October 12, 1980. Blaser, Kent. “‘Pictures from Life’s Other Side’: Hank Williams, Country Music, and Popular Culture in America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 84 (winter 1985): 12–26. Boyd, Joe Dan. “Judge Jackson: Black Giant of White Spirituals.” Journal of American Folklore 83 (October–December 1970): 446–51. Bragg, Rick. All Over but the Shoutin’. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Brown, Virginia Pounds, and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row: Ruby Pickens Tartt, Alabama Folklorist. University: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Browne, Ray B. The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Discrimination. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979. 1. Popular Beliefs and Practices from Alabama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Callahan, Nancy. The Freedom Quilting Bee. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Campbell, David. “The Skyline Farms Band Plays for President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt.” Tributaries 3 (2000): 28–39. Capote, Truman. A Christmas Memory. New York: Random House, 1956. 1. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, 1948.



Carmer, Carl. Stars Fell on Alabama. Baldridge, New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1934. Cauthen, Joyce. With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow: Old-Time Fiddling in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. Clark, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988. Cobb, Buell E., Jr. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Cooper, Chip. Alabama Memories. New York: Gallery Books, 1989. Cooper, Chip, Harry Knopke, Robert Gamble, and Laura Woelfel-Madison. Silent in the Land. Tuscaloosa: CKM Press, 1993. Cooper, Chip, Kathryn Tucker Windham, and John Shelton Reed. Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South. Tuscaloosa: CKM Press, 2000. Covington, Dennis, and Vicki Covington. Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage. New York: North Point Press, 1999. Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer, and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. 1. “Return of the Native.” Preservation (May–June 1998): 70–79. Dyen, Doris Jane. “The Role of Shape-Note Singing in the Musical Culture of Black Communities in Southeast Alabama.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1977. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1947. Gruber, J. Richard. William Christenberry: Art and Family. New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2000. 1. William Christenberry: The Early Years, 1954–1968. Augusta: Morris Museum of Art, 1996. Halli, Robert W., Jr., ed. An Alabama Songbook: Ballads, Folksongs, and Spirituals by Byron Arnold. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer. Looking for Clark Gable and Other TwentiethCentury Pursuits: Collected Writings. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Hemphill, Paul. Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son. New York: Viking, 1993. Home Demonstration Annual Reports by County. Auburn University Archives. Hurst, Jack. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975. Jackson, George Pullen. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. New York: Dover, 1965. Jackson, Judge. The Colored Sacred Harp. Ozark, Ala., 1934. Kemp, Kathy, Keith Boyer, and Gail Trechsel. Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists. Birmingham: Crane Hill, 1994.



Lange, Susanne. William Christenberry. Dusseldorf, Ger.: Richter Verlag, n.d. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1960. Maharidge, Dale, and Michael Williamson. And Their Children after Them. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas, American Folklore Society, 1968. 1. Southern Music/American Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979. Malone, Bill C., and Judith McCulloh, eds. Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. March, William. Company K. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933. Martin, Stephen, ed. Alabama Folklife: Collected Essays. Tuscaloosa: Alabama Folklife Association, 1989. Miller, Howard. The Louvin Brothers. N.p., 1986. Moates, Marianne M. Truman Capote’s Southern Years. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Moss, Barbara Robinette. Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter: A Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2000. Murray, Albert. South to a Very Old Place. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Paterson, Judith Hillman. Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Peterson, Richard A. “Has Country Lost Its Homespun Charm?” Chronicle Review (May 29, 1979): 22–24. 1. “The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music.” Social Research 45 (summer 1978): 292–314. Potochick, Andrea. Lively Times and Exciting Events: The Drawings of Bill Traylor. Montgomery: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1993. Rea, Robert A. History at Auburn: The First One Hundred Years of Auburn University History Department. Auburn: Auburn University, 1991. Rhoads, Jessie DuBose. Memory Paintings of an Alabama Farm: The Art and Remembrances of Jessie DuBose Rhoads, Alabama Folk Artist, ed. Fred C. Fussell. N.p.: Historic Chattahoochee Commission and Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1983. Roberts, Frances C., and Sarah Huff Fisk. Shadows on the Wall: The Life and Works of Howard Weeden. Huntsville: Burritt Museum, 1962. Rosengarten, Theodore. All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. New York: Avon Books, 1974. Saxton, Kelly. “Of Memory and Dreams.” Alabama Alumni Magazine, June 2002, 19–23.



Schmidt, Aimee. Alabama: Culture and Community. Montgomery: Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, 1997. Solomon, Jack, and Olivia Solomon. Honey in the Rock: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991. Southall, Thomas W. Of Time and Place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press and Amon Carter Museum, 1990. Tullos, Allen, and Trudy Wilner Stack. Christenberry Reconstruction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1966. Walter, Eugene. The Untidy Pilgrim. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1954. White, B. F. Sacred Harp. Revised and Improved. 1902; Samson, Ala.: Sacred Harp Book, 1992. White, Newman I. American Negro Folk-Songs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928. Wilgus, D. K. “Country-Western Music and the Urban Hillbilly.” Journal of American Folklore 83 (April–June 1970): 157–79. Willett, E. Henry, ed. In the Spirit: Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions. And accompanying sound recording. Montgomery: Black Belt Press for the Alabama Folklife Association, 1995. Willett, E. Henry, and Joey Brackner. The Traditional Pottery of Alabama. Montgomery: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1983. Williams, Roger M. Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams. New York: Ballantine Press, 1970. Wilson, Edward O. Naturalist. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994. Windham, Kathryn Tucker. Odd-Egg Editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Wolfe, Charles. In Close Harmony: The Story of the Louvin Brothers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 1. The Devil’s Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Country Music Foundation, 1998.


Index

A+ educational reform movement, 101, 165, 232, 233 Aaron, Henry “Hammering Hank” Louis, 333, 410, 414, 451 Abernathy, Juanita, 317 Abernathy, Ralph David, 329, 348, 349, 461 Adams, Oscar W., Jr., 167, 326 aerospace industry, 155–59, 300, 346, 395, 396, 397 African Americans, 184, 191, 193, 196, 197, 202, 203, 216, 291, 366, 494, 500, 508–9, 527–28; and 1901 Constitution, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 318, 319, 343, 344; and agriculture, 278, 319, 320, 360, 401; and entrepreneurship, 167–69, 326; and unions, 120, 122, 133, 319, 320, 323, 324, 325, 326, 333, 340, 341, 344, 345, 360; civil rights movement, 317, 335–58, 401, 402, 424, 461, 462, 494, 507, 525, 528; churches, 331, 332, 333, 348, 349, 350, 352, 356, 466, 511; colleges, 249, 328, 329, 330, 334, 346, 347, 352, 363, 367, 368, 402, 460, 461; migration, 115, 143, 177, 178, 327, 332, 333, 334, 335, 506, 513, 514, 515, 516; women, 180, 260, 267, 278, 279, 285, 287, 288, 289, 291,

292, 326, 327, 347, 348, 365, 367, 524–25; women’s clubs, 254, 256, 327; work, 319, 320, 321–27, 334, 340, 359, 360, 366. See also culture; economy; education; military; music; politics; racism; religion; segregation; sharecroppers; sports; tenant farmers Agee, James, 268, 485, 486, 488, 489, 496, 530, 557 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 134, 136, 137 Agricultural Experiment Stations. See Alabama Cooperative Extension Service agriculture, 115–19, 121, 127, 135, 136, 137–38, 142–43, 409. See also Alabama Cooperative Extension Service; sharecroppers; tenant farmers Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 85, 199, 200 Alabama (the band), 520 Alabama A&M, 227, 249, 346, 363, 513 Alabama Arise (ARISE), 85, 217 Alabama Baptist, 43, 199, 214, 377, 468 Alabama Baptist State Convention, 81, 286, 460, 475, 480


580 I N DE X

Alabama State Board of Education (BOE), 5, 150, 196, 232, 235, 241, 242, 531 Alabama Child Labor Committee, 43, 195 Alabama Child Welfare Department, 196 Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), 341, 349, 350 Alabama Coalition for Equity (ACE), 230 Alabama College for Women (Montevallo). See Montevallo, University of Alabama Colored Baptist State Convention (ACBSC). See Alabama Missionary Baptist State Convention (AMBSC) Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE), 243, 247 Alabama Cooperative Extension Service (ACES), 56, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 116, 118, 119, 137, 138, 277, 278, 294, 305, 322 Alabama Council on Human Relations, 337 Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC), 80, 81, 105, 365, 369 Alabama Department of: Environmental Management (ADEM), 83, 86, 166; Human Resources (DHR), 199, 200, 201; Public Welfare, 64, 196, 198, 263; Transportation (DOT), 360, 363 Alabama Dry Docks and Shipbuilding Company (ADDSCO), 141, 170, 340, 396 Alabama Eagle Forum, 27, 81, 235

