From AL.com
By Challen Stephens | cstephens@al.com
on February 14, 2013
Dr. David Goldfield, a professor of Southern history, figures that Alabama is still best known for the Birmingham civil rights struggles of 1963.
Yet Goldfield, who lived in Homewood in the 1970s and teaches at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, said Alabama today is also well known for Tide football and automobile manufacturing.
“That is a weird list,” said Diane McWhorter.
McWhorter, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her insight into Birmingham history in “Carry Me Home,” said she might have suggested obesity. And later she adds civility to a list of outside perceptions of Alabama.
But like Goldfield, McWhorter also figures most deeper notions about the state still turn on 50-year-old images of fire hoses and police dogs. Yet she thinks the battle lines have moved, that today Alabama is best known for its hard line on illegal immigration.
And Alabama’s struggles of 50 years ago only serve to reinforce the perceptions of intolerance today.
David Person’s editorial last year on Alabama’s immigration law, playing to a national audience in USA Today, begins: “Here in the South it feels like the 1960s all over again.”
McWhorter, writing in The New York Times last summer, asked: “If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?”
( Read more... )Alabama HeadlinesIn late 2012, nearly half a century after Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, Alabama voters once again failed to remove racist language from the state constitution.
Educators and African-American groups lined up to oppose the redaction. Republicans favored it. Democrats argued the change might open the door for doing away with the right to attend public schools. Republicans said that wasn’t the case.
That twist, both complicated and insular, kept the news coverage outside Alabama to a minimum. There were a few national headlines, but nothing sticking it to the state as backwards or unrepentantly racist. These tended toward head-scratching reports in back pages.
“Alabama’s larger challenge at this point is not what’s in the constitution,” said Person, who lives in Huntsville. “The larger problem we’re facing right now is the perception that when it comes to immigrants, undocumented immigrants, we are not a welcoming place.”
A search of newspaper reports over the last couple years finds far more headlines declaiming Alabama’s immigration law than any current news involving black-and-white race relations. “Alabama's Disgrace” read The New York Times editorial. “A bad road for Alabama,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, including the line: “Sadly, the Alabama Legislature once again proved itself incapable of embarrassment.” Many publications employed the phrase “Juan Crow,” a clear throwback to struggles decades ago.
“I think the image of Alabama still lingers from the 1960s,” said Goldfield. “The reality, I think, is that Alabama is hardly alone in its concern over immigration. But reality and memory are two different things.”
McWhorter and Goldfield agree on this point. McWhorter points out that Arizona had the excuse of a pressing problem, namely that Arizona, unlike Alabama, is a border state. Instead, Alabama’s attempts at immigration enforcement are quickly folded into memories of its civil rights rap sheet.
“It’s not forever. We have come a long way in the South,” says Goldfield, who did not hear about the efforts to eliminate the racist language from the state constitution. “It’s a mark of how far we’ve come,” said Goldfield that the issue did not command national attention.
( Read more... )When it comes to state identity, only Alabama football seems to receive equal attention. “NOTRE LAME NO MATCH FOR TIDE” proclaimed The New York Post last month, as hundreds of publications celebrated or lamented the success of the Crimson Tide.
“What was a surprise to me was how delighted everyone was for me over the national championship,” said McWhorter, seeing in this some sign of improvement.
McWhorter is currently a fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. When she was in college in the 1970s, she said, no one congratulated her. “Alabama was so bad they didn’t have the right to brag about anything,” said McWhorter.
Alabama todayMcWhorter refers to herself an expat, defined by her home state, which she views with alternating pride and shame. For instance, she said the reason that segregation lasted for so long in Alabama is that “there was this veneer of civility.” Both black and white citizens were so used to being around one another, there was more communication across racial lines than in other parts of the country. She points out the communication may not have been equal, but communication remains.
“The black middle-class presence in Birmingham is certainly much more apparent than anywhere else I’ve been, certainly more than New York,” she said.
McWhorter, who wrote recently of a black man recently harassed by police in Boston for walking in a mostly white neighborhood. “It’s not just the South,” she said. And it’s not just the 1960s.
Goldfield mentioned a black man who was killed after wandering into a white neighborhood in Queens in New York City. He recalled the mayor then saying something like: “’We cannot tolerate this, we’re not like Mississippi or Alabama.’ And I’m thinking yes you are.”
“The rest of the country chooses to see this state as this aberration that it can dismiss, but actually it’s a mirror,” said McWhorter. “The true story of the South is not wanting to see yourself in it.”
Frankly, she said, the South is just further along the spectrum. “It is not an aberration.”
Person, who lives in Huntsville and writes editorials about Alabama for USA Today, said he hasn’t encountered much positive in outside perceptions of Alabama. “But that’s not really surprising because people don’t really know our state, the natural beauty, the generous spirit of the people,” he said.
“Coming from Chicago, I was stunned to find in Huntsville there were some neighborhoods where blacks and whites were living together. I was stunned to find in public you could hold conversations with white people, that white men would hold doors for me, that white women would speak to me and not clutch their purses,” said Person, who is black. “I didn’t have any positive interaction with white people growing up in Chicago.”
“Most of the people I run into who have been to Alabama really like it,” said McWhorter. She mentioned the growing reputation of Birmingham for fine dining.
“I think the key thing that maybe history has not chronicled well enough,” said Person, “while the institutional structures of racism were certainly well in place, and the caretakers of those structures were living up to worst examples, the reality is on a grassroots level, on a one-to-one level, on a family level, there were still some elements of family that were preserved between the races.”
Person said perhaps the rest of the country, especially those who have not been to Alabama, may be surprised that black and white residents were never completely cut off from another. “I think there was more of an element of community,” he said.
A half century after the historic zenith of the civil rights movement, Brown offered an even simpler assessment of national perceptions of Alabama. “We’re not on their radar screen. We have a non-image,” said Brown.
“The rest of the country chooses to see this state as this aberration that it can dismiss, but actually it’s a mirror,” said McWhorter. “The true story of the South is not wanting to see yourself in it.”
But a non-image would make it difficult to explain the joke behind The Onion’s satirical headlines this month: “PR Firm Advises U.S. To Cut Ties With Alabama.”
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