In our retirement we are have decided it is time to leave the bubble of Ithaca, New York and see what America is really about. We invite you to join us as we learn about people, places and the natural history we experience in our travels.
The lack of confederate flags as we crossed the Mason-Dixon line was very noticeable to us. We have probably only seen 2 or 3 confederate flags while driving the rural roads and cities in the south through Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Florida. I have seen that many in my hometown of Enfield, New York.
We did see many more American flags than in the past, which I was fine with until I realized that for some people, the confederate flag is now subsumed within the American Flag. I saw a lot of American flags with Trump flags and yard signs. I imagined that in the past that might have been a confederate flag. I will say that up North there are also American flags with Black Lives Matter and Pride flags. It is not clear what the American flag really stands for to the person flying it unless they give some other clues. For me, flying the American Flag and saying the Pledge of Allegiance has been performative, without a lot of meaning. As a nation we truely need to address what “liberty and justice for all” really means and embrace healing change. Only then can we stand unified “as one nation” and “indivisible”.
I listened to a podcast on NPR from 2020 that said: “We heard a lot from people who shared this worry the U.S. flag has been weaponized, deliberately redefined as a more conservative symbol owned by some Americans more than others.” It went on to quote, Ben Eagleson, a mechanic from Onley, Illinois: “We had a Black Lives Matter rally in our town and there were a lot of people driving by with American flags on the back of their pickup trucks as a counter-protest,” “It was like those of us supporting Black Lives Matter were somehow un-American or something.” Eagleson, who is white, said he took his American flag down for a time, but it’s flying again now on a pole outside him home. “I’d let something that had always been for me a positive symbol take on a negative meaning and I guess I just decided to reclaim it,” he said. Food for thought…
We went kayaking yesterday among the mangrove islands in the Indian River Lagoon. The islands are a favorite nesting spot for the Brown Pelican. I think if I were a bird, I might be a Brown Pelican. I can relate to their extreme clumsiness. Unlike other more graceful water birds, Pelican make a clumsy splash landing in the water as they dive head first for fish. I have read that they also sometimes crash land in their flimsy stick nests in the mangroves that often need to be rebuilt.
Click here to see a video of a Brown Pelican splash landing.
I was really looking forward to the Mullet Run that people talk about here in Florida, but it turns out it was not what I thought. Besides the iconic haircut of the 1980’s (turns out it is back in style) mullet are fish. I bet you knew that….
In a Montgomery, Alabama coffee shop, we ran into Greg Griffin, Jr. who is running for Circuit Court Judge. We had quite a long conversation with him and are inspired with how he returned to the south to fight for change. His father, Greg Griffin, Sr. is also a Circuit Court Judge. Here is an article about the both of them. I wish I lived in Montgomery so I could vote for him. Here is his campaign site if you care to make a donation.
We enjoyed driving less traveled roads through Georgia today. We stopped for gas in Cuthbert, Georgia (population 3,143), on the Jefferson Davis Highway. It is 100 miles from the gulf coast, 100 miles from the closest city (Montgomery, Al) and not near, it seems, anything at all. The City of Cuthbert, incorporated in 1831, is the county seat of Randolph County, which has a total population of 6,287 people. Most of the buildings, built on Cuthbert town square around 1890, are still there. One surprising thing about Cuthbert is that there are no obvious chain restaurants or motels, except for the ever present Dollar General. Is there a rural town in America that does not have a Dollar General?
According to Wikipedia, the county was developed for cotton plantations, the major commodity crop, and the rural area had a high proportion of enslaved Black workers. Today the Cuthbert population is still 80% Black. The main occupation now is food production as there is a large chicken processing plant owned by Tyson in Cuthbert. Poultry is now the largest sector of Georgia’s agricultural production since the Georgia cotton industry was decimated by the Boll Weevil. The insect first swept into GA in 1915 in dust clouds from the west. By the early 1920s, it had destroyed over 60 % of Georgia’s cotton crops.(New Georgia Encyclopedia)
The Cuthbert Water Tower, erected in 1895, has the distinction of being the only water tower in the middle of a federal highway. It is located in the middle of US Highway 82 (Jefferson Davis Highway) and defines the skyline of Cuthbert. For many years, people believed those who drank water from the tower would either stay or return to Cuthbert.