Alabama Education Association (AEA), 24, 37, 42, 68, 80, 81, 101, 165, 216, 231, 232, 233, 245, 289, 359, 407 Alabama Equal Suffrage Association, 48, 260 Alabama Ethics Commission, 81, 95 Alabama Farm Bureau. See Alabama Farmers’ Federation (ALFA) Alabama Farmers’ Federation (ALFA), 18, 20, 23, 24, 27, 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86, 95, 100, 114, 119, 165, 229, 244, 277, 278 Alabama Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (AFWC), 254, 256 Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs (AFWC), 43, 215, 254, 256 Alabama Industry and Manufacturers Association, 80, 165 Alabama Labor Council (AFL-CIO), 37, 82, 95, 344 Alabama League of Women Voters (ALWV), 48, 58, 63, 262, 263, 264 Alabama Missionary Baptist State Convention (AMBSC), 459, 460, 461, 462 Alabama New South Coalition, 105, 369 Alabama Polytechnic Institute. See Auburn University Alabama Power Company, 37, 68, 80, 153, 161 Alabama School of Trades, 397, 398 Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF), 507, 508, 509, 531 Alabama State Board of Education (BOE), 5, 150, 196, 232, 235, 241, 242, 531


I N DE X 581

Alabama State Council on the Arts, 526, 531 Alabama State University, 168, 227, 242, 245, 249, 317, 329, 330, 347, 349, 363, 367, 462 All God’s Dangers, 495, 508, 509 Allison, Bobby, 436, 437 Allison, Davey, 437 almshouses, 64, 139, 192–98. See also welfare system American Association of University Women, 214, 284 American Cast Iron Pipe (ACIPCO), 114, 130, 131, 147, 163 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 478, 479 American Farm Bureau Federation, 118, 136 American Federation of Labor, 37, 39, 43, 51, 52, 63, 95, 139, 257, 324, 344 American Legion, 74, 92, 140 American Public Welfare Association, 199, 263 Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 478, 479 anti-Catholicism, 51, 54, 468–70, 483 anti-Jewish, 76, 95, 425, 483, 503 anti-labor, 70, 101, 147, 425 Anti-Saloon League, 44, 45, 255, 464 anti-suffragists, 56, 262, 263, 276. See also suffrage; women architecture, 247, 488, 529–30 Armes, Ethel M., 132, 133 Arnold, Byron, 511, 512 Arrington, Richard, 81, 105, 160, 168, 365, 367, 368, 370, 444 art: self-taught artists, 494, 524, 526–28; trained artists, 258, 485,

487, 488, 489, 511, 528, 529, 530, 531 Ashby, Irene M., 43, 257 Assemblies of God, 285, 443, 458, 463, 482 Atkins, Leah Rawls, 492 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150, 493 Auburn University, 56, 375; and African Americans, 338, 363, 364, 366, 371, 374, 430, 431, 432; and education, 247, 237, 238, 239; and Farm Bureau, 61, 65, 72, 119, 277, 278; and farmers, 56, 143, 277; and military, 374, 375, 392, 402, 405; and research, 143, 247; and women, 282, 283; athletics, 417, 438, 439; Board of Trustees, 30, 65, 82, 244, 245, 246, 338; Plainsman, 283, 284; Women’s Student Government Association, 283, 284. See also education; football; sports; universities auto industry, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154, 158, 162 automobiles, xvi, 25, 41, 131, 181, 302 Avondale Mills, 113, 125, 126, 145, 396 BE&K Engineering, 161, 165 Bankhead, John H., Jr., 41, 50, 66, 67, 69, 136, 137, 402 Bankhead, Tallulah, 268, 269, 272– 74, 507 Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy law, 67, 136, 137 banking, 161, 162, 168 Banner Mine, 47, 128 Baptist Laymen of Alabama, 91, 472


582 I N DE X

Baptists, 38, 60, 85, 92, 112, 181, 182, 285, 313, 333, 443, 444, 449, 455, 456, 459, 460, 462, 465, 466, 468, 469, 470, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 507 Barron, Lowell, 82, 84, 239 Bass, Tommie, 206 Baxley, Bill, 27, 101, 246, 345, 354 Bechtel-McCone Aircraft, 141, 395, 397 Bedsole, Ann, 288, 289 Beecher, John, 60, 505 Belmont, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, 261 Benjamin, Dr. Regina M., 367 Big Mules, 7, 31, 70, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 87, 90, 98, 345 Birmingham: Board of Education, 54, 113, 330; Boys Club, 167, 193; Chamber of Commerce, 53, 125, 132, 133, 352 Birmingham News, 50, 54, 85, 214, 242, 260, 262, 351, 352, 364, 368, 380, 398, 412, 414, 426, 451, 493 Birmingham–Southern College, 113, 249, 337, 471, 460, 493, 502 Black, Hugo, 40, 52, 62, 66, 67, 119, 296, 337, 469, 479, 491 Black Belt, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 33, 46, 54, 60, 71, 78, 87, 99, 113, 115, 142, 143, 176, 186, 187, 188, 221, 222, 236, 247, 265, 304, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 327, 344, 355, 356, 365, 366, 368, 379, 404, 429, 431, 461, 468, 473, 487, 488, 489, 492, 503, 506, 511, 529, 530 Blair, Sheila, 290, 291 Blount, Carolyn Hood Self, 507, 508 Blount, Winton “Red,” 248, 508, 531

Boeing, 156, 158 boll weevil, 115, 138, 183, 224, 332 Bolton, Clyde, 451 Bonnett, Neil, 437 Boutwell, Albert, 160, 338, 352 Bowden, Bobby, 422, 426–28 Bowden, Terry, 427 Bowden, Tommy, 427 Boykin, Frank W., 69, 70, 335, 336, 340 Bragg, Rick, 191, 493, 498 Brandon, William W., 48 Brasher, John Larkin, 457, 458 Braun, Werner von, 155, 156, 158, 163, 300 Brewer, Albert, 26, 27, 34, 36, 95, 96, 97, 99, 240, 243, 247, 298, 359, 430 Bronner, David G., 85, 106, 154, 163, 438 Brookings Institution, 17, 26, 59 Brookley Field (Mobile), 396, 397, 398, 401 Brown, Mary Ward, 505, 529 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 58, 66, 232, 335 Bryant, Paul “Bear,” 68, 410, 420, 421, 422, 425, 430, 433, 434, 437 Bryce Hospital, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217 Buchanan, John, 76, 350 Burroughs, Floyd and Allie Mae, 485, 489 Bush, George W., 103, 104, 476 Business Council of Alabama, 24, 79, 80 Cabaniss, Jelks H., 54, 55 Cabaniss, William Jelks, Jr., 30 Campbell, Thomas M., 321, 322, 334, 335


I N DE X 583

Camp Sheridan, 271, 377, 381, 382 Capote, Truman, 503, 504 Carver, George Washington, 249, 328, 403, 500 Casey, Ron, 85, 493 Cason, Clarence, 497 Cater-Wallace Acts, 151, 152. See also economic development Cathedral Church of the Advent (Birmingham), 444 Catholics, 180, 214, 215, 260, 261, 408, 468–70. See also antiCatholicism chain gangs, 150, 202 Chambliss, Robert, 350, 351, 354 Chandler, Jennifer, 438 Chestnut, J. L., Jr., 355, 368 child labor, 38, 41, 42–44, 56, 57, 63, 67, 107, 122, 123, 125, 195–98, 256, 257, 260 Christenberry, William, 485, 486–89, 492, 499, 502, 529, 530 Christian Coalition, 44, 77, 81, 91, 476, 477 Chrysler Corporation, 149, 404 Church of God, 285, 444, 455, 482, 483 Church of God in Christ, 463 Churches of Christ, 443, 444, 482 Civilian Conservation Corps, 134, 413 Civilian Pilot Training Program, 375, 402 Civitan Club, 132, 403 Clark, Sheriff James “Jim” G., Jr., 355, 356, 358, 433 class con®ict, 4, 6, 8, 28, 34, 36, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 71, 95, 98, 99, 104, 109, 110, 185, 186, 189, 345, 346, 347, 350,

