# data[].attributes.body
My name jeff

# data[].attributes.body
Hi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Segregation & Racism Jim Crow Laws: Separated and discriminated blacks from whites using laws that didn't mention race, but went against African Americans. The Great Depression *On October 29, 1929 occurred the worst stock market crash in history. This day was nicknamed "Black Tuesday." Alabama In the 1930's Farming & Work Fair Labor Standards Act: Min.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This civil rights movement timeline chronicles important dates during the struggle's second chapter, the early 1960s. While the fight for racial equality began in the 1950s, the non-violent techniques the movement embraced began to pay off during the following decade. Civil rights activists and students across the South challenged segregation, and the relatively new technology of television allowed Americans to witness the often brutal response to these protests.

President Lyndon B. Johnson successfully pushed through the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a number of other groundbreaking events unfolded between 1960 and 1964, the span covered by this timeline.

1960

On Feb. 1, four young African American men, students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College, go to a Woolworth in Greensboro, N.C., and sit down at a whites-only lunch counter. They order coffee. Despite being denied service, they sit silently and politely at the lunch counter until closing time. Their action marks the start of the Greensboro sit-ins, which sparks similar protests all over the South.

On April 15, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee holds its first meeting.

On July 25, the downtown Greensboro Woolworth desegregates its lunch counter after six months of sit-ins.

On Oct. 19, Martin Luther King Jr. joins a student sit-in at a whites-only restaurant inside of an Atlanta department store, Rich's. He is arrested along with 51 other protesters on the charge of trespassing. On probation for driving without a valid Georgia license (he had an Alabama license), a Dekalb County judge sentences King to four months in prison doing hard labor. Presidential contender John F. Kennedy phones King's wife, Coretta, to offer encouragement, while the candidate's brother, Robert Kennedy, convinces the judge to release King on bail. This phone call convinces many African Americans to support the Democratic ticket.

On Dec. 5, the Supreme Court hands down a 7-2 decision in the Boynton v. Virginia case, ruling that segregation on vehicles traveling between states is unlawful because it violates the Interstate Commerce Act.

1961

On May 4, the Freedom Riders, composed of seven African American and six white activists, leave Washington, D.C., for the rigidly segregated Deep South. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), their goal is to test Boynton v. Virginia.

On May 14, Freedom Riders, now traveling in two separate groups, are attacked outside Anniston, Ala. and in Birmingham, Ala. A mob throws a firebomb onto the bus in which the group near Anniston is riding. Members of the Ku Klux Klan attack the second group in Birmingham after making an arrangement with the local police to allow them 15 minutes alone with the bus.

On May 15, the Birmingham group of Freedom Riders is prepared to continue their trip down south, but no bus will agree to take them. They fly to New Orleans instead.

On May 17, a new group of young activists join two of the original Freedom Riders to complete the trip. They are placed under arrest in Montgomery, Ala.

On May 29, President Kennedy announces that he has ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enact stricter regulations and fines for buses and facilities that refuse to integrate. Young white and black activists continue to make Freedom Rides.

In November, civil rights activists participate in a series of protests, marches, and meetings in Albany, Ga., that come to be known as the Albany Movement.

In December, King comes to Albany and joins the protesters, staying in Albany for another nine months.

1962

On Aug. 10, King announces that he is leaving Albany. The Albany Movement is considered a failure in terms of effecting change, but what King learns in Albany allows him to be successful in Birmingham.

On Sept. 10, the Supreme Court rules that the University of Mississippi must admit African American student and veteran James Meredith.

On Sept. 26, the governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, orders state troopers to prevent Meredith from entering Ole Miss's campus.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, riots erupt over Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi, or "Ole Miss."

On Oct. 1, Meredith becomes the first African American student at Ole Miss after President Kennedy orders U.S. marshals to Mississippi to ensure his safety.

1963

King, SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize a series of 1963 civil rights demonstrations and protests to challenge segregation in Birmingham.

On April 12, Birmingham police arrest King for demonstrating without a city permit.

On April 16, King writes his famous " Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in which he responds to eight white Alabama ministers who urged him to end the protests and be patient with the judicial process of overturning segregation.

On June 11, President Kennedy delivers a speech on civil rights from the Oval Office, specifically explaining why he sent the National Guard to allow the admittance of two African American students into the University of Alabama.

