Alabama State Quotes

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.

I'll be fine ' Pen told me a little curtly. 'Where are you going anyway ' 'The United States. Alabama.' 'Looking for a change of scene ' 'Looking for a dead woman.' 'Get Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to come down here and I'll make you one.

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Alabama, the last state to do so, did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000. Even then, 40 percent of the electorate in that referendum voted in favor of keeping the marriage ban on the books.

Interestingly, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and FBI crime reports, the states with the highest levels of gun ownership do not have the highest homicide rates. For comparison, Illinois, which has some of the strictest gun regulations in the country, has nearly three times the gun-related deaths as Alabama, a state which has a roughly 30 percent higher firearm ownership rate.

Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it.

She keeps herself in a constant state of unhappiness, so she is never disappointed by life.

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

South during the Civil Rights Era. It was during this time that the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was added as a holiday in Alabama. Even today, banks, state offices, and state institutions shut down in his honor.

Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed.

LYNCHING STATES Mississippi, 15; Arkansas, 8; Virginia, 5; Tennessee, 15; Alabama, 12; Kentucky, 12; Texas, 9; Georgia, 19; South Carolina, 5; Florida, 7; Louisiana, 15; Missouri, 4; Ohio, 2; Maryland, 1; West Virginia, 2; Indiana, 1; Kansas, 1; Pennsylvania, 1.

Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692—these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020; adults without children are usually ineligible.

My birth certificate says: Female Negro Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. is planning a march on Washington, where John F. Kennedy is president. In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox talking about a revolution. Outside the window of University Hospital, snow is slowly falling. So much already covers this vast Ohio ground. In Montgomery, only seven years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus. I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed. I am born Negro here and Colored there and somewhere else, the Freedom Singers have linked arms, their protests rising into song: Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday. and somewhere else, James Baldwin is writing about injustice, each novel, each essay, changing the world. I do not yet know who I’ll be what I’ll say how I’ll say it . . . Not even three years have passed since a brown girl named Ruby Bridges walked into an all-white school. Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds of white people spat and called her names. She was six years old. I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby. I do not know what the world will look like when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . . Another Buckeye! the nurse says to my mother. Already, I am being named for this place. Ohio. The Buckeye State. My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby’s hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm’s—raised and fisted or Martin’s—open and asking or James’s—curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa’s or Ruby’s gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .

Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion: The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers—those who want all and will not do with less. Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: “Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.

A special act of Congress enabled King to take his oath of office in Cuba—the only President or Vice President to be sworn in outside the United States—later in March. King returned home to Alabama in early April and died two days later, the only Vice President to never make it to the national capital during his term of office.

The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.

Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state—or any other country in the world.

First, realize that not everyone from the Blue Cancer states is a bad person. Northern California is full of rednecks that would easily be mistaken for natives of Alabama.

This is a revolution -- a revolution that won't fire a SHOT! We come to love the HELL out of the state of Alabama!" -John Lewis

The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled.

People ask me how I can stay in Alabama. Why wouldn't I leave? Alabama is my home. I love Alabama--the hot days in summer and the thunderstorms in winter. I love the smell of the air and the green of the woods. Alabama has always been God's country to me, and it always will be. I love Alabama, but I don't love the State of Alabama. Since my release, not one prosecutor, or state attorney general, or anyone having anything to do with my conviction has apologized. I doubt they ever will. I forgive them...I made a choice...I chose to forgive.

A 2012 CNBC report ranked the fifty states by overall quality of life, and Vermont placed third. New Hampshire, the second-least-religious state, was first in quality of life, and Maine, the third-least-religious state, was fourth in quality of life. At the other end of the list were Alabama (third-most-religious state) ranked forty-seventh for quality of life, and Louisiana (fourth-most-religious state) ranked fiftieth for quality of life.8 A 2012 ranking of the most and least peaceful states in America showed the same pattern. States with the lowest violent crime are 1. Maine, 2. Vermont, and 3. New Hampshire, the three least-religious states in America. The most dangerous state in America, with the highest murder and incarceration rates, is also the fourth-most-religious state, Louisiana.9 Statistics and rankings do not prove that Christianity caused or exacerbates the challenges faced by the most religious states in America, of course. What is clear, however, is that Christianity has not solved its most serious problems, despite repeated assurances from Christians that it can and does.

