I have just returned from an extended trip through the civil rights monuments of Tennessee and Alabama (a journey I encourage every American to take). It’s beautiful country, populated by some of the friendliest and most fiercely dedicated folks I’ve met in this country. The folks we met in Shelby County, Tennessee and Jefferson, Dallas and Lowndes County, Alabama are, for the most part, caring, intelligent and progressive people who care about their communities, about the history of the area – the real history – and about the future. They are passionate about their beautiful states, and they’ve chosen to stay there to try to make it better.
Dallas County, Alabama, in particular, contains some of the poorest municipalities not just in the state, but in the country. Selma – the site of Bloody Sunday, anchor of the great march to Montgomery in March of 1965 – is desperately poor. Lost in time, it scratches out a living through the meager tourist dollars that are spent in its few restaurants, visitor center and gift shop. There’s a National Park Service museum and interpretive center, and some highway markers that memorialize the history of that great voting rights crusade in the spring of 1965. But you won’t find much else to speak of. People don’t generally stop here except to take pictures, or to briefly tour the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, site of organizational meetings behind the march, and the place from which it stepped off on that long ago Sunday morning.
Travel to Birmingham or Montgomery, and you’ll find museums and roadside markers and monuments and memorials aplenty. People here care a great deal about preserving this history, about making sure people know what took place here, know how much was sacrificed – and about making sure the people who fought and died here are not forgotten. Speak to these folks, and you’ll find that they are happy you’re there – I was thanked warmly and sincerely wherever I went in the fortnight of my travels – and that people are not here by because they have to be - they’ve chosen to be here. This is their home, and like anyone else anywhere in America, it’s where they want to be, where they feel they belong. They have roots here, family, memories, traditions. They know the truth about these states, this region – that America has all but forgotten them, that they are not part of the daily conversation or in the national headlines. That they live in the poorest, most downtrodden and economically disadvantaged part of the country, a region with few prospects and little hope.
And yet they stay. They stay because they know the history, know that people were here before them who struggled and fought and died for the right to be here, to live as they pleased in the place they called home. They know their job prospect are dim, that they could do better elsewhere, that life here will continue to be an endless struggle filled with heartache and hardship. And yet they stay. (NOTE: I am not speculating here — I am communicating what they told me when I asked them directly about it.)
The rest of the country doesn’t give them a thought most of the time, until days like last Wednesday, when Alabama passed the most restrictive abortion legislation in recent memory, and news commentators across the country lamented that once again, this region had taken another step backward and this time, it was going to drag the rest of the country down with it. People who live here (many of whom, perhaps unbeknownst to the rest of the country, strongly disagree with what happened in Montgomery last week) know that the rest of the country mocks them, thinks they’re poorly educated, simple-minded, ignorant. They know they are in a long, slow struggle. But they believe in the arc of the moral universe.
Boycotts won’t work here in Alabama. There is no money here in the Black Belt. There hasn’t been in generations. There is nothing left to take from states that eke out their existence on meager tourist dollars and ever-diminishing federal programs. People here haven’t seen change in their lifetimes – not even with Obama in the White House – and furthermore, they know they are unlikely to without massive federal intervention, a southern Marshall Plan. No, the answer is not boycotts. The answer is to come to Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama. Meet the people. Hear their stories. Experience the history. Invest your time and your resources here, take the profits and reinvest them right here in the Heart of Dixie. Do this, and you will understand.