On June 12, Byron De La Beckwith assassinates Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi.

On Aug. 18, James Meredith graduates from Ole Miss.

On Aug. 28, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held in D.C. Around 250,000 people participate, and King delivers his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech.

On Sept. 15, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. Four young girls are killed.

On Nov. 22, Kennedy is assassinated, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, uses the nation's anger to push through civil rights legislation in Kennedy's memory.

1964

On March 12, Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam. Among his reasons for the break is Elijah Muhammad's ban on protesting for Nation of Islam adherents.

Between June and August, SNCC organizes a voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer.

On June 21, three Freedom Summer workers--Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman--disappear.

On Aug. 4, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman are found in a dam. All three had been shot, and the African American activist, Chaney, had also been badly beaten.

On June 24, Malcolm X founds the Organization of Afro-American Unity along with John Henrik Clarke. Its aim is to unite all Americans of African descent against discrimination.

On July 2, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination in employment and public places.

In July and August, riots break out in Harlem and Rochester, N.Y.

On Aug. 27, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDM), which formed to challenge the segregated state Democratic Party, sends a delegation to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. They ask to represent Mississippi at the convention. Activist Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke publicly and her speech was broadcast nationally by media outlets. Offered two nonvoting seats at the convention, in turn, the MFDM delegates reject the proposal. Yet all was not lost. By the 1968 election, a clause was adopted requiring equal representation from all state delegations.

On Dec. 10, the Nobel Foundation awards King the Nobel Peace Prize.

Updated by African-American History Expert, Femi Lewis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Timeline of 1964 and 1963 Civil Rights Milestones

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This civil rights movement timeline chronicles important dates during the struggle's second chapter, the early 1960s. While the fight for racial equality began in the 1950s, the non-violent techniques the movement embraced began to pay off during the following decade.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Segregation was the legal and social system of separating citizens on the basis of race. The system maintained the repression of black citizens in Alabama and other southern states until it was dismantled during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and by subsequent civil rights legislation. Segregation is usually understood as a legal system of control consisting of the denial of voting rights, the maintenance of separate schools, and other forms of separation between the races, but formal legal rules were only one part of the regime. Some historians list three other important elements contributing to the creation and reinforcement of the status quo: physical force and terror, economic intimidation, and psychological control exerted through messages of low worth and negativity transmitted socially to African American citizens.

The Rise of Legal Segregation

As a comprehensive legal and social policy, segregation was not fully institutionalized in Alabama until the beginning of the twentieth century, but had its roots in struggles over how to deal with the realities of emancipation and federal legislation and constitutional change that gave blacks full citizenship. While many Alabamians informally and incompletely enforced separate living and working arrangements during slavery, the state's role in formalizing and codifying separation was a postwar development. Formal and informal policies of repression, such as separate public accommodations, limited access to suffrage, and strict control over black labor, were put into place between the 1870s and the 1890s, and Alabama's 1901 constitution rested upon white supremacy as a basic element of governance. The supremacist underpinnings of the constitution persisted until judicial decisions in the 1950s and 1960s rendered them inoperable, and some segregationist language, like the ban on interracial marriage, remained in the constitution until Alabama's voters removed it by constitutional amendment in the twenty-first century.

At the end of the Civil War, Alabama had to reconstitute its state legislature. The state's first postwar constitution, drafted in 1865, actually cut back on equal rights for freedmen that had been present in Alabama's antebellum constitutions. For instance, the new political order limited free blacks' capacity to make choices about labor contracts and heavily promoted formal marriages between free blacks while prohibiting interracial marriage. Rather than guaranteeing equal rights in the constitution, the drafters instructed the legislature to "pass such laws as will protect the freedmen of this state in the full enjoyment of all their rights of person and property, and guard them and the state against all evil that may arise from their sudden emancipation." While the drafters promoted protection for freed slaves, they suggested to the legislature that the best form of protection for both the freed slaves and the state would be the development of a new form of second-class status and citizenship. The legislature reconvened in December 1865 and responded by passing Alabama's notorious Black Code, which, like black codes passed in other states, rigidly controlled and managed the lives of black citizens. Although the codes primarily focused upon compelling blacks to labor for whites (often their former masters) and punishing them harshly for vaguely defined crimes like loitering and vagrancy, they foreshadowed the social and geographic control that full-scale segregation would bring.

