Conversations with Garrett Lane and Fred Fluker, whose roots in rural Alabama community newspaper efforts inspired their careers in journalism and media — and a shared hopefulness about journalism being produced by the PACERS Network today. What drives “regular citizens” to start newspapers from scratch in their own hometowns? What can media professionals learn from these citizen journalists? And what do we need to do to ensure these labor-of-love newspapers stick around long-term in our communities?
Conversations with Jean Mosley and Cameron Brooks of Tallapoosa County, Alabama, one-time partners in publication of the Camp Hill Chronicle. Community newspapers don’t just bring their readers together; often, they bring together staffers from vastly different ages, races, and backgrounds. Case in point: For two years, Brooks, a high school student, helped put together the Camp Hill Chronicle with Mosley, a retired librarian and the paper’s octogenarian publisher.
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Conversations with scholars George Daniels (University of Alabama) and Nan Fairley (Auburn University) about today’s media climate and the state of citizen journalism. Thank goodness that not all newspapers are dead. Community-minded newspapers are often the only journalism outlets covering local stories and local issues. They’re also the only outlets “rendering lives in full” — documenting the lives of neighbors from birth announcements and graduations to marriages and obituaries.
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A conversation with Mary and Freddie Howard of Monroe County, Alabama, publishers of The Beatrice Legacy. Here in Beatrice, as Mary Howard notes, Black people still mostly live on one side of the railroad tracks; White people on the other. Can a community newspaper successfully serve as a bridge between oft-divided townspeople?
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A conversation with Gary and Jerrie Burton of Montgomery County, Alabama, publishers of a community-based newspaper, The Pintlala Ledger. Can citizen journalism restore goodwill between neighbors and bring a community together? And what does a community lose when there’s no local news source — and, thus, no historical record preserved?
Read the paper that inspired this conversation:
The Pintlala Ledger
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A conversation with Arnee Odoms, Alabama coordinator of Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering rural, small, and predominantly Black communities – not just on Election Day, but to engage in broader civic participation. Founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright both spent their formative years in Selma. How did life in a cradle of the Civil Rights Movement inspire their work? And what does Odoms think is the future of the electoral process in Alabama?
Episode 6 poems:
“Manifest Destiny”
“Reparations Now, Reparations Tomorrow, Reparations Forever — Using Text from George Wallace’s 1963 Inaugural Address and Also from Me”
“Today I Saw a Black Man Open His Arms to the Wind”
Learn more about the voting rights organization whose work inspired this conversation:
Black Voters Matter
A conversation with Karlyn Forner, PhD, author and former project manager of the SNCC Digital Gateway at Duke University Libraries. In the 1960s, the right to vote earned the Black citizens of Selma political empowerment. What it did not deliver was economic clout in equal measure. Today, the fight continues to earn what longtime Selma movement veteran Joanne Bland calls the “good freedom” of jobs, living wages, quality education, sturdy housing, and more.
Episode 5 poem by Ashley M. Jones:
“Who Will Survive in America? Or, 2017: A Horror Film”
Read the book that inspired this conversation:
Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma
By Karlyn Forner
(Duke University Press, 2017)
A conversation with Hasan Kwame Jeffries, PhD, history professor, author, and host of the Teaching Hard History podcast, about the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. As 1965 began, not a single soul among the 5,000 African Americans in Lowndes County were registered to vote. By the end of 1966, the Lowndes County voter rolls included nearly 3,000 African Americans. Learn how the Lowndes County Freedom Organization cracked Jim Crow.
Episode 4 poems by Ashley M. Jones:
“Poem for Revolution for Malcolm, Martin and All the Rest”
“All Y’all Really from Alabama?”
“Poem in Which I am Too Political to Read at Your School”
Read the book that inspired this conversation:
Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt
By Hasan Kwame Jeffries
(NYU Press, 2009)
A conversation with Scotty Kirkland, coordinator of exhibits, publications and programs at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black voting rights activists developed legal strategies to challenge Jim Crow in court. But white supremacists had their own countertactics. The Boswell Amendment to the Alabama Constitution was one of the most infamous – a nebulous “education requirement” approved by Alabama voters in 1946 to sidestep U.S. law and disenfranchise Black citizens.
Episode 3 poems by Ashley M. Jones:
“There is a Bell at Morehouse College”
“Redlining”
Read the article that inspired this conversation:
“Freedom on Trial: NAACP v. Alabama,” Alabama Heritage Magazine (Issue 121, Summer 2016)
By Scotty Kirkland
A conversation with Bryan K. Fair, JD, professor at The University of Alabama School of Law, on the life and legacy of W.C. Patton. Patton’s guiding philosophy: He could only ask more of his government if he participated in democracy to the fullest extent himself. That vision led him to hold voter registration drives in rural Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s, before becoming state president of the NAACP and, later, its national director of voter education.
Episode 2 poems by Ashley M. Jones:
“Rammer Jammer”
“Addie, Carol, Cynthia, Denise”
“Birmingham Fire and Rescue Haiku, 1963”
“Viewing a KKK Uniform at the Civil Rights Institute”
Watch the documentary that inspired this conversation:
I Shall Not be Moved: The Legacy of W.C. Patton
Produced by The University of Alabama Center for Public Television (1995)