So really, this was the most guarded pool in the entire state of Alabama. Maybe the most guarded pool in the entire country... but no one had the decency to even drown a little bit. Honestly.

TODAY I WANT TO TELL THE CITY OF SELMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE STATE OF ALABAMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA AND THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD, THAT WE ARE NOT ABOUT TO TURN AROUND.

While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don’t plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

What’s the biggest problem facing teenagers today? Ourselves. We’re a generation of lazy underachievers who need to learn that hard work pays off. What’s your town known for? Cow manure! Hold for laughs... Actually Irondale is the setting of Fannie Flagg’s famous novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Why’d you enter the Junior Miss Birmingham pageant? To win... to go to State... then Nationals... maybe get the hell out of Alabama.

I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I’d found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind.

* Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. ‘I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down to gether at the table of brotherhood – I have a dream. ‘That one day even the state of Mississippi – a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of op pression – will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream.’ He had hit a rhythm, and two hundred thousand people felt it sway their souls. It was more than a speech: it was a poem and a canticle and a prayer as deep as the grave. The heartbreaking phrase ‘I have a dream’ came like an amen at the end of each ringing sentence. ‘. . . That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character – I have a dream today. ‘I have a dream that one day down in Alabama – with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification – one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers – I have a dream today. ‘With this faith we will be able to hew, out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. ‘With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. ‘With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.’ Looking around, Jasper saw that black and white faces alike were running with tears. Even he felt moved, and he had thought himself immune to this kind of thing. ‘And when this happens; when we allow freedom to ring; when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city; we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands . . .’ Here he slowed down, and the crowd was almost silent. King’s voice trembled with the earthquake force of his passion. ‘. . . and sing, in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! ‘Free at last! ‘Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

There are five southern states that continue to include Confederate symbols in their flags. Notably, four of the five (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia) are also among the top ten states containing the highest percentage of white evangelical Protestants in the country.

In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King's march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, "They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain—what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney’s infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard’s name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand!

The New Deal’s unfinished business—its inattention to racial discrimination and racial violence—became the business of the postwar civil rights movement, as new forms of discrimination and the persistence of Jim Crow laws and even of lynching—in 1946 and 1947, black veterans were lynched in Georgia and Louisiana—contributed to a new depth of discontent. As a black corporal from Alabama put it, “I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.

Morrison, 2000). The Court also ruled that states could not be bound, as employers, by the federal laws against employment discrimination, either on the basis of age (Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, 2000) or on the basis of disability (Board of Regents of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, 2003).

Your Honor, I just want to say this before we adjourn. It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn't do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious problems and important work that must be done in this state.

Voting rights activists who had been trying to register voters for years stepped up their efforts. In Selma, Alabama, Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, but the city’s voting rolls were 99 percent white. White law enforcement officers regularly harassed and arrested activists.

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.

Remember Martin L. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? When it staged marches in Alabama, that state’s governor, George Wallace, called the organization’s members “professional agitators with pro-Communist affiliations.” Sound familiar? How close to “outside agitators”! The phrase begs the question: outside of what? The state? America? This country is called the United States of America, founded upon a national Constitution. Do all citizens have the right to protest, or just some? Is what happened to Mike Brown a local matter, or is his unjustifiable killing actually a national issue? It’s not the job of media to police protests—deciding who are “good” demonstrators, who are “bad” ones. Their job is to report what is happening, period. Were it not for these protests, let us be frank, the mass media would’ve ignored the crimes police committed against Michael Brown, against his family, against his community, and against his fellow citizens—us. If media were doing their job, reporting on the vicious violence launched against young Blacks the nation over, perhaps Michael Brown would be alive today. Let us look at the cops, almost 98 percent of whom are outsiders to Ferguson. They work there, they kill there, but they don’t live there. They dwell in neighboring, whiter counties and towns. Who are the real outside agitators?