364, 410, 419, 435, 455–56, 458, 461, 503, 511. See also populism Clay-Clopton, Virginia, 258 clay eating, 188–89 coal mining, 39, 45, 47, 48, 49, 109, 114, 127–29, 130, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 205, 244, 249, 323–24, 325, 332, 458, 502 Cobb, Ned, 60, 494, 495, 496, 521, 523, 526, 527 Cohen, Octavus Roy, 501 Cole, Nat “King,” 333, 515, 516, 521 colleges. See education; universities Colonial Bank, 161, 245, 246, 432, 433 Comer, Braxton Bragg, 34, 41, 43, 113, 125 Comer, Donald, 126, 127 community colleges. See education company towns, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 37, 61, 74, 75, 95, 121, 139, 320, 325, 340, 341, 344 Congressional Medal of Honor, 377, 379, 390, 391 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 72–74, 341, 342, 350–54 Constitutions: of 1819, 15; of 1875, 5, 10, 16, 31; of 1901, xiii, 31, 32, 34– 35, 36, 37, 57, 63, 93, 137; and education, 3, 4, 10, 16, 18, 19, 20–22, 229; and home rule, 9–10, 15, 22– 25; and racism, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 28, 318, 319, 343, 344; and taxes, 6, 9, 10, 12, 16–22, 26, 84, 229; and suffrage, 8, 9; consequences of, 14–26; origins of, 4–7; rati¤cation of, 11–14, 31; reform of, 26–28, 65, 79, 95, 99, 153


584 I N DE X

convict lease system, 17, 38, 41, 46– 49, 52, 57, 120–21, 127, 257, 263, 318, 502 Cook, Jeffrey Alan, 520, 521 Cooper, Chip, 530 Cooperative Extension Service. See Alabama Cooperative Extension Service corruption. See politics cotton, 115–18, 135, 137, 138, 142, 321, 376, 412, 420 courthouse gangs, 32–33, 64, 77, 89 Covington, Dennis, 459, 508 Covington, Vicki, 497, 505 Coyle, Father James E., 469, 470 crafts, 494, 509, 521–26; basketmaking, 278, 495, 512, 522, 523; pottery, 522, 523; quilting, 522, 524–25 Craighead, Lura Harris, 43, 256, 257 Crawford, George Gordon, 114, 115, 128, 129, 130, 138, 139, 163 Crew, Nancy Batson, 399 Crommelin family: Charles, Richard, and John, 391 culture, 60, 152; and science, 155–57, 498–500; folk culture, xiii, 118, 409–10, 494, 509, 521, 522, 525, 526, 527; oral transmission of, 494, 495, 496; theater, 272–74, 507–9. See also architecture; art; crafts; journalism; literature; music; photography Cummings Research Park, 158 Cunningham, Emory, 218, 219 current use. See Constitutions (1901); taxes Curry, Bill, 423, 433, 434

Dallas County Voters’ League, 336, 355 Davidson, Charles, 150, 359 Davis, Angela, 58, 330, 332 Davis, Colonel Benjamin O., Jr., 310, 402, 403 Davis, Charles R., 48, 49 Davis, Harwell G., 48, 318 Deal, Babs, 505 DeBardeleben, Charles “Uncle Charlie” F., 74, 128, 140, 418, 425 DeBardeleben, Henry F., 74 DeBardeleben, Henry T., 418 Dees, Morris, 370 Delmore brothers: Alton and Rabon, 516, 517, 518, 521 demagoguery, 36, 50, 51, 54, 67, 71, 468 DeMent, Ira, 201, 216, 217 Democrats, 4, 5, 6, 7, 32, 34, 38, 45, 51, 58, 62, 71, 75, 76, 87, 95, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 134, 197, 244, 257, 290, 367, 369 Dewberry, Elizabeth, 505 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 337, 347, 357, 461, 462 Dial, Thornton, 526, 527 Dickinson, A. J., 468, 469 diet, 117, 137, 185, 198, 204, 208, 209, 210 Disciples of Christ, 443, 478, 482 disfranchisement, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14– 16, 31, 33, 34, 39, 52, 137, 332, 336. See also Constitutions (1901); suffrage Distinguished Flying Cross, 391, 403 divorce, 182, 186, 187, 259, 261, 275, 281, 449, 452, 499


I N DE X 585

Dixon, Frank M., 63, 64, 70, 71, 73, 75 Dobbins, Charles, 62, 404 Donahue, Mike, 417, 418 Dorrill, John, Jr., 79, 82 Doster, Juliette, 507 Dothan Eagle, 30, 55 Dowd, Mollie, 63, 140, 260 Dowell, Spright, 225, 283, 417, 418, 425 Drinkard, Bill, 83, 84 Dryden, Charles W., 403 Duncan, Brigadier General Asa North, 384, 392 Duncan, Luther N., 72, 118, 119 Dunn, Loula Friend, 198, 199, 263, 267 Durr, Clifford J., 62, 119, 338, 348 Durr, Virginia Foster, 67, 266, 290, 297, 337 Dwight Manufacturing Company, 123, 141 Dye, Pat, 422, 425, 426, 431, 433 ESPN sports television network, 410, 423 Eagan, John J., 114, 130, 163 Eagle Forum, 27, 81, 235 earmarking, 19. See also taxes economic colonialism, 131–32, 145. See also economy economic development, 24–26, 95, 101, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 132, 148, 151–54, 155, 157, 165. See also economic colonialism; economy economy, 395, 396; and African Americans, 116, 122, 127, 129,

130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 143, 160, 166–69; and education, 164–65; and women, 169–71. See also aerospace industry; auto industry; banking; Constitutions (1901); economic development; health care; high tech industry; industrialization; iron industry; lumber industry; manufacturing; modernization; railroads; steel industry; textile industry Edmonds, Rev. Henry, 258, 470, 475 Edmund Pettus Bridge, 356, 357, 528 education, 38, 41, 57, 86, 99, 101, 112, 135–36; accountability, 153, 231, 232–35, 241, 242, 243, 247; and African Americans, 16, 34, 135, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227– 28, 232, 234, 236, 246, 247, 248, 249, 320, 327–31, 342–44, 361, 362, 363, 365, 432; and culture wars, 235–37, 477; and economic development, 153, 155, 160, 161, 238, 239, 248; and moral order, 221, 235, 236; and women, 225, 246, 256, 258, 259, 278, 282–85, 286, 291; colleges/universities, 227, 231, 237–50, 282, 328, 329, 363, 364, 371, 407–8; funding, 7, 10, 20, 21, 45, 59, 64, 66, 85, 89, 95, 98, 152, 221, 223, 226, 228–32, 233, 237, 239, 247, 250, 407–8; high schools, 41, 223, 224, 226, 227, 232, 233, 237, 320, 330, 355, 362, 363, 366, 367, 408, 424, 434, 503, 514; junior colleges, 240, 241, 242; local support, 4, 223, 228, 229, 230; private schools, 4, 232,


586 I N DE X

236, 237, 320, 328, 361, 398, 468; rural schools, 41, 42, 222, 223, 224, 225, 242; salaries, 223, 234, 343; trade schools, 240, 241, 242, 397, 398. See also Constitutions (1901 and education); universities; sports Elliott, Carl, 69, 70, 94, 99 Ellison, Ralph, 329, 498, 506, 516 Engelhardt, Harriett, 398, 399 Engelhardt, Samuel M., 344 environment, 86, 110, 165–66, 181 Episcopalians, 38, 85, 112, 285, 443, 444, 446, 465, 467, 468, 470, 474, 475, 478, 480, 482 Ernsberger, Richard, Jr., 427, 429 Erwin, Staff Sergeant Henry “Red,” 390, 391 eugenics, 29, 213–15 Europe, James R., 513, 514, 521 evangelicals, xii, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 54, 56, 60, 68, 75, 77, 91–92, 102, 118, 169, 182, 189, 191, 251, 262, 332, 348, 361, 376–77, 423, 444, 445, 446, 447, 454, 457, 459, 460, 462, 463, 464, 465, 467, 470, 477, 480 Evans, James E., 480 Evans, Walker, 485–89, 496, 530 4th Alabama (national guard unit), 309, 377–80, 387 Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), 341, 346 Fallin, Wilson, Jr., 462 Falwell, Jerry, 77, 91, 423 families, 42, 181–83 family wage, 42–43

Farm Bureau Federation, 37, 56, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 72, 119, 136, 322 farm extension act. See Smith-Lever Act Farm Security Administration (FSA), 67, 134, 138, 278, 531 Farmer, Hallie, 280, 284, 287, 491, 492 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 97, 336, 338, 341, 342, 354, 393 Federal Voting Rights Act, 15, 77, 78, 94, 105, 344, 358 Fields, Bud, 485, 489 Figures, Michael, 81, 369 Figures, Vivian Davis, 289 Fine and Geddie, 82 Finster, Howard, 526, 527 First Baptist Church (Birmingham), 67, 469, 479 First Colored Baptist Church (Montgomery), 333, 348, 349, 461 Fite, Rankin, 240 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 268, 270, 271, 382, 383 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 276, 382, 383, 501 Flock, Tim, 436, 437 Flock family: Bob, Ethel, Fonty, Maudie “Big Mama” Josie Williams, 435, 436 folk culture. See culture folk medicine, 117, 183, 206–7, 528 Folsom, James E. “Big Jim,” 26, 30, 34, 36, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 76, 88, 89, 199, 244, 264, 324, 337, 346 Folsom, James E. “Little Jim,” Jr., 34, 36, 83, 101, 230, 231, 359 football, 86, 99, 149, 271, 387, 411;