The harshness of the codes in conjunction with remaining northern bitterness about the war contributed to major Republican victories in national elections in 1866. Federal officials suspended the codes in all southern states, and in Alabama and elsewhere a new wave of constitution writing began. Alabama's 1867 constitutional convention included 18 African Americans who spoke against the discriminatory constitutional and statutory language in the existing legal system. In Alabama, the convention voted against mandating segregated schooling in its constitution, leading 13 pro-segregation delegates to resign from their positions. Alabama's 1868 constitution included an equal-protection guarantee and also secured suffrage rights for men over 21 regardless of race, but it did little else to provide formal legal protection for African Americans. Even these fairly modest reforms provoked outrage among many Democrats and conservatives, and the broader politics of Reconstruction contributed to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, especially in Alabama, a center of Klan activity during Reconstruction. Klan violence was not random. Klansmen directly targeted African Americans and their white allies who sought to enforce guarantees of equal political and social rights.

The Democrats regained tenuous control of Alabama's government in 1874, and they continued to fend off challenges from Republicans and emerging third parties intermittently through the 1870s and 1880s. By the end of the 1880s, the unification of Democrats around an agenda of racial hostility toward blacks had contributed to dividing and weakening the Republican Party. Black and white Republicans were holding separate conventions as white Republicans sought to distance themselves from the appearance of advocating for the freed men and women. Alabama held another constitutional convention in 1875, but the delegates did little to weaken the language forbidding racial discrimination in voting, because they did not wish to trigger federal intervention.

As these constitutional changes were occurring and Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court were struggling over the legacy of emancipation, southern states and localities quietly began to implement the first building blocks of segregation. Railway cars were an early target, and in the late 1870s and 1880s, trains began to shift from reserving cars for ladies to reserving cars for white passengers. As these practices became more widespread, many southern states and localities, including Alabama and its major cities, passed laws and ordinances mandating racial segregation on trains passing through them and on city streetcars. Policies criminalizing interracial marriage, and in Alabama other forms of interracial intimacy, were initially challenged on the basis of federal law and the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided freedmen with basic citizenship rights. But state courts and then the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama, indicated that such laws were permissible. Legal challenges to segregated transportation increased, and African Americans sought to enforce their legal rights under congressional legislation. The federal government, however, began to lose its will to enforce equality. Finally, in 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which mixed-race plaintiff Homer Plessy challenged Louisiana's 1890 law mandating separate accommodations for black and white passengers in railway cars. The court ruled that Louisiana's law was constitutional and established the principle that separate accommodations were acceptable as long as they were equal. This ruling granted wide latitude to the southern states to separate their citizens along racial lines across multiple aspects of life without triggering federal intervention, and most southern states, including Alabama, were not slow to take up the invitation. A wave of constitutional reform spread through the south to authorize harsh local control over African Americans.

Segregation in the Jim Crow Era

In the wake of the Plessy ruling, Alabama convened another constitutional convention in 1901. Delegates had as one of their main goals the establishment of a state based on white supremacy, and they enshrined separation between whites and African Americans in the constitutional text. Sections 178 and 180 through 182 included provisions specifically designed to disenfranchise black voters. Section 256 established an entirely segregated school system. Section 102 prevented the legislature from ever allowing interracial marriages. The conventioneers also debated how to define the people they were seeking to control, considering at one point the adoption of a rule that anyone with any degree of African ancestry could be defined as black. Ultimately, however, they stayed with Alabama's older definition, which required at least one black great grandparent for an individual to be subject to Alabama's many legal restrictions encompassing segregation. The constitution also disenfranchised working-class whites as well. Although the constitution was controversial, it passed and went into effect, giving subsequent legislatures the tools to implement a social and legal system of separation. Localities, too, could begin to apply the laws directly, and did so.