She leaned her uninjured shoulder against his plump, furry behind and shoved while she bitched to herself, "Four years at the military academy, two years at Kansas State University, survival camp in the swamps of Alabama, more schooling in Florida, and then torture endurance training with the Mossad and all so I could heave a bear's ass into a helicopter. Unfreaking real.

Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.

The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled. We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need—all so we can kill them with less resistance.

To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.

While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership.

It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section 102 of the state constitution read: The legislature shall never pass any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro.* No

Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.

The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more.

States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right. They held a nominating convention in Birmingham during which Frank M. Dixon, a former governor of Alabama, said that Truman’s civil rights programs would “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.” The Dixiecrat platform rested on this statement: “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” As its candidate, the States’ Rights Party nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond.45

Hoping to defuse the community’s anger, Black leaders in Selma planned a march. They would walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and to voter suppression. On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat voting rights leader Amelia Boynton unconscious.

ballot you go, the more volatile the polls tend to be: polls of House races are less accurate than polls of Senate races, which are in turn less accurate than polls of presidential races. Polls of primaries, also, are considerably less accurate than general election polls. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the average poll missed by about eight points, far more than implied by its margin of error. The problems in polls of the Republican primaries of 2012 may have been even worse.26 In many of the major states, in fact—including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama, and Mississippi—the candidate ahead in the polls a week before the election lost.

Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post

No Negro, in fact, no American, is an outsider when he goes to any community to aid the cause of freedom and justice. No Negro anywhere, regardless of his social standing, his financial status, his prestige and position, is an outsider so long as dignity and decency are denied to the humblest black child in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia. The amazing aftermath of Birmingham, the sweeping Negro Revolution, revealed to people all over the land that there are no outsiders in all these fifty states of America. When a police dog buried his fangs in the ankle of a small child in Birmingham, he buried his fangs in the ankle of every American. The bell of man's inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us.

There were, of course, other heroes, little ones who did little things to help people get through: merchants who let profits disappear rather than lay off clerks, store owners who accepted teachers' scrip at face value not knowing if the state would ever redeem it, churches that set up soup kitchens, landlords who let tenants stay on the place while other owners turned to cattle, housewives who set out plates of cold food (biscuits and sweet potatoes seemed the fare of choice) so transients could eat without begging, railroad "bulls" who turned the other way when hoboes slipped on and off the trains, affluent families that carefully wrapped leftover food because they knew that residents of "Hooverville" down by the dump would be scavenging their garbage for their next meal, and more, an more. But they were not enough, could not have been enough, so when the government stepped in to help, those needing help we're thankful.

These ideas persisted into the twentieth century and drove government programs that attempted to regulate Black women’s reproductive lives. State and federally funded family-planning programs engaged in massive campaigns to sterilize Black women. For example, between 1933 and 1976, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina approved the involuntary sterilizations of more than 7,500 people—affecting Black people at a disproportionate rate—on the grounds that they were “mentally defective.”44 In 1973, a federal district judge presided over a case of two Black sisters from Montgomery, Alabama, who were sterilized at ages twelve and fourteen when government-paid nurses pushed their illiterate mother into signing a consent form with an X.45 The judge, Gerhard Gesell, in ruling against this practice, noted that “over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs.

The levels of approval depend on the country and region: Swedes approve of spanking far less than do Americans or Kiwis, and Americans themselves are diverse, as we would expect from the southern culture of honor.178 In a 2005 survey, spanking approval rates ranged from around 55 percent in northern blue states (those that tend to vote for Democrats), like Massachusetts and Vermont, to more than 85 percent in southern red states (those that tend to vote for Republicans), like Alabama and Arkansas.179 Across the fifty states, the rate of approval of spanking tracks the homicide rate (the two measures show a correlation of 0.52 on a scale from -1 to 1), which could mean that spanked children grow up to be killers, but more likely that subcultures that encourage the spanking of children also encourage the violent defense of honor among adults.180 But every region showed a decline, so that by 2006 the southern states disapproved of spanking in the same proportion that the north-central and mid-Atlantic states did in 1986.181