I N DE X 587

college, xiii, 68, 74, 78, 237, 238, 244, 245, 246, 311, 363, 380, 392, 407–8, 416–35, 439, 487, 502, 519; high school, 22, 408, 422–23, 477, 499; obsession with, 312, 408, 409, 417, 423, 424, 428, 449; scandals, 417, 418, 424–29, 432, 433, 434, 449–52. See also education; sports; religion (and sports) Ford, Deborah Faye, 281, 282 forestry industry. See lumber industry “Forever Wild” initiative, 166 Forsman, Marie, 180 Fort McClellan, 393, 401 Foster, Nick, 480 Foster, Suroy, 168, 169 France, Bill, Sr., 436 Free Kindergarten Association, 180, 193 Freedom Quilting Bee (Wilcox County), 524, 525 Freedom Riders, 348, 351 Freeman, E. H., 378, 379 friends-and-neighbors, 32, 58, 64, 77, 99 Frost, Corky, 426 fundamentalism, xiii, 55, 75, 99, 286, 476–81. See also religion Gaines, Rowdy, 438 Gainous, Fred, 242, 243 gambling, 179, 221, 417, 447, 452. See also lotteries Garrison, Carol Z., 285 Gaston, A. G., 167, 168, 326, 330, 345, 368 Gee’s Bend, 497, 524, 525 Gelders, Joseph, 60, 74

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 25, 147, 162 Gentry, Teddy Wayne, 520, 521 Giles, Jackson W., 13, 14 Gioiello, John “Big Jim,” 128 Goldberger, Dr. Joseph, 208, 209, 210 golf. See sports Golthy, Freddy, Jr., 360 Gomillion, Charles G., 336, 340, 349 Gore, Al, 104, 476 Graham, Billy, 423, 448 Grand Old Party (GOP). See Republicans Grand Ole Opry, 517, 518, 521 Grau, Shirley Ann, 504 Graves, Bibb, 34, 38, 40, 41, 49, 52, 55, 56, 58, 63, 64, 68, 70, 73, 198, 212, 214, 215, 225, 263, 409, 418 Graves, Dixie Bibb, 264, 267, 268, 409 Gray, Fred, 168, 348 Greater Birmingham Foundation, 219, 291 Green, Hubert, 438 Greenback-Labor party, 323 Greensboro Watchman, 71 Grif¤n, Frances A., 257, 258 Grif¤th, Lucille, 280, 491 GRITS (Girls Raised In The South), 281, 282 Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation, 396 Gulf States Paper, 151 Gulf States Steel, 141, 147 Gunter, William A., Jr., 51, 207, 347 Gwaltney, L. L., 262, 377, 466, 467, 468 Haardt, Sara, 262, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 501


588 I N DE X

Hagood, Edwin W., 210 Hagood, Dr. John Waller, 210, 211 Hall, Grover, 29, 40, 55, 56, 71, 269, 493 Hall, Julian, 30, 55 Hamill, Susan Pace, 480, 481 Hamilton, Frances, 286 Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer, 280, 282, 491, 492, 493, 498 Hamm, Mia, 438, 439 Hand, Judge William Brevard, 481, 482 Handy, W. C., 513, 514, 521 Hart, General Franklin A., 375 Hart, Dr. Hastings, 195, 196, 212 Harris, Alan, 492, 493 Harris, Elmer, 165 Harris, Emmylou, 517, 520, 521 Harris, Henry, 431, 432 Hatcher, James, 507 Hawkins, Erskine, 330, 501, 515, 521 Hayes Aircraft. See Bechtel-McCone Aircraft Head, James, 337, 338 health care, 160, 180, 182, 183, 196, 198, 204–18, 263, 265, 282, 320, 326, 365–66, 377, 382, 465, 466, 469. See also hookworm; hospitals; malaria; mental health; pellagra; tuberculosis HealthSouth, 160 He®in, Howell, 26, 30, 31, 369, 391 He®in, J. Thomas, 9, 16, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 56, 67, 68, 252, 262 Hemphill, Paul, 497, 505 herb medicine. See folk medicine Herndon, Mark, 520, 521 high tech industry, 26, 110, 147, 152, 154–65

Highland Book Club (Birmingham), 255 Hildreth, Ellen Stephens, 257, 258 Hill, Lister, 51, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 99, 119, 491 Hill-Burton Act, 68 hill country, 7, 11, 31–32, 33, 46, 58, 127, 128, 142, 175, 222, 224, 376, 517, 527 Hillman Hospital, 193, 209 Hine, Lewis W., 43, 257 Hobson, Richmond Pearson, 44, 45, 50, 327 Hoffsommer, Harold, 135, 137 Holiness, 285, 457–58 Holley, Lonnie, 526, 528 home demonstration, 277, 278, 279, 283, 400, 465, 466, 522 home rule, 9, 10, 15, 33 Honda, 153, 154, 163 hookworm, 198, 209–212 Hoover, J. Edgar, 336, 354 hospitals, 68, 180, 193, 204, 205, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 319, 320 House, Mrs. L. A., 126, 127 Howard College, 127, 189, 211, 265, 283, 394, 404 Howell, Eli, 92 Howell, Mike, 166 Hubbert, Paul, 80, 82, 101, 105, 231, 232, 359, 407 Huddleston, George, 50, 54, 69 Huie, William Bradford, 424, 425, 502 Hullett, Sandral, 365, 367 Humphries, Hulond, 362, 363 Hundley, Bossie O’Brien, 260, 261 Hunt, Guy, 83, 84, 100, 101, 150, 151, 245, 359


I N DE X 589

hunting, 70, 183, 288, 408, 409, 410, 495, 527, 530 Huntsville Arsenal, 155, 396, 397, 401 Huntsville Chamber of Commerce, 125, 157 Hurston, Zora Neale, 506 Hyundai, 153, 154, 163 illiteracy, xvi, 8, 12, 42, 127, 129, 135, 221–27, 263, 377, 408, 495, 527 image of state, 3, 24, 49, 59, 78, 85, 92–93, 103–4, 112, 149–51, 235, 245, 353, 357, 367, 370, 371, 434, 469, 477–78 Independent Presbyterian Church (Birmingham), 258, 466, 470 individualism, xiii, 408, 409, 410, 411, 413, 455, 524 Industrial High School (Birmingham), 330, 514, 515 industrialization, 4, 34, 42, 43, 46, 110, 112–13, 119, 131, 132, 134, 141, 319, 322, 323, 447. See also high tech industry Ingram, Bob, 96 Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 171, 282 interracial marriage, 5, 16, 90, 319, 369 iron industry, 109, 113, 115, 128, 129–32, 138, 139, 146 Jackson, Bo, 432 Jackson, Harold, 85, 493 Jackson, Rev. Joseph H., 333, 461 Jacksonian politics. See politics Jacksonville State University, 422 Jacobs, Pattie Ruffner, 48, 51, 58, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 267, 268

Jacobs, Solon, 259, 262 Jaffree, Ishmael, 481, 482 James, Fob, 27, 79, 83, 84, 100, 101, 103, 150, 200, 202, 231, 235, 244, 359, 483 Jeffers, John, 475 Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 530 Jefferson County Citizens Coalition, 105, 368 Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School, 235 Jefferson State Junior College, 242, 284 Jenkins, Willie David, 322, 323 Jews, 57, 114, 133, 180, 208, 261, 291, 329, 337, 345, 371, 443, 444, 466, 468, 470, 471, 473, 475, 476, 478, 483–84, 487. See also anti-Jewish Jim Crow. See segregation John Birch Society, 91, 92 Johns, Vernon, 347 Johnson, Frank M., 90, 216, 217, 348, 349 Johnson, Lyndon B., 189, 357 Johnson, Marietta, 236, 237 Johnston, Forney, 54, 55 Jones, Bob, 68, 69, 136 Jones, James M. “Jimmy,” Jr., 72, 73 Jones, Madison, 502, 504 Jones, Sam P., 179, 456, 457 Jones, Thomas Goode, 52, 318 Jones v. Opelika, 481 Jordan, Eugene, 184, 190 Jordan, Mattie May, 183–85 Jordan, Ralph “Shug,” 392, 420, 422 journalism, 36, 55, 62, 71, 72, 85, 106, 133, 247, 258, 280, 329, 332, 333, 341, 351, 356, 368, 379, 392, 393, 416, 427, 451–52, 459, 486, 489, 490, 493–94, 497, 516


