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Alabama Quotes

“Certainly Birmingham had its white moderates who disapproved of Bull Connor's tactics. Certainly Birmingham had its decent white citizens who privately deplored the maltreatment of Negroes. But they remained publicly silent. It was a silence born of fear—fear of social, political and economic reprisals. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.”

FearSilenceDiscriminationModeratesAlabamaWhitesBirminghamBull Connor
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“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?”

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Book:A perfect Patricide: Part 1
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“We have a collection of 800 jars of soil in our museum. We collect these soils from lynching sites. People who are involved in erecting markers collect the soil, put it in a jar that has the name of the victim, the date of the victim, and then they bring it back to the museum. An older Black woman was digging soil at a site in west Alabama. She was afraid because it was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. As she was about to dig, a big white man in a pickup truck drove by and stared at her. It made her anxious. Then he drove by again and stared some more. Then he parked his truck, got out, and walked toward her. She was terrified. Then the man asked, "What are you doing?" She was going to tell him that she was just getting dirt for her garden. Then she said, "Mr. Stevenson, something got ahold of me. I told that man, I'm digging soil here because this is where a Black man was lynched in 1937." She just looked down and started digging. The man surprised her by asking, "Does that memo you have talk about the lynching?" She said, "It does." Then he asked, "Can I read it?" He started reading while she started digging. After he finished reading the memo, he said, "Would it be all right if I helped you?" She said, "Yes." The man got down on his knees, and she offered him the implement to dig the soil. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, you keep that. I'll just use my hands." She said he started picking up the soil and putting it in the jar, and throwing his hand into the soil. She said there was something about the conviction with which he was putting his whole body into this that moved her. She went from fear to relief to joy so quickly she couldn't help it. Tears were running down her face. The man turned to her and he said, "Oh, ma'am, I'm so sorry I'm upsetting you." She said, "No, no, no. You're blessing me." They kept digging, and they were getting near to filling the jar. She looked over at the man, and she noticed that he had slowed down. His face had turned red. Then she saw that there was a tear running down his face. She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. She said, "Are you all right?" That's when the man turned her, and he said, "No, ma'am." He said, "I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather who helped lynch this man." She said they both sat on that roadside and wept. She said, I'm going to go back and put this jar of soil in the museum in Montgomery. Then the man said, "Ma'am, would it be all right if I just followed you back?" She said, "Sure." She called me on the way back. She said, "Mr. Stevenson, I want you to come to the museum and meet my new friend." I was there when these two people who met on a roadside in a place of pain and agony and violence and bigotry came in and together did something beautiful by putting that jar of soil in that exhibit. I'm not naive. I don't believe that beautiful things like that always happen when we tell the truth. I do believe that we deny ourselves the beauty of justice when we refuse to tell the truth. I've seen too much beauty come out of truth-telling, too much restoration, too much redemption, to believe that truth-telling doesn't have a power that is greater than the fear and anger that is prompting these orders, prompting some of this retreat. I worry about people who are already surrendering and waving white flags, and running for cover. I just don't think that's the way we're going to get to the other side.”

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Author:Bryan Stevenson
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“During the rush hours the sidewalks were crowded with laborers and domestic workers, many of them well past middle age, trudging patiently to their jobs and home again, sometimes as much as twelve miles. They knew why they walked, and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves. And as I watched them I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.”

DignityCivil RightsAfrican AmericansBlacksAlabamaMontgomerySacrificesSacrificingMontgomery Bus BoycottBoycotts
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Nothing had come easy to him. School, sports, or girls... it seemed to Oswald that everyone else had come into this world with a set of instructions but him. From the beginning he had always felt like a pair of white socks and brown shoes in a roomful of tuxedos. He had never really gotten a break in life, and now it was all over.”

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Book:A Redbird Christmas
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“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.”

FootballRacismDrinkingLondonSoccerNflFishingRomeItalyForeignersAmerican FootballPubsAlabamaConservativesLiberalsCockneys20102008YuppiesSnobsRio De JaneiroArsenal FcRednecks2010 Fifa World CupSoccer In The United StatesUltimate FightingYobsAuburn AlabamaBass FishingBubbasFootball HooliganismLiberal Elite
Author:Robert Stacy McCain
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“Nine Negro boys in Alabama were on trial for their lives when I got back from Cuba and Haiti. The famous Scottsboro "rape" case was in full session. I visited those boys in the death house at Kilby Prison, and I wrote many poems about them. One of those poems was: CHRIST IN ALABAMA Christ is a Nigger, Beaten and black-- O, bare your back. Mary is His Mother-- Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth. God's His Father-- White Master above, Grant us your love. Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth: Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.”

PoetryPoemSouthTrialsAfrican AmericansBlacksAlabamaWrongful ConvictionScottsboro Boys
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“Everyone tends to think of October as being an autumn month. Not so much in south Alabama, usually. There, it's another warm, if not hot, summer month. But the Alabama summer heat will sometimes get broken by cooler days. The haze of the depth of summer lifts, the humidity backs off, and the sky takes on a clearer, sharper blueness that the more languid summer days rarely could manage. And sometimes, there will be a day where the temperature gives a clear peek of what's coming.”