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

This journey by time capsule to the early 1940s is not always a pleasant one. It affords us a glimpse at the pre-civil rights South. This was true in the raw copy of the guidebooks as well. The Alabama guidebook copy referred to blacks as “darkies.” It originally described the city of Florence struggling through “the terrible reconstruction, those evil days when in bitter poverty, her best and bravest of them sleep in Virginia battlefields, her civilization destroyed . . . And now when the darkest hour had struck, came a flash of light, the forerunners of dawn. It was the Ku Klux Klan . . .” The Dover, Delaware, report stated that “Negroes whistle melodiously.” Ohio copy talked of their “love for pageantry and fancy dress.” Such embarrassingly racist passages were usually edited out, but the America Eats manuscripts are unedited, so the word darkies remains in a Kentucky recipe for eggnog. In the southern essays from America Eats, whenever there is dialogue between a black and a white, it reads like an exchange between a slave and a master. There also seems to be a racist oral fixation. Black people are always sporting big “grins.” A description of a Mississippi barbecue cook states, “Bluebill is what is known as a ‘bluegum’ Negro, and they call him the brother of the Ugly man, but personal beauty is not in the least necessary to a barbecue cook.

She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47

This is why churches that try the most self-consciously to avoid social issues and political questions become, unwittingly, the most political of all. The founders of my church tradition, in concert with others, spoke much of the “spirituality of the church” as a reason for avoiding “political” issues. To some degree, they were right. The church does not bear the sword that’s been given to the state; the church advances by spiritual, not carnal, means. But the “spirituality of the church” was a convenient doctrine. My denomination was founded back in the nineteenth century by those who advocated for human slavery, and who sought to keep their consciences and their ballots and their wallets away from a transcendent word that would speak against the sinful injustice of a regime of kidnapping, rape, and human beings wickedly deigning to buy and sell other human beings created in the image of God. Slavery, they argued (to their shame), was a “political” issue that ought not distract the church from its mission: evangelism and discipleship. What such a move empowered was not just social injustice (which would have been bad enough), but also personal sin. When so-called “simple gospel preaching” churches in 1856 Alabama or 1925 Mississippi calls sinners to repentance for fornicating and gambling but not for slaveholding or lynching, those churches may be many things but they are hardly non-political. By not addressing these issues, they are addressing them, by implicitly stating that they are not worthy of the moral scrutiny of the church, that they will not be items of report at the Judgment Seat of Christ. These churches, thus, bless the status quo, with all the fealty of a court chaplain. The same is true of a church in twenty-first-century America that doesn’t speak to the pressing issues of justice and righteousness around us, such as the horror of abortion and the persisting sins of racial injustice.

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. . . . At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed. There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. . . . But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." -Lyndon B. Johnson, 15 March 1965

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now-- North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere

These prophetic verses certainly would apply to the United States. Twenty-two of our states have ports or harbors through which flow the world’s goods for America’s consumption. There are over 400 coastal and inland ports throughout the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau has identified two hundred and forty national trading partners of the United States using those ports. Some of the largest U.S. ports are located on inland waterways, including Houston, Texas; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Portland, Oregon. The port city farthest from the ocean, Fairmont, West Virginia, is 2,085 miles from the sea via an inland waterway. America is truly a nation dwelling on many waters.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

Despite indications of affection, a strong Anti-Semitic bias remained. In an 1878 campaign speech Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama referred to a candidate as a 'Jew-dog,' and the following year Senator Morgan opposed the appointment of a postmaster in Montgomery because he had been endorsed 'by a parcel of Jews.' In Nashville, Tennessee, in 1878, Christian mothers threatened to withdraw their children from a private school for girls after two Jews had been accepted. The principal yielded to the pressure and rescinded the enrollments. And in a Rome, Georgia, courtroom in 1873, the plaintiff's attorney declared that one cannot accept the word of a Jew 'even under oath.' Louisiana had anti-Semitic demonstrations in the late 1880s. Then, in 1893, farmers in the Bayou state wrecked Jewish stores in a particularly harsh outburst. That same year Mississippi night riders burned Jewish farmhouses, and a Baltimore minister preached: 'Of all the dirty creatures who have befouled this earth, the Jew is the slimiest.