590 I N DE X

Judson College, 258, 506 Julian, Percy Lavon, 500 Kentuck Art Festival, 531 Keller, Helen, 265, 266, 267, 268, 306, 317, 507 Kelly, Maud McLure, 261, 268 Kelly Ingram Park, 353, 431 Kennedy, Joey, 85, 493 Kennedy, John F., 93, 337, 354, 404 Kennedy, Robert, 95, 354 Key, DeWayne, 230, 231 Key, V. O., Jr., 29 Kilby, Thomas E., 26, 34, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 48, 120, 195, 196, 202, 212 Kilby Prison, 194, 203 Kincaid, Nanci, 251, 421, 422 King, Coretta Scott, 317 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 90, 94, 95, 168, 335, 337, 345, 347, 348, 349, 352–58, 361, 430, 431, 461, 462 King, Olin, 156, 157 Kirklin, John, 248 Knights of Labor, 120, 122, 323, 324 Knox, James, 48, 49 Knox, John B., 7, 8, 13, 14, 16 Kolb, Reuben F., 6, 8, 11, 13, 50, 52 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 66, 70– 75, 88, 133, 209, 225, 228, 266, 325, 336, 347, 350, 351, 352, 354, 358, 363, 364, 366, 369, 458, 470, 472, 488, 497, 516, 521 labor unions. See unionism Lackey, Fred L., 475 Langan, Joseph N., 346, 347 Lanier, LaFayette, 124 Lanier, Tommy, 363

Larson, Barbara, 290 Lawrence, Ben, 117, 118 Lawrence, Brooks, 464 Leadership Alabama, 101, 106, 290 Leadership Birmingham, 290, 291, 371 League of Municipalities, 37 League of Women Voters. See Alabama League of Women Voters League to Maintain White Supremacy, 74 Lee, Nelle Harper, xi, 487, 503 LeFlore, John L., 346, 347, 402 Legal Economic Cultural Research Association—In Defense of Principles of Constitutional Government (LECRA), 92 Lehman, Henry, 114, 484 Lehman Brothers, 114 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 486, 487, 489, 496 Lewis, Carl, 410, 413 Liberty National Insurance Company. See Torchmark libraries, 327, 489, 494 Lillian Smith Book Awards, 490 Lingo, Al, 353, 354 literacy tests, 9, 12, 32 literature, xvi, 485, 486, 489, 490, 494, 498, 499; and African Americans, 498, 506–7; ¤ction, 269, 315, 419, 490, 491, 501–7; history, 253, 276, 280, 284, 490, 491, 492; memoirs, 258, 490, 491, 494, 497, 498, 499, 501 Liuzzo, Viola, 358 lobbies, 24, 27, 37, 78–84 Logan, Adella Hunt, 327 Logan, Don, 218


I N DE X 591

Logan, Onnie Lee, 326 Lomax, Alan, 512, 519 Lomax, John, 511, 512 lotteries, 101, 221, 409, 480. See also gambling Louis (Barrow), Joe, 333, 410, 411, 412 Louvin brothers: Ira and Charlie Loudermilk, 517, 520 Lowder, Robert “Bobby,” 161, 244, 245, 312, 426, 427, 428, 433 Lowery, Joseph E., 349, 370 Lucas, Charlie, 526, 528 lumber industry, 109, 115, 119– 22, 138, 139, 143, 144–45, 205, 360, 527 lynching, 5, 7, 263, 318, 424 MacArthur Foundation, 247, 530 Mack, Mae, 187, 188 malaria, 184, 188, 208 Mallory, Kathleen, 264, 267, 268 Malone, Vivian, 354 Manley, Dexter, 432, 433 manufacturing, 4, 26, 109, 110, 114, 134, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 281, 397, 401 manufacturing belt, 109, 110 March, William, 502, 503 March v. Alabama, 481 Marshall (George C.) Space Flight Center, 156, 157, 163 Martin, Augusta Benning, 196, 465 Martin, Jim, 99, 289 Mattingly, Lt. Commander T. K. “Ken,” 376 May¤eld, Sara, 272 Maxey, Fred, Jr., 60, 454 Maxwell Field, 381, 394, 398

Mays, Willie Howard, 333, 410, 414, 415 McCampbell, Commander David, 391 McCovey, Willie Lee, 415 McGill, Eula, 140, 279 McGovern, George, 97, 101 McGowin, Earl, 71 McGowin, James G., 121 McGregor, Milton, 101 McKelway, Alexander J., 43 McKissick, Floyd, 416 McMillan, Ann Dial, 281 McMorris, Rear Admiral Charles H. “Socrates,” 384 McNair, Chris, 367 McNair, Denise, 354 McNair, Maxine, 354 McWane, James, 130 McWhorter, Diane, 497, 498 Means, Albert, 429, 450 mechanization, 115, 137, 142, 305, 326, 332. See also industrialization Medicaid, 84, 204, 205, 227, 365 Medical Association of Alabama, 210, 367, 214 Medicare, 204, 205, 365 medicine. See folk medicine; health care Mencken, H. L., 55, 269, 271, 272 Mencken, Sara Haardt. See Haardt, Sara mental health, 4, 16, 19, 85, 86, 89, 194–95, 213–17, 290, 319, 348, 504 Mercedes Benz, 101, 152, 153, 154, 163 Mercy Home (WCTU), 193, 255 Merritt, Judy, 284 Methodists, 38, 40, 45, 60, 67, 85, 91, 112, 118, 126, 179, 180, 181, 197,


592 I N DE X

215, 221, 285, 337, 349, 351, 385, 401, 417, 418, 443, 444, 446, 448, 453–54, 455, 456, 457, 459, 460, 465, 466, 468, 469, 470, 473, 474, 475, 478, 480, 481, 484, 487, 511 Metropolitan Church of God (Birmingham), 482 midwifery, 326 Miglionico, Nina, 287 Miles College, 327, 352, 368, 462 military, 499, 501; and African Americans, 325, 338, 339, 340, 341, 355, 374, 378, 400–404, 405; and ROTC, 374, 375, 376, 380; and women, 394, 397–400; in Cuba, 404, 405; in Korea, 403, 404, 517; in Persian Gulf, 404; in Vietnam, 403, 404; in World War I, 309, 332, 376–83, 444, 458, 502, 517; in World War II, 310, 332, 333, 338, 339, 340, 341, 346, 355, 373, 383–404, 424, 502, 504, 517 Miller, Benjamin M., 58, 59 Miller, Massie, 117, 120 Miller, T. R., 121, 122 mill villages, 42–43, 115 Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, 60, 140 Mitchell, H. L., 118 Mobile Air Service Command, 396, 397 Mobile Bay, 154, 389 Mobile County Poor Asylum, 194 Mobile Daily Register, 11, 12, 36, 256, 359 mobile homes, 183, 188 Mobley, Ethel Flock, 435 Mockbee, Samuel “Sambo,” 247, 529, 530

modernization, 41, 70, 95, 99, 103, 108, 110, 115, 237, 409, 416, 418, 436 Montevallo, University of, 113, 284, 287, 373, 462, 491 Montgomery Advertiser, 11, 12, 29, 55, 214, 269, 270, 404, 411, 413, 434, 490, 493 Montgomery Air Intermediate Depot. See Maxwell Field Montgomery Bus Boycott, 58, 62, 317, 338, 347, 348, 349 Montgomery Improvement Association, 348 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 165, 525, 531 Moody, Dwight L., 179, 423 Moon, Arlin, 524 Moore, A. B., 492 Moore, Roy, 27, 479, 480 Moorer, Admiral Thomas M., 391, 405 Moquin, Joe, 158 Moral Majority, 44, 77, 91 Morison, Samuel E., 387, 388 Morrill Land Grant Act, 374 Morrow, Hugh, 350 Moseley-Braun, Carol, 334, 369 Moss, Barbara Robinette, 498 Mother Angelica, 482 Moton, Dr. Robert R., 336 Mount Hebron Baptist Church (Leeds), 60, 454 MOWA Indians, 70 Murdock, Kimball, 43, 256, 257 Murdock, Nellie Kimball, 258 Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 43, 212, 465 Murray, Albert, 498, 516 Muse, William, 426, 428