Cuthbert is the birthplace of boxer Larry Holmes, NFL player Rosey Grier and jazz and swing musician Fletcher Henderson Jr. (1897-1952). Another famous person who grew up in Cuthbert heard of is Winfred Rembert, a Black artist who used hand-tools and shoe dye on leather canvases. During a civil rights march in the 1960s, Rembert was arrested without being charged. He spent seven years on a chain gang and survived a lynching.You can watch a short documentary film about Rembert called All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. His memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, was published posthumously in September 2021 and won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
We are in Eufaula, 85 miles south east of Montgomery, in Barbour County, Alabama, still in the deep south on the Georgia border. Eufaula is where Governor George Wallace was born and raised. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was sworn in as Alabama Governor (in the same spot that Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederacy) spewing the infamous lines, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Wallace made sure to thank the “home folks” of his native Barbour County for giving “an anxious country boy” a chance.
It is here in Barbour County, Alabama that Jefferson Cowie, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022) chronicles “the unholy union , more than two hundred years strong, between racism and rabid loathing of government” (New York Times Book Review). I have always associated “freedom” with the fight of the oppressed for a better, more just world. Freedom is also a word used by those looking to dominate. This book helped me understand the hatred of white supremacists toward the Federal government that Trump used to enflame his followers to act during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. I was first alerted to this book because Cowie is scheduled to speak at Ithaca College on Thursday, March 28th, at 5pm in the Park School Auditorium.
According to the book’s introduction, Freedom’s Dominion is ” a story of rough continuity, recurring conflict, and ideological regeneration across time in one place. In Barbour County, freedom served as an ideological scaffolding that supported most every form of domination discussed in this book- Indian land dispossession and removal, mob political violence, lynching, convict labor, Jim Crow, resistance to school integration, and the fight against voting rights… Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom.”
I have to say, since I skimmed this book before I arrives in Eufaula, I expected to find a back water place ravaged by history. This is not at all what we found. Eufaula is home to the second largest historic district in the state, with more than 700 historic and architecturally significant structures. There are quite a number of antebellum mansions and the downtown is quite well preserved and attractive. There is money here. According to the Eufaula Chamber of Commerce pamphlet , when the Union Troops rode in to Eufaula at the end of the Civil War, some town aristocrats wined and dined the Union General, who decided to spare the town and there was no death and destruction for the White gentry as occurred in many other southern towns. Somehow, this just makes the violent, racist history of the town seem worse.
Reconstruction in America: A Truth That Needs Telling, Equal Justice Initiative
Except for the fact that it was spared at the end of the Civil War, and so many grand historic structures remain, Eufaula and Barbour County are not so different than any other southern counties, and I dare say some northern counties, too. This point was driven home when we saw the sheer number of counties that had documented lynchings when we went to the lynching museum in Montgomery.
Montgomery, Alabama has to reconcile the fact that it is both the “Cradle of the Confederacy” and the “Birth Place of the Civil Rights Movement”. It raises the question of whose dreams are being fulfilled with it’s nickname “Capitol of Dreams”? To be fair, you can visit The First White House of the Confederacy (two blocks from the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor), but I have seen no confederate flags in the city. There are plenty of plaques in the city recognizing the large role the city played in the slave trade and also marking civil rights milestones. Montgomery is the home of the Legacy Museum . It seems the city has done a pretty good job of recognizing all aspects of its past, however I did not see any plaques acknowledging what they did to the Creeks, the indigenous people living there when White settlers arrived.
Montgomery is a pretty city with a lot of downtown revitalization happening. It was one of the first cities in the nation to implement SmartCode Zoning, focusing on walkable neighborhoods. Montgomery is a majority Black city (61% of population) and, we were told it has an increasing Korean population due to the large Hyundai plant located there. Once home to the First White House of the Confederacy, Montgomery grew to become the center of the Civil Rights Movement, notably the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor of The Dexter Avenur Baptist Church from 1954- 1960. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized here. The church stands right next to the State Capitol.Rosa Partk’s protest happened on December, 1st, 1955 on the day oi my birth.
