Newsroom Category: Alabama Humanities Honors

Brittany Howard, Jason Isbell: AL Humanities Fellows

Huntsville / April 18, 2024 — Grammy-winning musicians and north Alabama natives Brittany Howard and Jason Isbell will soon receive the highest humanities honor bestowed in their home state.

On August 26 in Huntsville, the Alabama Humanities Alliance (AHA) will recognize Howard and Isbell as Alabama Humanities Fellows. This ticketed event at the Von Braun Center will feature an in-depth conversation between the duo, and each honoree will perform a song for the occasion. Proceeds benefit AHA’s public humanities programming statewide.

Tickets are now on sale via the Von Braun Center (in person) and Ticketmaster (online). You can also learn more about the event at alabamahumanities.org/honors.

 

About the honorees

Howard and Isbell share deep roots in north Alabama — Howard in Athens, Isbell in Green Hill and Muscle Shoals. And the two are among the most acclaimed artists of their generation, with a combined 11 Grammy Awards between them.

They’ll be joining good company as Alabama Humanities Fellows. Past honorees include the likes of Imani Perry, Bryan Stevenson, Howell Raines, Fred Gray, E.O. Wilson, Harper Lee, Kathryn Tucker Windham, W. Kamau Bell, and Wayne Flynt.

While Howard and Isbell are, of course, impeccable musicians, it is their great talent as songwriters and storytellers that makes them Alabama Humanities Fellows. They adroitly weave key elements of the humanities — history, literature, and philosophy — into their songs.

“Brittany Howard and Jason Isbell use their lyrics and their lives to examine what it means to be human — and they challenge all of us to see the humanity in each other,” says Chuck Holmes, executive director of the Alabama Humanities Alliance, “Their lyrics require us to think, and to bring the same level of curiosity and empathy to our own lives.”

The August 26 event honoring Howard and Isbell is part of the Alabama Colloquium series and presented by the Alabama Humanities Alliance, which is celebrating 50 years of storytelling in 2024. All proceeds from the event support AHA programming that helps Alabamians connect with each other, our shared history, and the vibrant, complex communities we call home. 

 

Event details: 

The highlight of the event will feature an in-depth conversation between Howard and Isbell. The honorees will receive their awards from another legendary north Alabama musician-songwriter, Muscle Shoals native Patterson Hood, co-founder of the Drive-By Truckers.

Hood has personal connections with each honoree. In the early 2000s, Isbell was a member of the Drive-By Truckers. In 2011, Hood heard Howard and her original band, the Alabama Shakes, play at a bar in Florence, Alabama; Hood invited them to open a series of shows for the Drive-By Truckers, helping to introduce Howard and the Alabama Shakes to a larger audience.

 

About the Alabama Humanities Alliance
Founded 50 years ago, in 1974, the nonprofit and nonpartisan Alabama Humanities Alliance serves as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. AHA promotes impactful storytelling, lifelong learning and civic engagement. Through our programs and grantmaking, we provide Alabamians with opportunities to connect with each other, with our shared history, and with the vibrant and complex communities we call home. Learn more at alabamahumanities.org.

About the Alabama Colloquium
Each year, the Alabama Humanities Alliance presents the Alabama Colloquium to celebrate how the humanities lift up our state and bring Alabamians together. We also bestow the title of Alabama Humanities Fellow on individuals whose outstanding work in the humanities has positively impacted our state, nation, and world. In 2024, AHA will present two Colloquium events. The first, in Huntsville on August 26, will honor Brittany Howard and Jason Isbell. The second, in Birmingham, will take place December 2 and feature another pair of honorees to be announced this summer.

Perry, Mathews honored as Humanities Fellows

BIRMINGHAM / October 24, 2023 — Amidst an era of divisiveness and disinformation, the Alabama Humanities Alliance’s 2023 Alabama Colloquium shined a spotlight on how the humanities can build community and offer truth and healing through honest, shared explorations of the past. For proof of that, look no further than this year’s newly named Alabama Humanities Fellows, Imani Perry, Ph.D., and David Mathews, Ph.D.

Perry and Mathews were honored before a sold-out gathering at the Grand Bohemian Hotel, where the historian-author-scholar duo shared stories from their careers and the impact Alabama has had on their work.

Dr. Perry was introduced by Odessa Woolfolk, a 1997 Fellow and an icon in Birmingham for her role as an educator, activist, and as founding president of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and as co-founder of Leadership Alabama.

During her presentation, Woolfolk noted that, “Dr. Perry has said ‘writing can be a moral instrument if it asks us to do more than read.’ South to America should inspire its readers to do something for the betterment of America. Perhaps, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, there is a lot of good trouble, necessary trouble to be had right here in Birmingham and in our country. Just a thought.”

Dr. Mathews was introduced by Catherine Randall, Ph.D., co-founder and chair emerita of the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, as well as a five-time graduate of the University of Alabama.

“Today, David Mathews is receiving the highest humanities honor in the state because he sees diverse communities, rich cultures, and fellow neighbors more clearly and with more empathy,” Randall said. “He provides context that helps us better understand our past and our present…His scholarship and public service in pursuit of community-building and deliberative democracy represent the best of the humanities.”