The effect of the new constitution was readily evident in Mobile the following year. Mobile's city code had not specifically segregated public transportation, though city officials had relied upon custom and intimidation. After the constitution went into effect, white support for more formal restrictions increased and could be made effective. Although Mobile's population was nearly half African American, the city council passed an ordinance providing for "separation of the races" on Mobile streetcars by requiring blacks to sit in the back. Black community leaders and ministers immediately initiated a mass boycott in protest of the policy, and some blacks who rode the streetcars actively resisted the segregation measure. The boycott, however, gradually collapsed after a few months. Two years after the boycott, a city official ordered blacks out of Mobile's oldest public park, and the city council upheld his action, establishing another means of enforcing policies of segregation without passing formal measures. Segregation then progressed rapidly in Mobile as public spaces were increasingly either separated or reserved for whites alone. By 1913, a black sociologist concluded that blacks in Mobile lived in an isolated world, utterly separate from whites in most aspects of life and even death, with blacks and whites being buried in separate cemeteries. The experiences of Mobile's black and white citizens were fairly typical for Alabamians in the early twentieth century.

The struggles of the postwar years and late nineteenth century culminated in utter victory for white supremacists in 1901, and systematic social division between the races was the effect. The constitutionally and legally mandated separations were but one facet of segregation. Ordinances and laws established separate school systems and required separate seating in public transportation in many cities. Custom, backed up by the threat of violence from the police or lynch mobs, enforced forms of residential, economic, and social segregation encompassing banking (separate banks), medicine (separate medical practices and hospitals), law (informal exclusion of blacks on juries), religion (separate churches), and daily life (encompassing separate residential areas, schools, and even cemeteries). If these measures failed to enforce whites' preferences to avoid associating with blacks, the state stood ready to step in.

The 1926 case of Wyatt v. Adair offers a good example of state-supported social segregation. Whereas towns could not constitutionally pass ordinances mandating residential segregation by race, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1926 that individuals could agree privately not to rent or sell properties to blacks. J. E. Adair, a white man, rented a store and a residential floor of a house in Birmingham from W. P. Wyatt, who also was white. Wyatt then leased another residential floor of the house to a black family, an act made even more outrageous to the Adair family because the entire house shared a single toilet and bathroom. Adair sued on behalf of himself and his family, arguing that Wyatt's lease of a floor of the same house to a black family forced him to move ( Wyatt v. Adair, 1926). The Alabama Supreme Court supported Adair's claim, resting its ruling on the ordinary custom of not leasing premises within residences with common toilets to blacks if whites were already living there. Adair recovered damages, including his lost rent and the expense of moving, but also for the mental anguish caused "by seeing his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter humiliated." Through this widely cited ruling, the court both approved the principle of segregation and its message of disgust toward blacks and signaled that it would stand ready to enforce private suits for damages against anyone foolhardy enough to violate the strict norms of separation.

Segregation's Political Impact and Significance

The daily process of enforcing segregation influenced how race was defined in Alabama and contributed to the state's shift toward understanding race as the separation between blacks and whites, excluding the consideration of other racial groups. Individuals with Native American ancestry lived in some regions of Alabama and built communities that existed separately from blacks and whites. In the 1920s and early 1930s, some black Alabamians tried to escape the worst elements of segregation by claiming that they had Native American, rather than black, ancestors. For instance, one man, Percy Reed, was able to convince an appellate court to overturn his conviction for miscegenation (race mixing) on this basis in Reed v. State in 1922. The state attempted to close this loophole toward the end of the 1920s. In 1927 the legislature amended its definition of black, shifting to a "one-drop rule" that defined anyone with any black ancestor as black. The next year, Alabama's high court ruled in Weaver v. State that race could be established in a court of law by investigating a person's appearance, associations, and acquaintances. With this rule in place, practices of compliance with segregation could be used to determine race. In several court cases in the 1920s and 1930s, prosecutors established defendants' race by showing whether the person had gone to a black or white church or school and how the person interacted with blacks and whites. Individuals who had attended black schools or belonged to black churches or interacted primarily with blacks socially were more readily deemed black by Alabama's legal system, even if they did not appear to be "black."

In some ways, segregation enabled moderate whites to provide limited benefits and accommodations for blacks without threatening white supremacy. The development of separate public library systems was an example. The first public library branch for African Americans opened in Birmingham in 1918. Some whites supported segregated library branches as a non-threatening vehicle for blacks' social improvement. Library branches for blacks primarily in urban environments grew slowly until pressure from black civic and religious leaders, educators, and librarians promoted the establishment of more library branches in the 1940s and early 1950s. These efforts to expand access to segregated libraries were eclipsed by the Read-in Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which blacks in Alabama used sit-ins to desegregate public libraries.