I N DE X 593

Musgrove, L. B., 45, 52, 54 music, 259, 509–21, 524; and African Americans, 330, 331, 333, 498, 500, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516; blues, 498, 509, 513, 514, 517, 520; country, 316, 509, 516– 21; folk, 509–13; jazz, 498, 500, 501, 506, 509, 513, 514, 515, 516, 521, 524; rock and roll, 509, 516, 520; shape note (sacred harp), 509, 510, 516, 517 Myrick, Goodwin, 79, 85 99th Pursuit Squadron, 402, 404 NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), 238, 409, 422, 424, 425, 426, 428, 429, 433, 434, 438, 439, 450, 451 National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 249 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 156, 157, 376, 396 National American Woman Suffrage Association, 260, 261 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 233, 234 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 62, 328, 341, 344, 346, 347, 348, 349, 363, 402 National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), 30, 435, 436, 437, 451 National Association of Colored Women, 327 National Baptist Convention, Incorporated (NCB), 459, 461, 462 National Book Award, 496, 497

National Child Labor Committee, 43, 197, 224 National Conference of Christians and Jews, 291, 337, 470, 475 National Defense Education Act, 69 National Guard (Alabama), 39, 64, 70, 150, 210, 323, 354, 357, 377, 384, 405 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), 134, 135 National Medal of Science, 499 National Public Radio, 151, 498, 521 National Space Science and Technology Center, 158 National Youth Administration, 61, 341 National Woman’s Party (NWP), 261, 262, 269 National Women’s Trade Union League, 261, 279 nativism, 46, 54, 468. See also antiCatholicism; anti-Jewish Nazarene, 285, 444, 455, 456, 458 New Deal, 33, 46, 50, 51, 57, 58, 61– 73, 75, 76, 84, 88, 94, 110, 119, 134, 136, 137, 138, 141, 192, 197, 198, 266, 276, 320, 325, 337, 338, 401, 404, 466 New Era Baptist State Convention, 459 New Era Progressive State Convention, 459 New¤eld, Rabbi Morris, 470, 484 New South Coalition, 81, 105, 365, 369 The New Yorker, 490, 509, 525 New York World, 49, 130 Nice, Charles M., 338 Nichols, William F., 392


594 I N DE X

Nielsen, Kate, 291 Nixon, E. D., 347, 348 Nixon, Herman Clarence, 62, 189, 190, 457, 492 Nixon, Richard, 95, 96, 97, 244, 335 Nobel Prize, 500 Noland, Dr. Lloyd, 129, 208 Non-Partisan Voter’s League (NPVL), 346, 347 Norrell, Robert J., 492, 493 Norris, Helen, 505 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 25, 147, 162, 163 Novak, Caroline, 165 167th U.S. Infantry Regiment. See 4th Alabama Oil and Gas Trust Fund, 26 Olympics, 411, 412, 413, 438 O’Neal, Edward A., III, 119, 136 O’Neal, Emmett, 26, 203 Operation New Birmingham, 291, 371 Opportunity Schools, 222, 223 organized labor. See unionism Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, 482 Owen, Marie Bankhead, 56, 253, 262, 272, 273, 276, 277, 490, 492, 493 Owen, Randy, 520, 521 Owen, Thomas McAdory, 97, 220, 490 Owens, James Cleveland “Jesse,” 333, 410, 412, 413 paci¤sm. See religion Paige, Leroy Robert “Satchel,” 414, 415

Paradise, Emphel “Hump,” 523 Parker, Arthur Harold, 330, 331 Parks, Rosa, 266, 267, 297, 317, 338, 347, 348 Parrish, Avery, 515 Partlow, William, 214, 215, 217 Partlow hospital, 215, 216 paternalism, 39, 52, 57, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 254, 528 Paterson, Judith Hillman, 497, 498 Patrick, Luther, 69, 75 Patterson, John, 88, 89, 90, 329, 405 Payne, Rufus “Tee-Tot,” 518 Peleliu, 373, 389 pellagra, 118, 139, 184, 188, 208– 9, 218 Pentecostals, 118, 285, 443, 448, 455, 456, 458, 463, 478, 482, 483 Pepper, Claude D., 69 Percy, Walker, 504, 505 Persons, Gordon, 342 Persons, Major General John C., 384 Petrie, Dr. George, 416, 417, 449, 491, 492 Pettiford, Rev. William R., 167 philanthropy, 113, 125, 167, 180, 192, 211, 212, 219, 227, 253, 328, 508, 531 Phillips, Sam, 519, 521 photography, 257, 356, 364, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 529, 530, 531 Pinto Island, 340, 341 Pittsburgh Plus freight rate, 131 Planned Parenthood, 215, 337 planning (land use), 158, 159 planters, 6, 31, 33, 41, 54, 56, 61, 63, 65, 69, 78, 123, 136, 143; political in®uence, 7, 8, 10 Platt, Martin L., 508


I N DE X 595

Pleasant Grove Baptist Church (Gee’s Bend), 524, 525 politics, xiii, 112, 150, 153, 422; and African Americans, 4, 38, 39, 51, 57, 58, 60, 65, 71, 76–106, 287, 288, 289, 358, 359, 365, 367–69; conservatism, 5, 7–8, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 87, 88, 99, 102–3, 119; corruption, 5–7, 12, 13, 16, 31, 32, 34, 35, 46, 65, 66, 73, 78, 81, 82, 83–84, 93, 97, 101, 318, 365; cynicism about, 36, 83, 150; Jacksonian, 4, 15, 29–34, 46, 56, 185, 220; liberalism, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 88, 103, 421–22; progressivism, 33, 34, 37–57, 100, 102; traditional, 30– 37, 78. See also Big Mules; Constitutions (1901); courthouse gangs; Democrats; friends-and-neighbors; New Deal; poll tax; populism; reapportionment; Republicans; states’ rights; women poll tax, 9, 13, 14, 15, 32, 54, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 99, 118, 137, 266, 284, 338, 346. See also Constitutions (1901) Pool, Sybil, 287, 288 poor whites, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 61, 116, 125, 169, 180, 181–201, 355, 383, 411, 435–36, 455, 456, 458, 465, 485, 498, 516, 522, 528 populism, 6, 88, 240, 337, 344, 410, 493 Populist Party, 253–54, 257, 323 Porter, John, 461, 462

Potts, Earl, 286 Presbyterians, 38, 61, 85, 215, 258, 285, 286, 328, 337, 443, 444, 464, 466, 468, 470, 472, 473, 474, 475, 478, 480, 482, 529 Presley, Elvis, 517, 520 Primitive Baptists, 83, 89, 313, 368, 444, 456, 506, 510 prisons, 4, 7, 16, 19, 34, 47, 85, 86, 201–4, 319, 327, 329, 398, 495. See also convict lease system Proctor, Angie, 287 Professional Golf Association (PGA), 370, 438 Progressive Baptist State Convention, 459 Progressive Democratic Council, 105 Progressive Farmer Company, 218 Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), 461 prohibition, xiii, 38, 41, 44–46, 47, 67, 75, 180, 254, 255, 263, 267, 327, 435–36, 447, 464–65, 467, 468, 469 property taxes. See taxes prostitution, 24, 40, 70, 82, 132, 179, 188, 194, 197, 203, 254, 263, 381, 469 public health, 4, 16, 19, 38, 57, 66, 68, 137 Pulitzer Prize, 55, 85, 191, 248, 493, 494, 497, 498, 499, 502, 503, 504 racism, xii, 36, 46, 50, 56, 57, 71, 75, 76–106, 109, 122, 323, 328, 358, 361, 364, 425, 472, 515, 516; in white churches, 472–75. See also African Americans; Constitutions (1901); religion; segregation railroads, 41, 49, 50, 119, 120


596 I N DE X

Raines, Howell, 487, 493 Ramsay, Erskine, 113 Ramsey, Eric, 425 reapportionment, 66, 86–88, 99, 102 Redstone Arsenal, 141, 155, 396 Reed, Dock, 512 Reed, Joe, 80, 87, 105, 245, 359, 365, 369 Reese, Judge Eugene, 230, 231 religion, xiii, xvi, 126, 128, 130, 179, 180–81, 182, 183, 184, 191, 192, 195, 199, 205, 206, 214, 215, 222, 225, 227, 258, 272, 370, 375, 381, 385, 390, 449, 499–500; and African Americans, 98, 324, 331–37, 348–51, 353, 354, 356, 358, 359, 361, 368, 371, 401, 444, 448, 458, 459–63, 465, 466, 470, 471, 472– 75, 476, 481, 483, 509, 512, 513, 524; and culture wars, 81, 102, 235, 236, 475–81; and ethics, 448– 52; and paci¤sm, 376, 377, 383, 384, 458, 481; and politics, 43–49, 77, 85, 91–92, 95, 98, 99, 102, 104, 165, 480–81; and sports, 237, 409, 416–17, 418, 419, 421, 422, 423, 425, 449–52; and women, 170, 252, 262, 268, 397, 455, 457, 458, 464, 475, 476–77, 528; beliefs of, 445, 446, 447, 448, 452–53, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 467, 478, 481, 505; bivocational, 286, 453, 455, 460, 515; church membership, 443–44, 447, 459, 470, 482, 483; conversion, 314, 445, 446, 453, 499; revivals, 446, 454, 456, 457; in rural areas, 179, 452–59, 460, 510, 526, 527, 528. See also African

