Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Birmingham, black business district, Civil Rights Institute, Martin Luther King Jr. on June 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I like to believe that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past will resolve into the positives and utopian extreme of her future; that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow.
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The words were inscribed on a dark, marble wall in the rotunda [...]
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Birmingham, Swann Covered Bridge, urban sprawl on June 24, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The sprawl lining the road from Hazel Green south toward Birmingham had more personality than the formulaic strip malls that barricaded in the highly-trafficked corridors outside Atlanta and Charlotte and everywhere else, though this is not to say they were necessarily less ugly. The Wal-Mart and Lowe’s empires still had feudal outposts here, but the [...]
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Cook's Natural Science Museum, creationism, Decatur, Hazel Green, John R. Cook Sr., natural science, Tractor pull on June 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In Alabama, we have finally found a land entirely strange to us.
At first glance, it didn’t look much different from southern Tennessee. It had the same rustic farms with tightly-wound spools of hay, the same aged signs advertising local roadside eateries, the same cattle pastures and cornfields and single-floor brick houses with well-mown lawns alongside [...]