If there was a positive outcome for African Americans from the years of segregation, it was that segregation generated vitally strong all-black institutions, which supported individual blacks and provided space for the development of autonomous black leadership. For instance, Birmingham's all-black Masonic Hall provided an organizing site for Birmingham's radical union movement in the 1930s. Black churches, in addition to providing spiritual community and leadership, sometimes provided meeting space and cover for political discussions, including local NAACP chapters, and the development of organized resistance and mutual protection. Some black teachers in segregated schools modeled independence and pride for their students. The total nature of segregation and its deep tentacles, which spread throughout Alabama's culture, law, and society, however, rendered it impervious to successful systemic attack until the emergence of the civil rights movement and its tactics of mass protest.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott challenging segregated public transportation started in 1955. These two important events signaled the beginning of the end for segregation in Alabama. While years of struggle would follow, the major elements of segregation were toppled by Congress as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public accommodations and employment, and gave the federal government enforcement powers. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination in housing. Federal courts also contributed by ordering individual school districts and other institutions like public parks to desegregate and by supporting civil rights protesters in legal conflicts over sit-ins and marches. By the end of the 1960s, the state was no longer legally permitted to separate whites and blacks in all elements of daily life, and the regime of segregation had ended.
Additional Resources
Alsobrook, David. 2003. "The Mobile Streetcar Boycott of 1902: African American Protest or Capitulation?" Alabama Review 56: 83-102.

Chafe, William. 2000. "The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun." Journal of American History 86: 1-54.

Flynt, Wayne. 2001. "Alabama's Shame: The Historical Origins of the 1901 Constitution." Alabama Law Review 53: 67-76.

Graham, Patterson Toby. 2003. A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900-1965. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Morgan, Martha and Neal Hutchens. 2001. "The Tangled Web of Alabama's Equality Doctrine After Melof: Historical Reflections on Equal Protection and the Alabama Constitution." Alabama Law Review 53: 135-242.

Rogers, William Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt. 1984. Alabama: The History of a Deep-South State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Segregation was the legal and social system of separating citizens on the basis of race. The system maintained the repression of black citizens in Alabama and other southern states until it was dismantled during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and by subsequent civil rights legislation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ADAH: Alabama History Timeline (1901-1950)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TIMELINE INCLUDES AMERICAN HISTORY EVENTS. NAVIGATE BY CLICKING ON THE DATES ABOVE.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alabama Historical Newspapers - Access Genealogy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Statewide Resources: Hosted at Ancestry.com Alabama Newspapers and Periodicals $ This manuscript details all Newspapers and Periodicals published in 1915. It is organized by county. Historical Newspaper Collection $ Read history as it was happening in more than 6 million pages from over 400 different newspapers across the US, U.K.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Great Depression was a sustained, national economic recession that shaped the lives of all Alabamians. Although the U.S. stock market crash of October 1929 is often seen as the beginning of the Great Depression, in Alabama and elsewhere, the crash exacerbated an already existing decline in agriculture that had begun much earlier in the decade and spread statewide to cities and industries thereafter. The Depression's impact on Alabama lasted throughout the 1930s and, for some Alabamians, into the early 1940s, which was longer than the nation as a whole. So dire was Alabama's situation during these years that it drew the interest of Fortune magazine, which sent author James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to Alabama in 1936. Their work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would become the iconic study of Alabamians' experiences during the Depression. The era reshaped the state's political, economic, and social traditions, highlighted the economic inequalities associated with industrial work, and challenged Alabama's long-standing social and racial hierarchies, even encouraging some Alabamians, black and white, to push for basic civil rights. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal provided relief for many facing dire poverty, but the Depression truly ended only with the economic boom that followed the state's mobilization because of World War II.

Historians now generally agree that, nationwide, the Great Depression did not begin with the stock market crash, but with a more gradual decline in key economic sectors. American agriculture had been struggling as early as 1921, when commodity prices fell steadily from post- World War I highs. In Alabama, cotton prices dropped to the lowest levels since the 1880s. By 1929, industries, the backbone of prosperity in the "Roaring Twenties," experienced a decline in consumption as farmers could no longer afford to buy consumer goods and the overall market for goods had become fairly saturated. As industries scaled back production, they fired workers, leading to increased unemployment, which peaked at 25 percent in 1933 and hovered around that mark throughout much of the 1930s. Alabama's already limited non-farm employment fell 15 percent between 1930 and 1940. Without income, people could no longer buy the goods that buoyed the American economy. In Alabama, for example, personal annual income fell from an already low $311 in 1929 to a $194 in 1935.