In May 2003, a bill aimed at requiring the Alabama Historical Commission to provide a current inventory of landmarks in the site eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places could thus state: The history of Africatown, USA originated in Ghana, West Africa, near the present city of Tamale in 1859. The tribes of Africa were engaged in civil war, and the prevailing tribes sold the members of the conquered tribes into slavery. The village of the Tarkbar tribe near the city of Tamale was raided by Dahomey warriors, and the survivors of the raid were taken to Whydah, now the People’s Republic of Benin, and put up for sale. The captured tribesmen were sold for $100 each at Whydah. They were taken to the United States on board the schooner Clotilde, under the command of Maine Capt. William Foster who had been hired by Capt. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner who had built the schooner Clotilde in Mobile in 1856.15 This is the official version of the story, also found in a piece emanating from the office of former representative Herbert “Sonny” Callahan, created in 2000 for the Local Legacies Project of the Library of Congress.16 The Africatown Community Mobilization Project uses it on its brochure. In addition to the offensive misuse of “tribe,” almost everything in this text is historically inaccurate and unwittingly derogatory. The project’s brochure contains further mistakes that come from a 1993 article produced by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.17

Slavery is legal in prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”49 Prisoners are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring workers to be paid the minimum wage. The highest hourly wage in prison rarely exceeds $2 and most prisoners earn less than a dollar an hour. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas most prisoners are not paid for their work. Once you enter prison you become, in essence, a slave of the state.

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1861, the man featured on this stamp stood on the steps of the statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama, and took the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America. Less than two months later he was at war with his own former countrymen. The war was to be one of horrific brutality, with a death toll fifteen times greater than that of all America’s previous conflicts, including the War of Independence, added together.

In the months that George had been rousing up the pickers, their world had grown even more dangerous due to the state’s desperate wartime need for labor. From the panhandle to the Everglades, Florida authorities were now arresting colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working. Charged with vagrancy, the men were assessed fines of several weeks’ pay and made to pick fruit or cut sugarcane to work off the debt if they did not have the money, which few of them did and as the authorities fully anticipated. Those captured were hauled to remote plantations or turpentine camps, held by force, and beaten or shot if they tried to escape. It was an illegal form of contemporary slavery called debt peonage, which persisted in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South well into the 1940s. Federal investigations into neoslavery in Florida uncovered numerous abuses of kidnapping and enslavement and led to a 1942 indictment and trial of a sugar plantation company in the Everglades.

When the South woke up to the loss of its once guaranteed workforce, it tried to find ways to intercept it. Southern authorities resurrected the anti-enticement laws originally enacted after the Civil War to keep newly freed slaves from being lured away, this time, however, aimed at northern companies coveting the South’s cheapest and most desperate workers. “Conditions recently became so alarming—that is, so many Negroes were leaving,” wrote an Alabama official, that the state began making anyone caught enticing blacks away—labor agents, they were called—pay an annual license fee of $750 “in every county in which he operates or solicits emigrants” or be “fined as much as $500 and sentenced to a year’s hard labor.

president of the United States—himself an heir to the white populist tradition of Thurmond and of Alabama’s George Wallace—said that there had been an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” as if there were more than one side to a conflict between neo-Nazis who idolized Adolf Hitler and Americans who stood against Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists.

Where are you from exactly?” he asked his state-based colleague, after exchanging first pleasantries. “Gulf Shores.” Paul replied. “I know we’re at the Gulf shore,” Garry said. “But where exactly?” “Gulf Shores is a place.” “Where’s Gulf Shores?” Garry went on with questioning, feeling increasingly silly. “Baldwin County.” “Where’s Baldwin County?

Pigeoners (some professional game dealers, most opportunists) came from every corner of the United States—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Alabama, and Louisiana (to name a few).

