Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Alabama...
Parts of the South are in similar straits. In Alabama, a 15% reduction in the general fund was ordered in September, just four months after the fiscal 1983 budget of $496 million was adopted, when Governor Fob James realized that the declining state economy and a 14% unemployment rate had opened a $50 million hole in the budget. Even Louisiana, long buoyed by oil and gas taxes, has that sinking feeling. Reason: the oil glut has depressed prices, and thus tax revenues. Fearing that its $6.3 billion budget could be $100 million out of balance...
...spiritually disorienting to see a black driving a car with Alabama plates and a Wallace bumper sticker. It is surreal to walk into Wallace's state campaign headquarters, a neobellum low-rise former furniture store on the edge of Montgomery. There, amid the deep shag carpeting and the clickity-click of computer printers churning out voter lists, sits Mrs. Ollie Carter, a black Wallace worker. All day she phones around the state with a gentle, churchgoing courtesy, asking blacks for their support, reminding them to vote...
...claims that 98% of the blacks she calls say they are supporting Wallace. She taught elementary school for 19 years in rural Shelby County, and remembers that none of her pupils had their own textbooks until George Wallace became Governor. Wallace people almost always mention his record in improving Alabama education (though the state still ranks among the lowest in literacy), especially those free textbooks for the children, and the system of 26 junior colleges he started around the state. And the fact is that, leaving aside the low growls of race, Wallace was generally quite a good Governor...
...theory has it that Alabama blacks have always been cynically knowing about George Wallace, that they have figured all along that his segregationist behavior and rhetoric were matters of political expediency. There is some truth in the theory. Alabama today has the second highest (after Michigan) unemployment in the nation: 14.5%. Everywhere in Alabama the message is the same: "Folks are hurtin'." Wallace has argued, so far successfully, that as an internationally known figure and the most experienced Governor in Alabama history, he can bring new industries and new jobs to the state. So many Alabamians, black and white...