The situation worsened as the Congress passed tariffs in 1930 to encourage domestic consumption. In turn, America's trading partners enacted tariffs of their own, leading to a sharp drop in international trade and more economic woes for the nation's farmers and producers. When the stock market crashed in late October 1929, many Americans, and certainly many Alabamians, were already experiencing economic hardship.

In the years after the Civil War, Alabamians, like many southerners, lived on the edge of poverty, a result of the disruption of the plantation economy and the subsequent rise of widespread sharecropping and farm tenancy, low-wage industry, and a lackluster economy. The devastation of cotton crops by the spread of the boll weevil and a decline in cotton prices because of international competition further depressed the state's economy by the 1920s. Alabama's farm families experienced the first pangs of Depression when cotton prices plummeted. The commodity began its fall in early 1921, from a high of 35 cents per pound to less than 5 cents per pound by 1932. Unable to make a living on cotton, some farmers left to find work in cities. Others fell deeper into debt and tenancy. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of landowners fell from around 96,000 to 75,000, a decline that was harsher for white farmers than black farmers. In fact, black ownership of land increased slightly during the latter 1920s, a result of falling land prices and African Americans returning to the South in a brief reverse of the Great Migration. Black farmers still tended to own smaller, less profitable farms than white owners, however. Nevertheless, the number of tenant farmers increased universally, from 148,000 to 166,000 over the course of the decade. Furthermore, between 1920 and 1930, the average farm size shrank from 75 to 68 acres and dropped in value from $3,803 to $2,375 and the percentage of farms worked by tenants increased from 58 percent to 65 percent; another sign of worsening times prior to the Depression.

Many farm families lived on the brink of starvation and bankruptcy during good years, so the Depression forced those on the land to focus on long-term survival. Farmers ate less meat and more filling and inexpensive starches, like beans and corn, and wore clothes made out of burlap feed and fertilizer sacks. Tenants and sharecroppers moved to find better contracts and travelled farther and more often as the Depression worsened. Having less food, fewer clothes, and little money, rural Alabamians ceased going to school, church, and other social functions.

Industries were hit later by the Depression, so some farmers left their land for the mills and mines of cities such as Birmingham, Huntsville, and Anniston. But when the Depression spread into the cities in the early 1930s, the state witnessed an urban exodus, with many people who had fled land turning back to sharecropping and tenant farming or returning to family land. In fact, the 1930s serve as a demographic anomaly, as thousands of laid-off workers relocated to the countryside in the hopes of surviving off of the land. This shift from town to country placed new pressure on land that was already stressed from inefficient farming practices, a reliance on soil-depleting cash crops, and soil erosion. When combined with historically low commodity prices and a lack of credit, these conditions made it even more difficult for farm families to survive.

Alabama's industrial sector, centered in the Birmingham District, had expanded in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and its collapse during the Great Depression devastated the state's economy even further. Of nearly 3,000 mines and mills operating in the state in 1929, only half were still in operation in 1933 as an abrupt decline in national demand and international trade led to a drop in production. Employment in iron and steel industries fell by 28 percent from 1929 to 1931. Of 100,000 wage and salaried workers in Birmingham, 25,000 were jobless, 60,000 were working part time, and only about 15,000 were working full time by June 1932-an unemployment rate of 25 percent. When city leaders announced that 100,000 people in Birmingham (out of a total population of 260,000 or nearly 40 percent) received some kind of economic aid in 1934, Pres. Roosevelt called the city the "worst hit town in the country."