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1 Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Keeping blacks subjugated required that they be unarmed. Alabama’s law was typical: “Any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state” was forbidden “to own fire-arms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”76 Blacks caught breaking the law were subject to incarceration—which, in the early twentieth century, often meant being sold into debt servitude and forced to work in conditions that approximated slavery. According to Douglas Blackmon, “In an era when great numbers of southern men carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the century become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration.”77

Alabama was not - and I don't think is - an abortion-friendly state. Remember: Birmingham is where a man made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list by bombing a Southside abortion clinic, killing a security guard. The bomber's brother was so upset by the manhunt that to protest, he cut off his own hand with a circular saw. And he videotaped it. And then he drove himself to the hospital. EMTs were sent to his house to collect the hand, and a surgeon reattached it. This is Southern Gothic country. Our zealots don't play.

The most insidious of the destructive forces behind Africatown’s demise involves the paper mills, which were at the heart of a billion-dollar lawsuit filed by residents. After seventy years as the main employers of Africatown’s residents, both mills shut down in 2000. Suddenly, nearly two thousand jobs disappeared, along with the perpetual and noxious stench associated with paper making. But the job losses were just a scratch on the surface compared to the real, almost invisible damage the mills had inflicted. To fully understand the story, we must step back in time to the 1980s, to a time when environmental laws in Alabama were essentially meaningless. Today, Alabama ranks last in the nation for what it spends to protect the environment, and is widely regarded by industry trade groups as the most permissive state in the country when it comes to setting or enforcing pollution limits. Back in the eighties and nineties, things were much worse. James Warr, who was the head of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management from its inception in the 1980s until the early 2000s, was opposed to vigorous application of environmental regulations for businesses. He was an odd fit for the head of an environmental agency tasked with regulating polluters, but I believe that is precisely why he was chosen—to ensure that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act didn’t slow industrial production in Alabama. I was an environment reporter for the Mobile newspaper for eighteen years, beginning in 2000, and had numerous interactions with Warr and his agency. During an interview in 2003, Warr told me that the federal Superfund law was illegal and he had no intention of enforcing it or adding new sites in Alabama to the list.

In 2001, Dr. D.A. Graham received the Chaplain of the Year award from the Military Chaplain Association for the United States Marine Corps. He is a certified facilitator for Development Dimensions International as well as a certified facilitator in nonviolent communications. Dr. Graham served as Founding President of the Alabama Student Society of Communication Arts. He is the proud parent of his daughter, Diedre, who graduated from the University of Alabama.

The first efforts made to obtain powder were by orders sent to the North, which had been early done both by the Confederate Government and by some of the States. These were being rapidly filled when the attack was made on Fort Sumter. The shipments then ceased. Niter was contemporaneously sought for in north Alabama and Tennessee. Between four and five hundred tons of sulphur were obtained in New Orleans, at which place it had been imported for use in the manufacture of sugar.

the poverty still far too common in rural South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi has meant significantly more social spending coming to those states—federal taxpayer dollars, of course—than to any other region of the United States.

As mentioned earlier, the 27th Amendment was one of 2 unratified amendments written by Madison that Congress sent to the states with the Bill of Rights. But here’s the story of how it was ratified. Unlike modern amendments, the proposed amendments in the Bill of Rights didn’t have expiration dates. So in 1982, 191 years after it failed, a sophomore political science student at the University of Texas–Austin named Gregory Watson noticed that some states had ratified it, but that it hadn’t expired. So he wrote a paper about the failed amendment and got a C from his TA. He appealed the grade, but his professor upheld the C. Pissed off, Watson started writing letters to various state legislatures. They noticed and began ratifying the amendment. Ten years after his C, Alabama became the 38th state to ratify it, giving it the ¾ (38) needed to add it to the U.S. Constitution. In 2016, Watson’s paper was resubmitted for a grade change, with a request of an A+ for having caused an actual constitutional amendment. The University of Texas–Austin honored the change, but only gave the paper an A.

In Alabama Wallace has managed to pass the point of being just the most popular politician in the memory of the state. He has become a Folk Hero. Alabama, along with the rest of the South, has been changing into something more like the rest of the nation, and in the process, a particular devastation is being worked among its people. In his transition from the gentle earth to the city-the filling stations, the power lines, the merciless asphalt, the neon Jumboburger drive-ins-the Southern yeoman has acquired a quality of metallic ferocity.