If I had to choose one stop on the National Civil Rights Trail, the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama is at the top of the list. We have visited a number of Civil Rights Trail sites over the years and this is one of the most powerful. The museum takes you on a journey over 400 years from enslavement to racial terrorism to codified segregation and finally the mass incarceration of today. Photos and videos are not allowed so I am reporting mostly from memory. When you first enter the museum, you experience huge ocean waves as you cross the ocean as part of the middle passage. You hear many first hand narratives-from ghosts of enslaved people waiting for auction, to a father holding his young daughter in his arms before he is dragged away from her to be sold down the river, (half of enslaved families were broken up) to people who were incarcerated as teenagers serving life without parole. You see jars of dirt holding the DNA of a fraction of the 4,400 people lynched over a 73 year period in this country.
“When we have the courage to learn the truth we open up doors that permit justice, that permit reckoning, that permit healing. This museum is dedicated to creating a society where the children of our children are no longer burdened by the legacy of slavery.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, standing on a hill overlooking Montgomery is a sacred, reflective space memorializing more than 800 people who were lynched. The names and dates of people who were lynched in each county are etched onto a hanging steel monument. The sheer number of counties is overwhelming, and they are not just in the South. They have gifted each county stones that can be publicly displayed in their county. Jefferson County. Alabama had 63 documented lynchings. They are planning a display in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham.
I had heard of Fred Shuttlesworth, but did not really know what this man accomplished during the civil rights movement until I came to Birmingham, Alabama. We took the Red Clay Fight for Rights tour and watched a PBS Documentary “Shuttlesworth”, both of which I recommend. In order to understand why Fred Shuttlesworth was exactly who the movement needed in Birmingham, one needs to understand what it was like there in the 1950s and 1960s under the rule of Bull Connor.
Birmingham was a company town with the owners of the steel, iron and coal companies making the rules. They were segregationists and there was agreement that Blacks should be kept in their place. Birmingham was essentially a police state supporting the industries. Bull Connor became the political intermediary between the corporate interests and the Ku Klux Klan, so that the corporations could keep their hands clean. In the documentary “Shuttlesworth”, eye witnesses talk about the Klan regularly parading with the police cars leading the procession. If a Black person stepped out of line, they could expect a violent reaction- bombing, beating, arrest or even lynching.
Fred Shuttleworth was described as a warrior, leading people in to battle, willing to risk his life for change. Some folks said he was crazy- they bombed his house, beat him up multiple times, took his car yet he persisted and refused to give up. He was not afraid of Bull Connor; he always believed that God would protect him. He was called “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was a firey preacher with an authoritarian personality. When he was growing up in an abusive household in Montgomery, his mother put him in charge of his 8 younger siblings. He felt like he was being prepared for something and other people felt that too. He learned his persistence from his mother. He knew by the time he was 22 years old that he would be a preacher.
Reverend Shuttlesworth came to Birmingham in 1952 and became preacher of Bethel Baptist Church in 1953. In 1956 the Alabama attorney general outlawed the NAACP, so Reverend Shuttlesworth established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), serving as president of the group until 1969. The ACMHR coordinated boycotts and sponsored federal lawsuits aimed at ending segregation in Birmingham and the state of Alabama.
The Shuttlesworth family lived next to the church. On Christmas Day, 1956, sixteen sticks of dynamite that had been placed under the house where the bedroom was, exploded and the house collapsed. Fred walked out of the rubble without a scratch on him. Andrew Manis, a member of the church said, “if we had seen Jesus walk on water, we wouldn’t have been any more reverent than we were when we saw Fred come out of that building alive. Fred Shuttlesworth was not only their man but God’s man.” He and his church survived two more bombing.
Remains of a guard station across from the Bethel Baptist Church and Shuttlesworth home. It was for volunteers who served as armed guards to protect Reverend Shuttlesworth and the church every night.
After the Brown vs.the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling desegregating schools, Birmingham schools stayed segregated. Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his own children at a white high school in Birmingham. The Klan was waiting for him in front of the school and beat him so bad he ended up in the hospital.