 

Fellows in conversation

During their on-stage conversation, Mathews and Perry talked at great length about community and how the past informs our present.

“The word ‘community’ originally meant to share with or to care with,” Mathews noted. “Every word carries with it a history and that word’s history carries a recognition by our most ancient ancestors that to survive — just to stay alive — required different people to come together, beyond just family.”

“Part of the difficulty with listening is people are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, which is actually a necessary part of being in respectful community,” Perry added. “At minimum, what’s required is for people to get comfortable with hearing things that might be unsettling and actually examine why it feels unsettling — to sit with the discomfort.”=

At the end of the event, each honoree was asked what it meant to return home to Alabama and receive this honor.

“It means the world to me,” Perry responded. “I have traveled far and been educated at lots of fancy places, but everything that I have carried with me that has enabled me to move with integrity and diligence and rigor and deep love of people — which is at the heart of the humanities — comes from this soil and my family. This means so much. There’s nothing in the world like being celebrated at home.”

Mathews ended his remarks with some levity, leaving the room in laughter. “A lot of people think I’m crazy,” he said with a smile. “But thanks to this award, they cannot prove it.”

The event was moderated by journalist Priska Neely, managing editor of the Gulf States Newsroom, an innovative collaboration among National Public Radio and member stations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Neely filled in at the last second for planned moderator Kaitlan Collins, the CNN anchor and Alabama native who was sent on assignment to cover the ongoing war in the Middle East.

Collins sent a taped message to the Colloquium crowd that included her congratulations to Perry and Mathews: “You have both done such important work not only in exploring our past, but to also see how our past can be used to bring communities together and having those really important conversations that are so vital for our state.”

Other honorees recognized at the 2023 Alabama Colloquium included:

The Alabama Humanities Alliance also unveiled two new ways to engage with its work:

Healing History

Following the Colloquium, AHA offered a limited-capacity listening tour of Wallace House, run by our partners at the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. Built in 1841, in Harpersville, the Wallace House was once part of a 5,000-acre cotton plantation, which was worked by nearly 100 enslaved people.

Today, descendants of the home’s White landowners and enslaved Black population work together to examine their shared history and create a space for mutual understanding and reconciliation. Tour participants visited with those descendants as they shared their stories, and their hopes for the future. The tour also offered a chance to explore family exhibits and experience an open-air sculpture, Bearing Witness: Praise House, that evokes the spiritual practices of those once enslaved on the plantation.

Watch an AHA-funded video about the work underway at Wallace House.

AHA is focused on Healing History because its impact is needed urgently in our communities, and because it offers great hope for our future. As AHA’s Healing History coordinator Kathy Boswell shared:

“One of the best things about sharing history is being able to sit down and have those conversations through love, first of all. To speak from the heart and learn through the heart. To speak from curiosity and learn through curiosity, through humility. And, especially, to share and learn through willingness. Because what willingness means is, ‘I’ve left behind all the doubt, the fear, the shame, the concerns. And what I’m willing to do is, is to have the courage to raise my hand and say I’m in.’” 

 

About AHA’s 2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows

Imani Perry, a Birmingham native, is a scholar of law, literature, history, and cultural studies, as well as a creative nonfiction author. In 2022, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. She was also recently received the MacArthur Fellow “genius grant.”

Perry has written five other books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which won the 2019 PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

Perry is a professor in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. She has bachelor’s degrees from Yale in American studies and literature, along with two terminal degrees from Harvard — a J.D. and a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization. Outside of academia, Perry is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where she pens a weekly newsletter that frequently reckons with the past, “Unsettled Territory.”

David Mathews, a Grove Hill native, has dedicated his life to building community and promoting democracy. Mathews earned an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. Returning to UA, Mathews both taught history and made it. He served as a history professor from 1965-1980, became the youngest president of a major university when he began his UA tenure at age 33, and presided over the integration of the Crimson Tide’s football program under Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.

Mathews also served as U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in President Gerald Ford’s administration, where he worked on restoring public confidence in government. And he spent four decades as president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation, focusing the nonprofit’s work on engaging citizens in the democratic process.

Mathews’ legacy is evidenced in Alabama at the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, which seeks to strengthen civic engagement statewide. While president at UA, he also played a significant role — along with his counterpart at Auburn, Harry Philpott — in helping to found what is now the Alabama Humanities Alliance.

 

About the Alabama Humanities Alliance

Founded in 1974, the nonprofit Alabama Humanities Alliance serves as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Through our grantmaking and public programming, we connect Alabamians to impactful storytelling, lifelong learning, and civic engagement. We believe the humanities can bring our communities together and help us all see each other as fully human. Learn more at alabamahumanities.org.

 

2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows announced

BIRMINGHAM / August 16, 2023 — A pair of Alabama natives, widely acclaimed for their insights into American history and democracy, will return home this fall to be celebrated as 2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows.

On October 23, the Alabama Humanities Alliance (AHA) will honor Imani Perry, Ph.D., and David Mathews, Ph.D., at the Alabama Colloquium, presented by Regions. The highlight of the event will feature CNN anchor and Prattville native Kaitlan Collins in a wide-ranging conversation with the honorees. The conversation will explore how examining our past can offer healing and strength for Alabama’s communities today.