In the early 1800s, the state of Louisiana was a territory of Napoleon, which was sold to America at the end of his regime.

In this time, if there is an ominous conspiracy underway in the United States, it would be the silent massive suspicion of a conspiracy which threatens home, job, status, the accustomed order of life.

Toward the close of the campaign, a day was spent in the state's largest city, Birmingham. It is, in Alabama, the closest thing to alien turf for Wallace, not only because of its relative sophistication, but because the Republican party is particularly robust there.

The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity. It developed its own language: prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and fancy girls. Its routes, running counter to the freedom trails that fugitive slaves followed north, were similarly dotted by safe houses - pens, jails, and yards that provided resting places for slave traders as well as temporary warehouses for slaves. In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few southerners, white or black, were untouched. In the half century following the War of 1812, planters and traders expanded and rationalized the transcontinental transfer of slaves. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, traders and owners sent an estimated 120,000 slaves from the seaboard to the west, with the states and territories of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana being the largest recipients. That number increased substantially during the following decade and yet again during the 1830s, when slave traders and migrating planters uprooted almost 300,000 black men, women, and children. By this time, though most of the slaves still derived from the Upper South - particularly Maryland and Virginia - their destination had moved further west. Alabama and Mississippi had become the largest recipients, with each receiving nearly 100,000 slaves during the 1830s. The Panic of 1837 and the subsequent decline in cotton and sugar production deflated the price of slaves and the trade slackened for a few years. But prices soon revived and with them the demand for slaves. Nearly one quarter of a million slaves left the seaboard for the interior during the 1850s, with more than half being taken west of the Mississippi River. The 'mania for buying negroes' easily overwhelmed periodic bans against slave importation and did not cease until the arrival of Union troops.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

California was large, and southern California was of the same latitude as Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. To some it seemed logical and fair to split California into two—one slave, one free. But California had already decided on its identity as a free state. A different compromise was required, an olive branch to southern slaveholders, assuring them that California’s addition as the thirty-first state would not weaken slavery in the Union. The price was the elaborate Compromise of 1850 and, within it, the Fugitive Slave Act. California would not have become a state without it. And the Union would divide further because of it, the victory lap of Manifest Destiny, of gaining California and all its gold, serving as a very clear beginning of the end.

bad legislation included a serious, if inexplicable, effort to remove Alabama from the United Nations, which made it through the house but not the senate; a bill that would have allowed the legislature to approve or reject speakers at state schools, which Tom managed to quash,

As treaty commissioner during Monroe’s first term, the general both persuaded and bullied Native Americans into ceding large parts of Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and practically all of Alabama to the United States. He then wangled an appointment for his nephew as head government surveyor for the ceded lands. Exploiting the government-owned surveys, the pair, along with other assorted relatives and friends, formed a land investment company that purchased prime real estate in the territory,

Nearly every southern state, including Alabama, had completed the total disenfranchisement of African Americans by 1901. Virtually no blacks served on state juries. No blacks in the South were permitted to hold meaningful state or local political offices. There were virtually no black sheriffs, constables, or police officers. Blacks had been wholly shunted into their own inferior railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, neighborhoods, and schools. All

