Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Poor" also has a new meaning in Alabama. The $3,000-per-family-of-four poverty line figure used in the rest of the country is awkward to use in counties where the average family income hovers around $800. Much handier is the government's survival level" figure of about $1500 per family...
Using the "survival level" (by government definition, the income necessary to keep a family going for a year) to define poverty, things start to look a little brighter. In the central Alabama Black Belt region, it means that the white families (with an average annual income of about $2500) get above the poverty line. But in the ten Black Belt counties where the average income for a black family is less than $600 less than half the "survival level"--a disturbing conclusion is obvious. Either there is something grotesquely wrong with the statistics, or else thousands of American families have...
...Central Alabama is remarkably beautiful. There are gentle green hills, green with meadows and trees, green from the frequent afternoon rains. There are small cotton fields along the roads, and in September the open cotton bolls make the Black Belt look like a huge snowbank. In the open meadows there are fat black cattle grazing under "Eat More Beef" signs. A traveller on the main highways, looking just at the green hills and the cotton and the cattle, might think he had found the legendary pastoral American paradise...
That's because a traveller on the main roads wouldn't see many of the people that live behind the hills. It takes some arduous tracking on the red dirt roads and the mule paths to find the hard-core poor. Alabama's poor are slightly more visible than those lost in the urban ghettos, but it's still easy to forget they are there until a trip up the dirt road shows them too clearly...
...houses are probably the most shocking part. In the 1930's, in the depths of the depression, James Agee and Walker Evans went to Alabama to photograph and write about Southern rural poverty. Several of the buildings in the picture section of their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, still exist. Thirty years of occupancy have not improved the buildings. And where the buildings are different from the ones Agee and Evans saw, they are not much better...