Alabama in the Twentieth Century


Book Description

A native son and accomplished historian does not flinch from pointing out Alabama's failures from the past 100 years; neither is he restrained in calling attention to the state's triumphs in this authoritative, popular history of the past 100 years.




Alabama Getaway


Book Description

In Alabama Getaway Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation's most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary—the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. Tullos traces the spectral legacy of George Wallace, ponders the roots of anti-egalitarian political institutions and tax structures, and challenges Birmingham native Condoleezza Rice's use of the civil rights struggle to justify the war in Iraq. He also gives due coverage to the state's black citizens who with a minority of whites have sustained a movement for social justice and democratic inclusion. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global industries like auto manufacturing and biomedical research, Alabama Getaway asks if the coming years will see a transformation of the “Heart of Dixie.”




"Everybody was Black Down There"


Book Description

In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.




The Politics of White Rights


Book Description

In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954–73 taught Alabama’s segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South. Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining “law and order,” which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, “law and order” represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy. Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama’s property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state’s tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.




Through a Woman's Eye


Book Description

Through a Woman's Eye presents an evocative collection of a hundred black and white photographs made by Edith Morgan of Camden, a small town in Wilcox County, Alabama, just after the turn of the twentieth century. Morgan was educated locally before attending the School of the Chicago Art Institute. Subsequently she returned to Camden where she spent the remainder of her life teaching art. She also taught illiterate blacks and whites to read. Thirty years ago, Marian Furman, also of Camden and herself a professional photographer, discovered an album made by Morgan of photographs of her friends, students, and local African Americans. The latter, although somewhat stereotypical of photographs of blacks at the time, are sympathetic; they reveal the humanity of Morgan's subjects. This volume collects Morgan's photographs, along with essays that put them in the context of time and place. Professor Hardy Jackson's essay presents a personal memory. Furman describes socioeconomic and political conditions in Wilcox County and offers biographical information on the Morgan family. Dr. Matthew Mason of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library presents additional biographical information and offers a critical assessment of Morgan's photographs, comparing her work to that of contemporary photographers, especially her female peers.




Negro Education in Alabama


Book Description

Horace Mann Bond was an early twentieth century scholar and a college administrator who focused on higher education for African Americans. His Negro Education in Alabama won Brown University’s Susan Colver Rosenberger Book Prize in 1937 and was praised as a landmark by W. E. B. Dubois in American Historical Review and by scholars in journals such as Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Southern History. A seminal and wide-ranging work that encompasses not only education per se but a keen analysis of the African American experience of Reconstruction and the following decades, Negro Education in Alabama illuminates the social and educational conditions of its period. Observers of contemporary education can quickly perceive in Bond’s account the roots of many of today’s educational challenges.




Alabama Quilts


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 James F. Sulzby Book Award from the Alabama Historical Association Alabama Quilts: Wilderness through World War II, 1682–1950 is a look at the quilts of the state from before Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory through the Second World War—a period of 268 years. The quilts are examined for their cultural context—that is, within the community and time in which they were made, the lives of the makers, and the events for which they were made. Starting as far back as 1682, with a fragment that research indicates could possibly be the oldest quilt in America, the volume covers quilting in Alabama up through 1950. There are seven sections in the book to represent each time period of quilting in Alabama, and each section discusses the particular factors that influenced the appearance of the quilts, such as migration and population patterns, socioeconomic conditions, political climate, lifestyle paradigms, and historic events. Interwoven in this narrative are the stories of individuals associated with certain quilts, as recorded on quilt documentation forms. The book also includes over 265 beautiful photographs of the quilts and their intricate details. To make this book possible, authors Mary Elizabeth Johnson Huff and Carole Ann King worked with libraries, historic homes, museums, and quilt guilds around the state of Alabama, spending days on formal quilt documentation, while also holding lectures across the state and informal “quilt sharings.” The efforts of the authors involved so many community people—from historians, preservationists, librarians, textile historians, local historians, museum curators, and genealogists to quilt guild members, quilt shop owners, and quilt owners—making Alabama Quilts not only a celebration of the quilting culture within the state but also the many enthusiasts who have played a role in creating and sustaining this important art.




Bloody Lowndes


Book Description

The treatment of eating disorders remains controversial, protracted, and often unsuccessful. Therapists face a number of impediments to the optimal care fo their patients, from transference to difficulties in dealing with the patient's family. Treating Eating Disorders addresses the pressure and responsibility faced by practicing therapists in the treatment of eating disorders. Legal, ethical, and interpersonal issues involving compulsory treatment, food refusal and forced feeding, managed care, treatment facilities, terminal care, and how the gender of the therapist affects treatment figure centrally in this invaluable navigational guide.




Red, Black, White


Book Description

Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton—a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South—explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments. Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.




Inside Alabama


Book Description

An insider's perspective in a conversational, yet unapologetic style on the events and conditions that shaped modern-day Alabama.