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Author:JF Smith
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“Mobile’s reputation as the birthplace of Mardi Gras in North America does not rest solely on the fact that a few half-starved French colonists observed the pre-Lenten feasts here 300 years ago… In 1852, a group of Mobile "Cowbellians" moved to New Orleans and formed the Krewe of Comus, which is now that larger city’s oldest and most secretive Carnival society. …All of Mobile’s parading societies throw Moon Pies along with beads and doubloons, providing sugary nourishment to the revelers lining the streets. The crowd is very regional, mostly coastal Alabamians. Everyone seems to know each other, and they are always honored and often extra hospitable when they learn that you traveled a long way just to visit *their* Carnival. Late into the evening, silk-gowned debutantes with their white-tie and tail clad escorts who’ve grown weary of their formal balls blend easily with the street crowds…”

SocietyFormalMobileParadesAlabamaBallMardi GrasCarnivalLentKreweMoon PiesComus
Book:Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South
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“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.”

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Book:The Heaviest Corner on Earth
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“He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him except her. Cries every time his daddy picks him up. Every time he looks in those wet blue eyes, he nearly loses it. His own son hates him. Can’t blame the kid for having an opinion.”

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Book:The Heaviest Corner on Earth
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“It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse. You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.”

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Book:Ava's Man
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“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.”

EnvironmentEmploymentTexasSlogansEnvironmentalismMississippiLouisianaAlabamaPolitical CampaignAnti IntellectualismArabs2008Fossil FuelsRocky MountainsUnited States SenateDeepwater Horizon Oil SpillPetroleum IndustryNewt GingrichRepublican Party UsArctic National Wildlife RefugeDrilling RigsMitch McconnellOil Wells2008 In United States2008 RncAnti ArabismDrill Baby DrillMay 2008Natural Gas PricesOffshore DrillingOffshore Oil Gas In UsOil PlatformsOil RigsRepublican National ConventionShale GasShalesUs Offshore Drilling Debate
Author:Naomi Klein
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“I later read a survey about Southerners' knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor. This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them. But Alabaman's seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King's famous speech. "I have a dream," he said, of an Alabama where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

SouthRace RelationsRace And Racism In AmericaAlabamaMartin Luther King Jr
Book:Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
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“As he reached the river, Oswald suddenly felt as if he were walking around in a painting. Then it dawned on him. Everywhere he looked was a painting! Everything was alive with color: the water, the sky, the boathouses that lined the river with red tin roofs, silver tin roofs, and rusted orange tin roofs. Red boat in a yellow boathouse. Green, pink, blue, tan, yellow, and white boathouses. The wooden pilings sticking out of the water were a thousand different shades of gray and each individual piling was encrusted with hundreds of chalk-white barnacles and black woodpecker holes. Even the grain of the wood and the knots on each post differed from inch to inch and pole to pole.”

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Book:A Redbird Christmas
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“[The Montgomery Bus Boycott] is not a drama with only one actor. More precisely it is the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.”

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Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But this discontent was still latent in 1954. At that time both Negroes and whites accepted the well-established patterns of segregation as a matter of fact. Hardly anyone challenged the system. Montgomery was an easy-going town; it could even have been described as a peaceful town. But the peace was achieved at the cost of human servitude.”

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Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice. The story of Montgomery is the story of 50,000 such Negroes who were willing to substitute tired feed for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice.”

JusticeRacismInjusticeOppressionExploitationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”

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Book:All Over but the Shoutin'
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“I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian. I just looked at them. How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me? I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn’t know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back: “Roll Tide.”

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Book:My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South
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“Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.”

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Book:Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South
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“Sir," I said, "you have never had real peace in Montgomery. You have had a sort of negative peace in which the Negro too often accepted his state of subordination. But this is not true peace. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. The tension we see in Montgomery today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.”

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Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“There is another side to the picture: it is the white community of Montgomery, long led or intimidated by a few extremists, that finally turned in disgust on the perpetrators of crime in the name of segregation. The change should not be exaggerated. The White Citizens Council is still active. Confessed bombers still win their freedom in the courts. And opposition to integration is still the rule. Yet by the end of the bus struggle it was clear that the vast majority of Montgomery's whites preferred peace and law to the excesses performed in the name of segregation. And even though the many saw segregation as right because it was the tradition, there were always the courageous few who saw the injustice in segregation and fought against it side by side with the Negroes.”

ActivismIntegrationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaWhitesMontgomeryMontgomery Bus Boycotts
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.”

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Author:Megan McCafferty
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“Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is remarkable for its truth-telling about two important issues concerning Alabama's past and present: the civil rights movement and immigration. These stories, rendered through the words and eyes of a young Latina girl who came from Argentina to Marion, Alabama, are made vivid and immediate through Weaver's highly accessible drawings and dialogue. This is a book-about maturation, family, education, and social change-every schoolchild, parent, and citizen should experience.”

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Author:Sena Jeter Naslund
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