Chapter One
Alabama
Capital: Montgomery
Entered Union: 1819 (22nd)
Origin of name: Possibly from a Choctaw Indian word meaning
“thicket-clearers” or “vegetation-gatherers”
Nickname: Yellowhammer State
Motto: Audemus jura nostra defendere (“We dare defend our rights”)
Residents: Alabamian or Alabaman
U.S. Representatives: 7
State bird: yellowhammer
State flower: camellia
State tree: Southern longleaf pine
State song: “Alabama”
Land area: 50,744 sq. mi.
Geographic center: In Chilton Co., 12 mi. SW of Clanton
Population: 4,557,808
White: 71.1%
Black: 26.0%
American Indian: 0.5%
Asian: 0.7%
Hispanic/Latino: 1.7%
Under 18: 26.3%
65 and over: 13.0%
Median age: 35.8
Alabama
George Packer
In the summer of 1980, when I was nineteen, I worked as
a $600-a-month intern at a government-funded poverty law
center in Alabama, renting a matchbox house with two
black law students at the crumbling edge of downtown
Mobile. It was a record hot summer, at a record high in
urban seediness: Mobile, the poor man’s New Orleans, was
hollowed out by economic stagnation and the white exodus
that followed desegregation. Carter was in the White
House, the azaleas in Bienville Square were dead, and
the sixteen blocks between the house and office offered
the comfort of no trees, only the glare of the sun and
an assortment of drunks, casual laborers, and petty
criminals. My yellow short-sleeved Oxford shirt, too
heavy in the humidity, instantly marked me as a
carpetbagger, and one morning a razor-thin limping man
pursued me block after block, yelling, “Hey! Ass-hole!”
Anomie set in the day I arrived-everything shut down for
Memorial Day weekend-and pursued me all the way to my
departure in August. At times it grew so intense that
the only relief came in cups of mocha-flavored instant
International Coffee, from a red-and-white tin, which I
bought at a shop downtown and savored as the taste of
civilization itself.
The house on St. Francis Street had only one
air-conditioner. Carlos, the law student to arrive
first, grabbed it, and never let go. Cooled only by an
ineffective fan, my room began to incubate turd-sized
cockroaches. Carlos, from American University in
Washington, despised me on sight. This was upsetting,
because I had gone South with the idea of becoming a
latter-day soldier in the civil rights struggle. I saw
myself, in all modesty, as an heir to Schwerner and
Goodman, the two white northerners killed in 1964
outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, with their black
movement colleague Chaney. The Mother’s Day melee when
the Freedom Riders pulled into the Birmingham bus
terminal, the fire hoses and K-9 squads in Linn Park,
George Wallace standing in the doorway at the University
of Alabama to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from
becoming the first black students to attend-in my mind,
all of this had happened the day before yesterday. My
backpack carried Robert Coles’s study of the psychology
of black children during desegregation, Children of
Crisis, Anne Moody’s memoir of growing up black during
the civil rights era, Coming of Age in Mississippi, and
(because I accepted Black Power as a necessary stage of
the movement) Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. But it was
hard to sustain my own private freedom ride after I
discovered that Carlos kept a personal roll of toilet
paper in his bedroom, ferrying it back and forth to the
john. So much for black and white together.
That first weekend, before contempt had hardened into
hatred, Carlos and I went out to get a bite to eat. A
black neighbor saw us round the corner and exclaimed in
wonder, “You black and you white but you both walking
together!” Confronted with this nightmare tableau of
black abjectness, white noblesse, and assumed
interracial harmony, Carlos dispatched both the neighbor
and me with a strained, sneering laugh. It was little
consolation that Raymond, the other housemate, from
Rutgers and gay, liked me fine.
Carlos’s rejection nagged at me all summer, but my civil
rights romance was too strong to be snuffed out. The law
center was opening satellite offices in the rural
counties north of Mobile Bay, and I spent many days
doing advance work by way of Greyhound buses to
Monroeville and Evergreen. These were some of the
poorest places in America. In Monroe County, which,
according to the 1980 census, was 43 percent black,
median white family income was $17,600 and median black
family income was just over $9,000. Conecuh County was
even poorer. I interviewed an old woman with a picture
on the wall of her shack showing the two Kennedys and
King under the words “The Three Who Set Us Free.” She
didn’t seem very free: There was no indoor plumbing in
the shack. The revolution of the early sixties had blown
through the bigger cities in Alabama and barely touched
these piney backwoods. “We get along just fine with our
colored folks,” the probate judge of Monroe County told
me, sounding like a hundred years of predecessors.
I was looking for something-marches, drama,
self-sacrifice, community, history-that now existed only
in books. Less than two decades before, when Coles was
working as a child psychiatrist amid the upheavals of
southern desegregation, a young black civil rights
worker told him that he’d joined the movement because
“I’ll be lucky if I can vote, and be treated better than
a dog every time I go to register my car, or try for a
driving license, or go to buy something in a store.” By
1980, what was left of the movement had migrated behind
the closed doors of the courts. The law center was
involved in several important civil rights suits,
including desegregation and voting rights cases against
the Mobile school board and county commission, but these
were moving slowly, obscurely, through the legal system.
Class-action lawsuits were not what I had in mind that
summer. I wanted the sight of headlights in my rearview
mirror on a rural road. In fact, the Klan still operated
in Mobile, as the country learned just a few months
later, in March 1981, when two of its members randomly
lynched a nineteen-year-old black youth on a city
street. (Eventually they were convicted, and one was
electrocuted in the first execution of a white man for
the murder of a black man in Alabama since 1913. The
United Klans of America was later bankrupted by a civil
suit that forced the Alabama chapter to turn over its
Tuscaloosa meeting hall to the victim’s mother, who used
the proceeds to buy her first house.) But the main
battle for equality in Alabama and the South was over. I
had arrived in time for its ambiguous and incomplete
aftermath: superficial civility, de facto segregation,
economic inequality, with most of the stirring old words
gone stale from sloganeering. As Carlos made clear, laws
did not change hearts.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from State by State
by Matt Weiland Sean Wilsey
Copyright © 2008 by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ecco
Copyright © 2008
Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-147090-5