Shuttlesworth served as secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1958 to 1970. Joining forces with the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE), Shuttlesworth helped organize the Freedom Rides and in 1963, began a campaign called Project “C” to fight segregation in Birmingham through mass demonstrations and boycotts. Project “C” was about conflict, and they had all of the ingredients to make national headlines in Birmingham. They could count on Bull Connor to create physical conflict, so Shuttlesworth convinced Martin Luther King to come. The strategy was to fill the jails until they overflowed. There were lunch counter sit-ins and some arrests, but the adults were not showing up en mass to be arrested for fear of consequences. This is when the idea of the childrens march was hatched, which was an incredible success. A thousand children showed up to march and over 800 were arrested. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was where they held the mass meetings and trained the children for the march. When the jails overflowed on the first day, Bull Connor brought out the dogs and fire hoses on the second day. The national press was there to let the world know and the movement got the reaction they needed. Their demands were met, but shortly after that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing took place and four little girls lost their lives. These events, among others, helped bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the passage of the acts, Shuttlesworth continued to focus on issues in Birmingham until he died in 2011 at the age of 89. (https://www.nps.gov/. We need many more people today with the courage, conviction and the mind for strategy of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
Birmingham, Alabama, founded in 1871 during the post civil war reconstruction period, was called the “magic city” because of its fast pace of growth during the period from 1881 through 1920. The city’s population expanded from 3,000 in 1880 to 260,000 by 1930. Birmingham was built at the crossing of Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads. It had nearby deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone – the three main raw materials used in making steel and iron. Birmingham is the only place in the world where these minerals can be found in significant quantities and in close proximity, so Birmingham was planned from the start as a steel and iron producing industrial city. (Wikipedia).
It also had a competitive advantage over northern industrial cities: cheap labor. The availability of a large population of destitute freedmen and impoverished whites in the vicinity of the coalfields offered mine owners an important advantage: workers who were both desperate enough to settle for meager wages and so thoroughly divided along racial lines that they would not organize to protest their predicament or so those in power thought. They did not anticipate the formation of one of the South’s few viable interracial labor unions, District 20 of the United Mine Workers. In 1908, they went on strike for two months, but the strike was crushed by the mine owners when they convinced Alabama Governor Comer to send in the Alabama National Guard.
Coal miners, United Mine Workers District 20, 1908
A nationwide depression in the 1890s caused mining and furnace companies inAlabama to fail. Sloss and Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad (TCI) purchased some of these firms and greatly expanded their operations. Sloss reorganized as the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in 1899 and became the second-largest iron manufacturer in the state. Later, outside investors from New York gained control of Sloss and TCI, and Pioneer was absorbed by Ohio-based Republic Iron and Steel Company, leaving Woodward as the only locally owned ironmaking firm. (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org)
The Great Depression that began in 1929 devastated Birmingham’s economy. Production of steel and pig iron shrank to the lowest levels since 1896, and operations at TCI, Republic, Sloss-Sheffield, and Woodward were drastically curtailed. Business leaders fought bitterly against labor reforms enacted under the New Deal, particularly the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which aimed to raise the wages of southern laborers to the level of their northern counterparts. Labor unions won recognition against strong resistance, but unemployment reached unprecedented levels.(https://encyclopediaofalabama.org)
Industrialists soon realized that Alabama’s coal reserves, which remained plentiful, commanded higher prices in foreign markets than coke-fired pig iron, which was becoming uneconomical to produce. In 1970, USP&F’s last active furnace in Birmingham, one of the two that had been remodeled on the site of the original Sloss Furnace Company, shut down for good. In 1980, Jim Walter Corporation closed the huge new furnace that USP&F had erected in North Birmingham in 1956, then dismantled and sold it for scrap. Even Woodward, long the most profitable company in the Birmingham District, was forced out of business in the early 1970s, and only U.S. Steel’s Fairfield plant remained in production.
From its highest population of 340,887 in 1960, the population was down to 200,733 in 2020, a loss of about 41 percent. White flight to the suburbs after the city was integrated in the late 1960’s contributed to the population decline. Today most of the metropolitan area lies outside the city itself. Other businesses and industries such as banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have diversified the Birmingham economy. Mining in the Birmingham area is no longer a major industry with the exception of coal mining.
Perspectives on the Road 