Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...This is the third in a series. The author spent the summer working for the Southern Courier, a civil-rights newspaper based in Montgomery, Alabama...
...dreams have always had a regional distribution in the South: Virginia and Tennessee seem to fit the Hospitality pattern well, while Alabama and Mississippi have to be the natural haunts of the lurking Klansmen. Southerners, of course, are aware of this. And those in the Deep South respond with an even more aggressive Southern Hospitality than the kind Virginia dispenses with quiet confidence. And so it is in Alabama and Mississippi that the Southern schizophrenia--the simultaneous existence of the two myths--is most apparent...
Signs at the borders hint at the difference. Coming down on US 427 from Nashville, the traveller passes a small sign saying "Leaving State of Tennessee." On the other side of the road is a mammoth white billboard. WELCOME TO HISTORIC ALABAMA, it says. ALABAMA, CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY AND HEART OF DIXIE WELCOMES YOU. At the bottom, in capital letters just as large as the rest, is LURLEEN WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA. It's hard to read LURLEEN, because right underneath it is GEORGE. The Alabama Highway Department has always been embarrassingly short of money, and it didn...
...small "Wallace in 68" buttons. In gas stations and greasy cafes all over the state, the same ritual goes one. "You from out of state? What y'll doin' round here? How you lahk it here?" The ritual has an important purpose: about half the people who come to Alabama are Southern Hospitality-seekers; the other half are rotten no-good trouble-making kids. Each half will get what it's looking for; the Alabamian is ready to glad-hand the decent folks who like the South and to womp on the no-good kids. But first there...
When I arrived in Alabama, however, I was surprised. It looked just like the real world. Montgomery and Birmingham could have been in any other state; and even the legendary Selma looked like any Midwest commercial town. There were no border guards to weed out Northerners who had come to meddle; thick-necked police didn't roam the strets with electric cattle prods; Negroes walked on the sidewalks and not in the gutters. There were more Wallace posters, of course, and the bookstands seemed notably short of books like Black Power. But if Alabama wasn't Cambridge or Haight-Ashbury...