I’ve not spent much time in the American South, and it’s a region high on my travel list. In early 2020, I decided to go to Alabama. A work trip to Atlanta provided the perfect excuse to rent a car and escape one of Minnesota’s endless frozen weekends. I also hadn’t done a solo road trip in a while, and I started getting excited. I had visions of myself cruising down red dirt roads, turning on classic country, pivoting quickly to podcasts, comparing rural Alabama’s pro-life billboards with the ones dotted across rural Minnesota (frequency, which random words they choose to underline or use all caps for, degree of Bible-quoting, date at which they have determined eyelashes form, etc.), and following the recommendations of whatever the locals were friendly enough to give me.
And then impulsively I invited my mom. My mother had conditioned me to never pass up a free hotel room and to repay her, I have historically invited her on all my working lady business trips (a life in nonprofits means these are few and far between). No hot tub is too polluted for her to take advantage of, and she will bring a bag to save any complimentary tea bags. She’s actually a really great travel partner, as I believe her when she says “I don’t care, you pick.” Mom truly is just along for the ride.
However, I had already booked two $25 Airbnbs, one in a Birmingham college rental and another in a bachelor pad in Montgomery, and no amount of prior warning and expectation setting would deter my mom. My farmer father sent along N-95 masks as a joke, since COVID was just beginning to show up in America. We jokingly took a picture wearing them and left them in my car. What innocent times…
Birmingham
The podcast of choice was S-Town from Serial and This American Life. It’s based in Woodstock, Alabama, just southwest of Birmingham, our first stop. I regret now not driving through it. Birmingham is just over 2 hours from the Atlanta airport. I impulsively stopped near the first mural I saw upon entering town, which happened to be a tiny enclave of entrepreneurialism, essentially two blocks of redevelopment, in the Woodlawn neighborhood. We stopped in what were 3-4 white, Millennial-run businesses + a newer co-working hub spaced out by a full barber shop, a thrift store serving as a third place, and an old-guard butcher shop. I’d lived in Logan Square, Chicago, so my gentrification radar was going off.
The owner at Trove Design Shop (+ massage studio) sent us to The Essential in downtown B’ham for lunch. Journal reads, “Again, in a city that is 75% Black, we were in another entirely white space.” Another posh, well-designed, “$$” space almost hidden along a cobblestone street. At its height in the 1960s, Birmingham’s population was 340K. It was now 210K, but remains Alabama’s biggest city. The vacancies downtown were evidence of a fuller time. However, there was construction underway and adaptive reuse dotted about, including The Pizitz Food Hall, which also housed the Yellowhammer Print Shop.
We strolled downtown, stopping by the "Four Spirits” memorial, and then went on to Pepper Place, which was another (mostly white) redevelopment of the former Dr. Pepper bottling facility now filled with a natural food market—including a farmers market we checked out before we left—another Yellowhammer Print Shop location, and some design-oriented businesses and high-end shops.
We made a quick pitstop at Sloss Furnaces, which used to be the economic engine of the town as a pig iron-producing blast furnace. It shut down in the early 1970s and is now a National Landmark.
The blogs told us that we’d find good shopping in the Homewood neighborhood, a neighborhood that had seemingly reached its peak 15 years ago and stopped trying. We didn’t linger too long.
From Homewood, I Googled “Whole Foods” and soon Mom and I were driving up a small mountain past mansions, caught in a BMW rush hour to an area of B’ham called “The Summit.” Clearly, this is where all the wealth resided. There was glittery mall housing a Restoration Hardware, Lululemon, Cheesecake Factory, etc.
We went back down the hill to Little Five Points for a delicious dinner at Chez Fonfon, then checked in to one of the most half-assed AirBnbs I’ve ever stayed at (I say this as a host myself) near the University of Alabama–Birmingham. After requesting (and receiving!) clean(er) sheets, we locked our door and listened to the owner move out a broken washing machine as we drank wine, ate pralines, and watched half of Cheer on Netflix.
Backroads
After coffee at Woodlawn Cycle Cafe and some pastries from the Pepper Place winter farmers market, we hit the road. We got off the interstate at Calera, the fastest growing city in Alabama (population 11,620), then passed through Jemison. Both towns felt lifeless and bleak, and as a rural cheerleader, I wish there was a kinder thing to say.
Part of coming to Alabama was to add nuance to easy stereotypes. However, most housing we saw did take the shape of trailer homes and the dirt really was red and there truly were a ton of Baptist churches. I was surprised by the amount of forests and logging, as well as cows.
As Mom was starting to doze off in the passenger seat, I made the decision to go to Selma.
Calera, Alabama. The state’s fastest-growing city.
Jemison, Alabama
Selma
While the drizzly drive had dampened our spirits, Selma took them a step lower. The only images I’d seen of this city of 20K were of civil rights warriors marching across the Edmond Pettus Bridge. The full weight of repayment we as a country owe African Americans landed heavily indeed looking around the disinvestment in the shadow of the bridge. Selma is 80% Black. There were no gentrifying design shops or third wave coffee shops here, just a community doing its best with the scraps our racist policies have left behind. Vacant historic buildings, a noticeable lack of foot traffic (even in the most touristed part of town), and a felt police presence.
I wish I would have stayed longer, asked more questions, but I was too ashamed. I felt my outsider status. I live in a small city, also of 20K. However, it’s 90% white. The average household income in Northfield is $62K vs. Selma’s $22.6K. Income is just one proxy for the way racism lives on. This discrepancy could be seen and felt from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a KKK Grand Dragon and Confederate general. There were also marks of beauty and care, like the new “Revolution of Joy” mural. Still, the fact that we can’t agree—worse, can’t be bothered—to rename the bridge lets us know where we are in our antiracist efforts in this country.
Montgomery
Another one of the white histper shop owners in Birmingham, upon my asking for any Alabama recommendations, had urged us not to miss the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum. He said it was a start at some much needed truth and reconciliation. The memorial is “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”
The Memorial for Peace and Justice was the most powerful experience of the trip. We walked amidst 800 hanging monuments, each representing a county where racial violence had taken place, and each listing the names of the Black people killed. The undulating floor dropped under the hanging masses, putting you fully under the weight and shadows of the people lynched in this nation. It was somber and devastating. It was also hopeful to see such truth-telling memorialized and ongoing.
While there are people in Montgomery trying to tell a more complete and honest history of both the city and the country as it relates to race, there were plenty of places it was noticeably absent. The fountain in the middle of the roundabout is where slaves used to be auctioned. No traces of that. A statue of James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” still stands in front of the capitol building, despite the fact that he experimented on enslaved Black women for the benefit of white women.
It was jaw-dropping after two days of driving through resource-starved communities to come upon the Alabama state houses. They were enormous. The grounds were pristine. Everything glowed a stark and imposing white. The white GOP legislature holds a supermajority over the almost entirely Black democratic party.
I feel incredibly self-conscious and conflicted writing about all of this as a white Northerner. I know we have our own deep racial issues—Minnesota is home to many well-documented and known achievement gaps between whites and BIPOC residents. As everywhere, there are a lot of hard-working people who love Alabama who have been working for decades to make things better and more just. The Memorial for Peace and Justice is just one example of that. I don’t want my reflections of the work still to be done to overshadow those efforts and successes. I also want people to keep open eyes to the work we still need to do.
