Alabama in the Twentieth Century

Alabama in the Twentieth Century

Author: Wayne Flynt

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2004-10-10

Total Pages: 621

ISBN-13: 081731430X

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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

Alabama Getaway

Author: Allen Tullos

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 082033961X

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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"

Author: Robert H. Woodrum

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780820328799

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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

The Politics of White Rights

Author: Joseph Bagley

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 082035418X

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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.


Author:

Publisher:

Published:

Total Pages: 816

ISBN-13: 0817359176

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Inside Alabama

Inside Alabama

Author: Harvey H. Jackson

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0817350683

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


Alabama Baptists

Alabama Baptists

Author: Wayne Flynt

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 768

ISBN-13: 9780817309275

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The definitive history of the dominant religious group within the state during the last two centuries


Through a Woman's Eye

Through a Woman's Eye

Author: Marian Perdue Furman

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2015-05-08

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 158838263X

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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.


Carry it on

Carry it on

Author: Susan Youngblood Ashmore

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0820330515

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Carry It On is an in-depth study of how the local struggle for equality in Alabama fared in the wake of new federal laws--the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Susan Youngblood Ashmore provides a sharper definition to changes set in motion by the fall of legal segregation. She focuses her detailed story on the Alabama Black Belt and on the local projects funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency that supported programs in a variety of cities and towns in Alabama. Black Belt activists who used OEO funds understood that the structural underpinnings of poverty were key components of white supremacy, says Ashmore. They were motivated not only to end poverty but also to force local governments to comply with new federal legislation aimed at achieving racial equality on a number of fronts. Ashmore looks closely at the interactions among local activists, elected officials, businesspeople, landowners, bureaucrats, and others who were involved in or affected by OEO projects. Carry It On offers a nuanced picture of the OEO, an agency too broadly criticized; a new look at the rise of southern Black Power; and a compelling portrait of local citizens struggling for control over their own lives. Ashmore provides a more complete understanding of how southerners worked to define for themselves how freedom would come during the years shaped by the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.


Alabama Justice

Alabama Justice

Author: Steven P. Brown

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0817320709

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Winner of the Anne B. & James B. McMillan Prize in Southern History Examines the legacies of eight momentous US Supreme Court decisions that have their origins in Alabama legal disputes Unknown to many, Alabama has played a remarkable role in a number of Supreme Court rulings that continue to touch the lives of every American. In Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation, Steven P. Brown has identified eight landmark cases that deal with religion, voting rights, libel, gender discrimination, and other issues, all originating from legal disputes in Alabama. Written in a concise and accessible manner, each case law chapter begins with the circumstances that created the dispute. Brown then provides historical and constitutional background for the issue followed by a review of the path of litigation. Excerpts from the Court's ruling in the case are also presented, along with a brief account of the aftermath and significance of the decision. The First Amendment (New York Times v. Sullivan), racial redistricting (Gomillion v. Lightfoot), the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Frontiero v. Richardson), and prayer in public schools (Wallace v. Jaffree) are among the pivotal issues stamped indelibly by disputes with their origins in Alabama legal, political, and cultural landscapes. In addition to his analysis of cases, Brown discusses the three associate justices sent from Alabama to the Supreme Court--John McKinley, John Archibald Campbell, and Hugo Black--whose cumulative influence on the institution of the Court, constitutional interpretation, and the day-to-day rights and liberties enjoyed by every American is impossible to measure. A closing chapter examines the careers and contributions of these three Alabamians.