Alabama exiles its prophets and exalts its fools (Archibald/al.com)

[eppur_se_muova]

By John Archibald | [e-mail]
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on November 10, 2017 at 6:25 AM

***
Helen Keller. E.O. Wilson. Ralph David Abernathy.

You have them in your city. Probably in your family. People who lived in Alabama. People who left.

People of wisdom or courage or exceptional gift. People who found their audience or their calling outside the state, who were recognized for their worth only beyond the bounds of this place they called home.

I was struck by it this week while talking to Alabama's pre-eminent historian, Wayne Flynt. He has written definitive histories of the state and sees it in a two-century totality of beauty and possibility and disappointment and deceit. He can, like few people I've known, talk with authority about the origin of our issues, and the consequences yet to come.
***
more: http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/11/alabama_exiles_its_prophets_an.html

[Aristus]

1. My mother was born in Montgomery, Alabama, eighty years to the day after

the Confederate Congress ratified the Confederate Constitution (which specifically permitted the institution of slavery in the South).

She was the first member of her family ever to go to college.

She lives here in the Pacific Northwest and avoids Alabama as if it were radioactive.