The general economic decline of the 1920s and the Depression also affected the textile industry. Several mills shuttered in the face of economic hardship. Huntsville's Dallas Mill, for instance, went from a profit of almost $800,000 in 1920 to losses of almost $280,000 just a decade later. Nevertheless, Alabama's textile industry weathered the Depression better than iron and steel, timber, or mining. Mill owners proved remarkably resilient in the face of the economic downturn; they cut workers' pay, lengthened hours, and took advantage of increasing unemployment to hire men, women, and children willing to work for very low wages. Between 1929 and 1935, textile mills lost only 4,300 jobs, and then recovered dramatically after 1936 to outpace other state industries. The greatest challenge to textiles during the 1930s was not the Depression itself, but a massive strike that began in Gadsden in 1934 and spread to mills across the East Coast as workers protested mill owners' efforts to avoid new regulations put in place during the New Deal.

Poverty and Relief in Alabama's Cities

At first, state leaders struggled to address the rapidly declining economy. Without a federal directive to provide assistance, without a precedent for such hardship, and with rapidly declining government funds, state and local governments relied largely on relief administered by religious and charity organizations. Across the state, church groups established food pantries, clothing distribution programs, and job-referral services, though the latter failed when officials were unable to find work for applicants.

During the Depression, relief payments were much more prevalent among urban families, who were more likely to live in proximity to privately run or church-affiliated aid centers and less likely to be as self-sufficient in terms of food or clothing as rural inhabitants. No Alabama city suffered as much as Birmingham. Services, both private and public, were stretched by the starving, sick, homeless, and unemployed. Birmingham's business and civic leaders formed a local version of the nationwide Community Chest, which worked in conjunction with the Red Cross to raise money and distribute aid to destitute families. The sheer amount of need quickly swamped local relief agencies, forcing the Community Chest to run at a near-constant deficit.

Although Birmingham became a national symbol of urban suffering, both Mobile and Montgomery experienced hardships as well. In Mobile, traffic declined at the port, leading to shortages across the city. As retail sales and trade fell by tens of millions of dollars, about 10 percent of adults in the city were on relief and city services shrank. In Montgomery, defense employment at Maxwell Field (now Maxwell Air Force Base) buoyed the city, but residents cut spending, particularly on unnecessary items. Throughout the state, cities and counties often paid teachers and other government workers in IOUs and "warrants," slips of paper that were supposed to be redeemable for cash once the economy improved. Many doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were paid with food, goods, and labor.

State Responses and Outcomes

Notions of government thrift played an important role in the 1930 election of Benjamin Meek Miller as governor. Miller promised to reign in government spending in the state (his nickname was "Old Economy"), but once he took office, he found that the worsening Depression combined with a failure of voluntary assistance placed new demands on the state treasury. With declining income, unpaid teachers threatened to strike, and the governor implemented a state income tax, borrowed nearly $500,000 to fund relief efforts, and backed legislation to raise borrowing limits, but his efforts fell short, and many localities closed schools or reduced hours. In hopes of reducing costs, Miller, a committed prohibitionist, also disbanded the state's Law Enforcement Department, whose main task was upholding Prohibition. This indifference, combined with a nationwide push to repeal Prohibition as a means of answering the Depression, led Alabama to join the rest of the nation in approving the 21st Amendment in 1933. Miller also took the first steps to establish the Alabama Relief Administration (ARA), a state-run public relief agency that played an important role in distributing New Deal money. Yet the benefits of state relief were limited in the early 1930s; the ARA often favored non-union, skilled laborers and disregarded working-class and poor white and black Alabamians as undeserving of funds. These people, in turn, sought relief among their families and communities and, increasingly, from the federal government, particularly the provisions of New Deal agencies. Pres. Roosevelt often had to encourage Miller to spend more of the money the state received for aid.

Most Alabamians looked to Miller and later Roosevelt for help, but a few sought out unconventional political solutions. In 1930, the American Communist Party established a branch in Birmingham and found a receptive audience for more radical changes to the failing economy. The group published a newsletter called the Southern Worker that was aimed at the agricultural and industrial workers of the South and established connections with organized labor in the city's mines and mills and with marginalized farmers in the surrounding countryside. In response to the growing Communist presence and labor unrest in the mills and fields, Birmingham passed an "anti-sedition" law that punished citizens who were critical of the American government and employed a "red squad" of police officers tasked with rooting out Communist sympathizers. Joseph Gelders, a physics professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, and a well-known advocate of workers' rights and civil liberties, was kidnapped and beaten for supposed connections to the party during the minor "red scare" that followed. Although not as extensive as the panics of 1919 and the 1950s, the Depression-era scare resulted in a number of arrests, acts of violence, and a notable increase in the activity of the Ku Klux Klan, which saw a minor resurgence on anti-labor and anti-Communist rhetoric.

