Word: anniston
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Fort McClellan is a very large and convoluted place. The installation covers 46,374 acres in northwestern Alabama, and is home for over 6000 people. In nearby Anniston, Alabama, the streets are arranged in a convenient grillwork pattern, and numbered accordingly. But the military in this instance is less regular than its civilian neighbors. Every street merges into a tangle of other streets. Each building resembles the next; there are no outstanding landmarks to help the visitor find his or her way around the post. A post information officer could be a valuable assistant to a confused reporter, supplying road...
Butting up against the heel of the Appalachian Mountains near Anniston, Ala., Fort McClellan appears to be the most placid of military bases. It is pastorally appointed with sweeping greensward, tall stands of shortleaf pine and pleasing arrangements of whitewashed command buildings fronted by old-fashioned verandas. It is a small post, with slightly more than 5,000 people. But McClellan is unique in that 2,000 of those are WACs; it is the largest WAC base in the world. What is more, 20% of the WACs are black. More than any other single factor, that probably accounts...
...black men and women had assembled by the time Colonel McKean arrived with two carloads of brass, as requested by the blacks. It was a doomed colloquy. A white race-relations officer and a black major were both shouted down. When Beverly Bradford, a white reporter for the Anniston Star, was discovered in the midst of the WACs, she was subjected to some unladylike pummeling. "It was wild," says Colonel Richard Hines, the deputy post commander. "It would have taken 50 MPs to stop those women...
...hear about what it's like growing up in a black ghetto," he says. "I can't talk to them about 400 years of bondage, goddammit. I want to know what's wrong now." If an officer like McKean cannot find the answer, the incident at Anniston will not be the last...
Also of concern is the transportation of deadly gas over creaky southern rail lines that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, account for a disproportionate number of the nation's train wrecks and derailments. More than 400,000 people live along the 661 miles of track the Anniston train will cover, and, reportedly, the thin concrete walls encasing the rockets are fragile if dropped on one of their corners...