My Blog

Category: Alabama

Anniston, Alabama’s pitfalls, triumphs, told in books

A new book by University of Alabama professor Ellen Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, tackles environmental issues in Anniston, Alabama, citing NewSouth’s Beyond the Burning Bus by J. Phillips Noble, about the attacks on Freedom Riders in Anniston, and making powerful linkages between Anniston’s civil rights history and the polychlorinated biphenyls environmental crisis …

Read More »

On MLK’s Holiday, a Few Words About the Poor

Today is the MLK holiday, although in Alabama the adoption of the holiday passed the legislature only by designating it as also being in honor of the birth of Robert E. Lee, who coincidentally shares the same birth week as King, so that white state workers taking the day off didn’t have to do so in tribute to civil rights. Setting aside that head-in-the-sand Alabama political posturing, it is MLK Day, which means it’s a good day to remember that though MLK is rightly celebrated as a leader of the movement which broke the back of legalized segregation, toward the end of his life he was mostly campaigning to end economic injustice and war …

Read More »

Remembering Alabama education pioneer Dr. Ethel Hall

Dr. Ethel Hall, the first African American woman elected to the Alabama State Board of Education, died this month at age 83. Hall had recounted both her two decades on the Board of Education and her early struggle to achieve higher education in her memoir My Journey, published earlier this year by NewSouth Books …

Read More »