Faced with such hostility, the party focused much of its efforts on the countryside. Organizers assisted poor farmers in the creation of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union (ASU) to speak out against unfair contracts and mistreatment. Although a relatively small organization, the ASU was a powerful voice for those suffering under the grinding poverty of Depression-era agriculture, particularly for African American farmers, and it clashed on numerous occasions with landowners, who were almost exclusively white. Despite sometimes violent persecution, ASU members led successful strikes in many areas of Alabama's Black Belt, succeeding in raising wages for farm laborers and gaining higher prices for cotton. The Communist-backed International Labor Defense Fund, which initially arrived in Alabama to represent the city's workers, gained recognition for defending nine young black men in the infamous Scottsboro trials.

Beginning in 1933, the arrival of New Deal programs alleviated some of the worst aspects of the Depression. Just as importantly, New Deal programs continued the political and social dislocations begun during the Depression. In 1934, Alabama voters returned to office former governor and notable progressive David Bibb Graves, who became the face of the state's efforts to combat the economic crisis. Graves also signaled an important political change as populist Democrats focused their efforts on economic improvement, even if that meant limited cooperation with federal policies and fewer appeals to white supremacy. In a state and region where poverty was a fact of life for many, even during times of national prosperity, the Great Depression brought national attention to the plight of many Alabamians and forced the state's leaders to play a greater role in providing for the many less fortunate.

Alabama's economy began to recover only after the advent of the World War II defense buildup, though the effects of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the war caused major changes and dislocations. Agriculture shifted from small farms and tenancy to fewer and larger farms, wage laborers, and mechanization. The number of tenants decreased sharply because of the availability of good-paying war work, even as mechanization increased as a result of New Deal subsidy payments and industrialization. Wartime plants and facilities in Huntsville, Gadsden, and Childersburg, and increased demand for iron and steel from Birmingham and ships from Mobile led to an employment boom as many Alabamians migrated from field to factory. Huntsville saw employment skyrocket from 133 total workers in 1939 to more than 11,000 in just five years at its two arsenals and ordnance depot alone. By 1940, the state's unemployment rate had dropped to 6.6 percent, a combination of defense employment, holdover employment on public relief, and incentives for aging workers to retire. Even Birmingham, the "hardest hit" city, had reduced unemployment to a manageable 10.9 percent. As the state joined the national defense effort, the economic effects of the Depression began to recede, even as its political, social, and personal legacy continued to shape the lives of Alabamians for years to come.
Additional Resources
Brown, James Seay Jr., ed. Up Before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers' Project, 1938-1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982.

Flynt, Wayne. Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Kelly, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Forest RestorationThe Great Depression was a sustained, national economic recession that shaped the lives of all Alabamians. Although the U.S. stock market crash of October 1929 is often seen as the beginning of the Great Depression, in Alabama and elsewhere, the crash exacerbated an already existing decline in agriculture that had begun much earlier in the decade and spread statewide to cities and industries thereafter.

# data[].attributes.body
To kill a Mockingbrid was set in Alabama. This link reiterates on what it was like in Alabama during this period. Images and further historic information is provided below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When compared to living in today's society, the 1930s was a much simpler time. Listed below is an interesting collection of rare photos. These 12 photos take us back to 1935, showing us how the people of this great state lived. The original captions are included with each photo.

What do you think about these vintage photos of Alabama? Can you or any of your family members recall what life was like in 1935? If so, share your experiences with us in the comments below!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Is What Life In Alabama Looked Like In 1935. Wow!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When compared to living in today's society, the 1930s was a much simpler time. Listed below is an interesting collection of rare photos. These 12 photos take us back to 1935, showing us how the people of this great state lived. The original captions are included with each photo.

# data[].attributes.body
I

# data[].attributes.body
Lyndal's Input

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What are the conditions of Alabama in 1935 and why is this information significant to the plot of "To Kill a Mockingbird"? | eNotes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get an answer for 'What are the conditions of Alabama in 1935 and why is this information significant to the plot of "To Kill a Mockingbird"?' and find homework help for other To Kill a Mockingbird questions at eNotes