Americans; anti-Catholicism; anti-Jewish; Christian Coalition; eugenics; evangelicals; Moral Majority; politics; prohibition; social gospel; women (and Christianity); and individual denominations Republicans, 31, 58, 76, 88, 102, 103, 104, 197 Resettlement Administration, 134, 524 Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA), 26, 154 revivalism. See religion Reynolds v. Simms, 87 Rhodes Scholar, 71, 121, 248, 502 Richardson, Ed, 233, 234 Richie, Lionel, 516, 521 Robbins, Marie, 450 Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, 154, 218, 438 Roberts, Frances, 280 Roberts, Kenneth, 68, 69 Robertson, Pat, 77, 91 Robinson, Jo Ann, 267, 329, 347 Rockett, Myrtle R., 275 Rodgers, Jimmie, 517 Rogers, William W., 492, 493 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 73, 137, 275, 519 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 58, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 72, 135, 136, 137, 139, 197, 263, 341, 383, 395 Rose Bowl, 68, 392, 418, 419 Rosengarten, Theodore, 495, 496 Rural Electri¤cation Administration, 61, 67 Rural Library Act, 69 Rural Studio, 247, 530 ruralism, 112, 116, 176, 179, 180, 320


I N DE X 597

Russell, Benjamin, 59, 124 Russell Manufacturing Company, 145, 164 Rust International, 161 sacred harp singing. See music Saint Paul’s Catholic Church (Birmingham), 180, 469, 470 Saint Vincent’s Hospital, 180, 193 sales taxes. See taxes Salvation Army, 180, 193 Samford University, 27, 92, 113, 166, 211, 249, 422, 426, 427, 429, 460, 472, 475, 480, 484 Sanders, Hank, 81 Sanders, Rose, 368 Sanguinetti, Elise, 505 Satcher, David, 327 Scarbinsky, Kevin, 451 School of Organic Education, 236 Scottsboro Case, 60, 280, 318, 459 Screws, Colonel William P., 379, 380 Scrushy, Richard, 160 Searcy, James T., 214 Searcy hospital, 215, 217 Second World War. See military segregation, 9, 34, 35, 71, 98, 104, 110, 220, 221, 225, 227–28, 232, 318–72, 401, 402, 403, 404, 415, 430–31, 446, 447, 448, 449, 460, 461, 462, 472, 516. See also education; unionism Selma University, 460, 461, 462 settlement houses, 43, 463, 465, 466 Shannon, Charles, 527 sharecroppers, 13, 60, 69, 70, 116–19, 135, 190, 226, 275, 281, 322, 382, 411, 412, 485, 494–95, 496, 512,

524, 527, 528; mobility of, 117, 411, 412, 486. See also tenant farmers Sharecroppers Union, 60, 494 Sheldon, Rev. Charles M., 443, 463, 467 Shilling, Erik, 394, 395 shipbuilding, 340, 396, 401, 481 Shoal Creek Country Club, 168, 370, 371 Shores, Arthur D., 326, 345, 367, 368 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 329, 345, 349, 350, 352, 353, 366, 461, 471 Siddon, Anne Rivers, 505 Sidney Lanier High School (Montgomery), 225, 235, 271, 362, 508 Siebels, George, Jr., 160 Siegelman, Don, 27, 34, 81, 82, 83, 87, 101, 102, 105, 202, 231, 235, 244, 407, 424, 480, 483 Simpson, James A. “Jimmy,” 68, 73, 74, 75 Sims, Bernice, 526, 528 Sims, Verner, 135, 136 Sisters of Charity (Birmingham), 180, 466 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (Birmingham), 167, 345, 350, 353, 354, 366, 368, 370, 431, 461, 472 Sklenar, Herbert A., 165 Skyline Farms Resettlement Community, 519 Slater, Morris “Railroad Bill,” 510 Slaughter, William, 106 Sledge, Eugene B., 373, 374, 388, 389, 390 Smith, Bill, 165


598 I N DE X

Smith, Clarence “Pine Top,” Sr., 514, 517 Smith, Hazel Brannon, 493, 494 Smith, General Holland McTyeire, 375, 384–88, 390 Smith, Major General Ralph C., 387 Smith, W. T., 120, 121 Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, 167 Smith-Lever Act, 116, 277, 322 Smitherman, Joe T., 355, 356 Smyer, Sidney J., 59, 350, 353 social gospel, 38, 43, 48, 61, 114, 130, 179, 180, 181, 193, 196, 212, 258, 447, 462, 463–67, 469. See also religion; settlement houses social mobility, 132, 185, 219 Social Security Act, 64, 134, 196, 199 society. See families; health care; poor whites; prisons; ruralism; suburbs Southeast Air Corps Training Center, 393, 394 Southern Baptist Convention, 264, 377, 478 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 98, 347, 349, 350, 352, 356, 363, 370, 461 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 61, 62, 73, 75, 338, 341, 492 Southern Intercollegiate Association, 417 Southern Living, 192, 218, 282, 438 Southern Poverty Law Center, 370 Southern Progress, 218 Southern Regional Council, 337, 490 Southern Research Institute (SRI), 161 South Highlands Presbyterian Church (Birmingham), 444 Space Craft, Inc., 156, 157

Sparkman, John, 66, 69, 73, 76 Sparks, Chauncey M., 32, 64, 65, 73 special interests. See lobbies Spies, Dr. Tom, 209 Spies Nutrition Clinic, 209 sports: and African Americans, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 421–22, 425, 429, 430–33; and individualism, 408, 409, 410; and poverty, 411, 412, 420, 429, 430, 432, 433, 434; and women, 435, 438–39; baseball, xiii, 413–15; boxing, xiii, 411–12; golf, 266, 282, 352, 370, 438, 499, 505; gymnastics, 438, 439, 450; soccer, 438, 439; stock car racing, 435–37; swimming, 438; track, 412–13; values of, 407, 416, 418, 419, 425. See also football; hunting; religion; Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail; universities Spring Hill College, 249 Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), 233, 234, 239 “Star Wars” defense initiative, 157 State Chamber of Commerce, 37, 412 State Sovereignty Commission, 91, 92 states’ rights, 15, 71, 75, 90, 92, 260, 472, 494 Steagall, Henry B., 46, 50, 69 steel industry, 109, 115, 129–32, 138, 139, 146–47, 414 Stevenson, Adlai, 69, 98 Stickney, Dr. Stonewall, 216, 217 Stiles, Charles W., 210, 211, 212 Stillman College, 460, 509 Stoner, J. B., 76, 345 Strawberry Pickers, 65 Stribling, T. S., 502


I N DE X 599

Stripling, Charlie, 519 Strode, Hudson, 502 suburbs, 176–77, 361, 364 Sudduth, Jimmie Lee, 526, 528 suffrage, 8, 9, 14–15. See also women Sullivan, Anne, 265, 306 Sullivan, Pat, 432 Summerford, Glenn, 458, 459 Sun Records, 519 Sunday, Billy, 423, 521 31st “Dixie” Division (national guard), 384 332 Fighter Group (Tuskegee Airmen), 402 Talladega College, 227, 249, 291, 334 Talladega Superspeedway, 436, 437 Tappan, Gladys, 277 Tartt, Ruby Pickens, 511, 512 taxes, 5, 33, 34, 46, 59, 68, 84–86, 99, 101, 104, 107, 123, 136, 152, 153, 164, 165, 186, 196, 213, 222, 231, 232, 246, 477, 480–81; current use, 18; opposition to, 4, 31, 34, 36, 84, 196, 220, 221, 225, 228, 235, 408; property, 9, 10, 17–22, 78, 144, 151, 159, 220, 228, 229, 408, 477, 480; sales, 10, 17, 18, 20, 59, 64, 220, 229. See also Constitutions (1901) Teledyne-Brown Engineering, 158 temperance movement. See prohibition Temple Emanu-El (Birmingham), 444, 483 tenant farmers, 6, 8, 9, 31, 38, 42, 56, 57, 59, 61, 65, 69, 71, 89, 115, 116– 19, 126, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137,