GAY LOVE SPELLS CASTER IN USA WhatsApp+2349053366074 LESBIANS LOVE SPELLS IN USA. BINDING VOODOO LOVE SPELLS CASTER IN AMERICA, WhatsApp+2349053366074 EFFECTIVE LOST LOVE SPELLS IN USA. INSTANT BLACK MAGIC VOODOO SPELLS THAT WORK FAST, NO SIDE EFFECTS AND IT DOESN’T BACKFIRE, My name is Dr ITSOKWI Spells caster. Call/WhatsApp +2349053366074 Specializing in helping you to achieve your goals. Trusted lost love spells in the world. Love spells that really work, spell to return ex lover with effective results GET BACK LOST LOVER AFTER DIVORCE, get my EX-LOVER back, Instant Divorce Spell, Fertility/Pregnancy Spell, Marriage Spell, Love spells, lost love spells, breakup spells, love spell casters that work,online love spell caster,psychic love spell casters that work, reunite love spell casters that really work,best love spell casters,free voodoo love spell casters,love spell caster that work,voodoo love spells caster protection, reunite us, attraction spells. Get back your lost love. Family disputes. Financial problems. Services:Psychic Readings, love reading, tarot love reading, Love spells, Lost love spells, Get back your lost love, Sangoma, Traditional healer, Court cases, Black Magic Removal, Stop drug addiction, Return missing relatives, Job and work cases,Curse Removal, Remove Black Magic, Hex Removal, Strong Spell, Negative Energy Cleansing, Protection Spell. Looking for an instant revenge solution for someone who made you feel bad? destroyed everything in your life? or someone who did bad to you? Contact DR ITSOKWI SPELLS. WhatsApp +2349053366074 spells to bring back lost love,bring back lost love 24 hours,bring back lost love in 24 hours,bring back lost love prayer in Alabama Alaska Arkansas Arizona California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District Of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington State West Virginina, UK, Canada, Iceland,newzeland, England, Bristol E.t.c Call/WhatsApp: +2349053366074 Death Spells That Work Overnight to kill wicked Step-dad / Step mom, Death Revenge Spell on wicked friends, Voodoo Death Spells to kill Enemies, Black Magic Spells To Harm Someone, Black magic death spells on ex-lover, Revenge instant death spells on uncle, Spell to hurt or kill co-workers. Effective spell to Win Court Cases, Spell To Get Charges Dropped, Justice Spell Ritual to get victory over your enemy, money invocation spell, ritual money spells, spell to win lottery jackpot, Powerball, win million dollars on lottery jackpot using Dr ITSOKWI appropriate spells Call or WhatsApp +2349053366074 Email: Dritsokwi777demon@gmail.com

╬ Love Spells That Work Instantly In USa }} +27632724350 * Lost Love Spells Caster In Johannesburg , pretoria , Montana }} +27632724350* Love spells That work Immediately in Salt Lake city Utah }} +27632724350* Love spells That Work Instantly In Maine }} Dallas }} Houston }} El-paso}} Texas ✆+27632724350 Get back Your Lost Lover In 24 Hours In Chicago, Illinois , Denver , Colorado ✆+27632724350 * Powerful Love Spells That Work Fast in El Paso- Denver }} Colorado { San Antonio Texas +27632724350 * :Love Spells In Austin }} Dallas }} Alabama }} Arkansas }} Idaho }} Utah }} Minnessotta }} ✆+27632724350 * Get back Your ex Lover Same day in Connecticut }} Montana {{ Nebraska North Carolina }} ✆+27632724350 * Love Spells That Work Same day In Indianapolis }} Maine }} Miami Florida }} Washington }} ✆+27632724350 * Bring Back Lost Lover in |}| Nevada | Oklahoma | tennessee * Vermont }} ✆+27632724350 * Lost Love spells Caster in Wyoming | Missouri | Mississippi ✆+27632724350 * Black Magic Specialist and Best Love spells caster In Kansas }} Kentuck }} Liousiana ✆+27632724350 * Approved And Effective Ex Love Back Spells | Get | Return / regain Ex Lover Back In United States ✆+27632724350 * @Powerful Traditional Healer In South Africa ✆+27632724350 * @ Traditional healer in Johannesburg @✆+27632724350 #Powerful Native Spiritual and Traditional Healer In Pretoria

On June 1, 1956, Alabama’s attorney general, John Patterson, arguing that the NAACP was organizing and supporting illegal boycotts, obtained a state court order banning NAACP activities in Alabama and fining the group $100,000, forcing closure of its state offices. It would take the NAACP eight years to void the sanctions.

Reese knew a broader and more sustained attack was the only hope. In Speer's ruling, Reese saw a basis for challenging the root of the South's forced labor blight—the system of selling convicts followed by the state of Alabama, nearly all of its counties, and at least a half dozen other southern states.