138, 141, 142, 185, 190, 224, 226, 275, 277, 319, 368, 370, 455, 456, 457, 458, 486, 488, 502. See also sharecroppers Tengle, Frank, 485, 486, 489 Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI), 61, 74, 113, 114, 127–33, 138–41, 146, 147, 152, 163, 167, 208, 301, 325, 395. See also USX Corporation Tennessee Valley, 33, 68, 69, 99, 119, 141, 146, 281, 395, 502 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 33, 63, 68, 134, 141, 155, 383, 395 Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention (Athens), 519, 521 textile industry, 42–44, 63, 107, 109, 114, 122–27, 134, 139, 140, 141, 145–46, 155, 184, 224, 257, 275, 396, 458 theater. See culture Thomson, Bailey, 24, 27 timber. See lumber industry Title 9, 438, 439 To Kill a Mockingbird, 315, 503 Tolliver, Mose “Mose T,” 526, 528 Torbert, C. C. “Bo,” 230 Torchmark, 161 tort reform, 80, 82, 149 Toyota, 153, 154, 158, 163 Trabits, Dorothy, 266 trade schools. See education Trammell, Seymour, 93, 97 trapping, 184, 190, 206 Traylor, Bill, 526, 527, 528 Trenholm, H. C., 329 Trico Steel, 147, 152


600 I N DE X

Troy State University, 92, 422 Truman, Harry S., 68, 75, 335 trustees. See universities tuberculosis, 198, 208, 210, 214, 255, 275, 319 Tucker, Cynthia, 493 Tuggle School, 167, 307, 329, 330 Tuggle, Carrie A. Greggs, 307, 329, 330 Tunstall, Loraine Bedsole Bush, 44, 196, 197, 263, 267, 268, 276 Tuscaloosa High School, 424, 487 Tuskegee Airmen (332nd Fighter Group), 310, 402, 403 Tuskegee Institute, 11, 64, 227, 249, 278, 308, 321, 322, 327, 329, 334, 336, 340, 402, 403, 465, 498, 506, 509, 516, 530. See also Tuskegee Airmen Tutwiler, Julia S., 43, 203, 255, 256, 282, 465, 511 Tutwiler Prison for Women, 298 Tuxedo Junction, 501, 515 USX Corporation, 147, 152, 160. See also Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company U.S. Public Health Service, 208, 469 U.S. Steel, 74, 129, 131, 279, 324, 504, 505. See also Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company; USX Corporation Underwood, Oscar W., 45, 50, 52–56, 73, 262 unionism, 33, 38, 39, 45, 49, 51, 52– 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 95, 115, 118, 120, 122, 132, 133, 134, 139–41, 144, 148, 195, 196, 214, 279, 436, 437, 448, 458, 466, 470

United Daughters of the Confederacy, 256, 369 United Hebrew Charities, 193 United Mine Workers, 48, 51, 63, 139, 320, 323 United Textile Workers (UTW), 63, 140 universities, 56, 68, 88, 89, 363, 366, 371, 374, 375, 385, 399, 400, 404, 405, 499, 530; accessibility, 239– 43; athletics, 244, 245, 380, 385, 392, 407–8; trustees, 29, 65, 82, 218, 243–47, 250, 338, 427, 428, 434. See also African Americans; Alabama Commission on Higher Education; education; football; sports The University of Alabama, 29, 49, 69, 88, 90, 101, 113, 135, 168, 195, 209, 214, 237, 238, 243, 244, 245, 247, 256, 261, 265, 280, 283, 284, 288, 353, 363, 366, 370, 374, 399, 407, 418, 419, 425, 427, 432, 434, 438, 450, 462, 475, 487, 490, 499, 519, 530; Law School, 385, 502. See also education; football; sports; universities The University of Alabama in Birmingham, 160, 161, 188, 243, 246, 248, 249, 285, 367, 368, 430, 434, 500; Center for Urban Affairs, 291; University Medical College, 64, 265 The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 156, 158, 160 University of North Alabama, 502 University of South Alabama, 245, 359 University of West Alabama, 245 urbanism, 175–77


I N DE X 601

Vann, David, 160, 368 Victorianism, 169, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 259, 264, 501 violence, 6, 40, 41, 132, 179, 263, 318, 319, 320, 321, 333, 344, 345, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 357, 358, 360, 366, 367, 368, 374, 411, 417, 423–24, 430–31, 470–72, 497, 504, 510; from economic/social establishment, 74, 133. See also lynching; military von Braun, Werner, 155, 156, 158, 163, 300 Vulcan Materials, 148, 165 Wade, Neal, 153 Wade, Wallace, 430 Walker, Margaret, 506 Wallace, George C., 18, 26, 66, 69, 75, 77, 80, 83, 88–100, 102, 104, 105, 149, 150, 151, 240, 241, 243, 244, 289, 298, 300, 325, 344, 346, 348, 349, 353, 354, 356, 357, 359, 362, 370, 422, 430, 437, 472, 528 Wallace, Gerald, 93, 97 Wallace, Lurleen Burns, 69, 88, 89, 93–95, 215, 241, 289, 290 Walter, Eugene, 503, 505 Walter, Francis X., 525 Ward, David, 492 Ward, George B., 469 Warren, Mike, 370, 371 Washington, Booker T., 11, 13, 52, 227, 249, 308, 317, 321, 328, 329, 336 Washington, Dinah, 520 Watkins, Donald V., 168, 245, 367 Watkins, Levi, 168

Weeden, Maria Howard, 528 Weeks, Barney, 82 welfare capitalism, 114, 128, 129–31 welfare system, 85, 136, 137, 182, 186, 191, 192–201, 263, 329 Welton, James A., 330 Wesley Houses, 466 West Alabama Health Services, 365 West, Myrtice, 526, 528 West Point Manufacturing, 124 Whatley, Fess, 514, 515, 521 Whatley, John T., 330 White, Newman I., 512 White, Sherman, Sr., 403, 404 White Citizens’ Council, 344, 494 white supremacy, 7, 16, 34, 71, 227, 341. See also racism; segregation Wieschaus, Eric, 500 Wilkins, Hattie Hooker, 287 Wilkins, Ruby Welsh, 285, 286 Wilkinson, Horace C., 75, 76 Williams, Aubrey, 61, 62, 67, 68, 72, 119 Williams, Charles Melvin “Cootie,” 514 Williams, Dewey, 510, 511 Williams, Hank, Jr., 521 Williams, Hank, Sr., 316, 517, 518 Williams, Zecozy Ausborn, 267 Willie, Louis J., 168, 326, 370, 371 Wilson, Augusta Evans, 501 Wilson, Edward O., 248, 487, 498, 499, 500, 502 Wilson Dam, 383 Windham, Kathryn Tucker, 498 Winston Cup, 435, 436, 437 Wiregrass, 7, 11, 33, 56, 58, 62, 64, 119, 299 Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers, 510


602 I N DE X

Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), 264, 286 women, xiii, xvi, xvii, 40, 41, 182, 193, 207, 340, 382, 491, 492, 493, 494, 501, 511–12; and Christianity, 38–39, 193, 254, 262, 263– 64, 265, 285–86, 528; and entrepreneurship, 169–71, 281–82; and politics, 66, 93–95, 106, 253–54, 263, 276, 284, 286–90, 400; and work, 41, 118, 182, 184, 195, 198– 99, 225, 260, 264–65, 274–82, 323, 397–402, 522; colleges for, 259, 265, 266, 268, 269, 284, 287; conservatism of, 252–53, 255; literary clubs, 196, 255, 267; prisons, 202– 4, 255, 256, 257, 284, 398; progressivism of, 38, 44, 56, 63, 195, 196, 254–67; social rebellion of, 267– 74; suffrage, 15, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48, 51–52, 53, 54, 57, 64, 67, 253, 255, 256, 257–63, 266, 269, 275, 276, 327, 409, 464, 492. See also African Americans; education; military; politics; religion; Victorianism Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Service, 399 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 43, 44, 193, 254, 255, 464

Women’s Exchange, 281 Women’s Fund of Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, 280 Women’s Political Council, 347 Women’s Trade Union League, 261, 279 wood dealer system, 144 Woods, John W., 165 Woolfolk, Odessa, 27, 290, 291, 292 Works Progress Administration, 61, 134 World War I. See military World War II. See military Worley, Nancy, 289 Worthington, Amelia, 260, 261 Wright, Richard, 329, 506 Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 381 Wyatt, Ricky, 215 Wyatt, Willie, 432 Wyatt v. Stickney, 217 Wynette, Tammy, 521 yeoman farmers, 4–5, 31, 33, 56, 61, 64, 65, 277, 278 Young, Mrs. Andrew, 317 Young, Logan, 429 Young Men’s Business Club, 337 Zoghby, Mary Stephens, 288 Zukoski, Charles F., Jr., 337, 338


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