The Alabama Colloquium annually offers a chance to celebrate the humanities’ impact in Alabama, honor individuals who use the humanities to make our state and nation a better place to live, and raise funds to support AHA’s statewide programming.

Following the event, AHA will offer a limited-capacity listening tour of Wallace House, in Shelby County. Built in 1841, the Wallace House was once part of a 5,000-acre cotton plantation, which was worked by nearly 100 enslaved people. Today, descendants of the home’s White landowners and enslaved Black population work together to examine their shared history and create a space for mutual understanding and reconciliation.

 

EVENT DETAILS

 

ABOUT THE HONOREES
Imani Perry, a Birmingham native, is a scholar of law, literature, history, and cultural studies, as well as a creative nonfiction author. In 2022, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.

Perry has written five other books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which won the 2019 PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

Perry is a professor in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. She has bachelor’s degrees from Yale in American studies and literature, along with two terminal degrees from Harvard — a J.D. and a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization. Outside of academia, Perry is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where she pens a weekly newsletter that frequently reckons with the past, “Unsettled Territory.”

David Mathews, a Grove Hill native, has dedicated his life to building community and promoting democracy. Mathews earned an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. Returning to UA, Mathews both taught history and made it. He served as a history professor from 1965-1980, became the youngest president of a major university when he began his UA tenure at age 33, and presided over the integration of the Crimson Tide’s football program under Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.

Mathews also served as U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in President Gerald Ford’s administration, where he worked on restoring public confidence in government. And he spent four decades as president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation, focusing the nonprofit’s work on engaging citizens in the democratic process.

Mathews’ legacy is evidenced in Alabama at the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, which seeks to strengthen civic engagement statewide.

 

ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Kaitlan Collins, a Prattville native, is a journalist and anchor of CNN’s primetime show, “The Source with Kaitlan Collins.” Previously, Collins was co-anchor and chief correspondent of “CNN This Morning.” Prior to that, she served as CNN’s chief White House correspondent, based in Washington, D.C.

Collins earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and political science from the University of Alabama.

 

About the Alabama Humanities Alliance
Founded in 1974, the nonprofit Alabama Humanities Alliance serves as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. AHA promotes impactful storytelling, lifelong learning and civic engagement. We provide Alabamians with opportunities to connect with our shared cultures and to see each other as fully human. Through our grantmaking, we help scholars, communities and cultural nonprofits create humanities-rich projects that are accessible to all Alabamians — from literary festivals and documentary films to museum exhibitions and research collections. Learn more at alabamahumanities.org.

Bryan Stevenson, John Lewis named Alabama Humanities Fellows

March 7, 2022 — Last week, the Alabama Humanities Alliance honored two new Alabama Humanities Fellows: Bryan Stevenson (pictured, above left), founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and American statesman. The Alabama Colloquium — presented by Regions Bank and the Montgomery County Commission — featured a conversation between Stevenson and NPR’s Michel Martin (pictured, above right), plus a tribute to the life and legacy of Rep. Lewis. Alabama’s new poet laureate, Ashley M. Jones, shared an original poem written in honor of both new Fellows.

In her conversation with Stevenson, Martin asked if the Montgomery-based attorney saw any parallels between his work and the current war in Ukraine. Stevenson’s EJI focuses on human rights, particularly for incarcerated individuals, and the EJI’s recently opened Legacy Museum traces racial injustice in America from enslavement to mass incarceration. Stevenson said he sees a thru-line between how most state-backed violence and bigotry develop — from the American South’s Jim Crow laws to mass incarceration and to the impetus for invasions such as Russia’s into Ukraine.

“Much of my work is a response to what I call the politics of fear and anger,” Stevenson said. “I believe that when you allow yourself to be governed by fear and anger, you tolerate things you should never tolerate. You accept things you should never accept…The only way that bigotry, the only way that violence, the only way that discrimination prevails is when we feel too afraid or too angry to do the things we’re supposed to do…We will tolerate abuse of people if we allow fear to keep us silent, or if we allow anger about our own issues to keep us indifferent.”

Stevenson noted that the humanities — which include an appreciation of history, law, ethics, and civic engagement — can help people overcome fear and anger, as well as misinformation and manipulation. There are a lot of false narratives in our world today, Stevenson said, “that allow people to not confront difficult truths.”

“That’s why truth-telling is so important in how we learn about our past. If you don’t hear the truth, you become vulnerable to manipulations,” he added. “I’m not naïve enough to believe that every time we tell the truth beautiful things happen. But I am persuaded that when we don’t tell the truth we deny ourselves the beauty that is justice.”

The Hon. Myron H. Thompson, in his tribute to John Lewis, recalled how he watched Lewis embrace and forgive former Alabama Gov. John Patterson, the governor who defended segregation in Alabama and led law enforcement’s violent response to nonviolent marchers in the 1950s and 1960s — protestors including a young John Lewis.

“John Lewis’ capacity for forgiveness, for clemency — his ability to take his biggest enemy into his arms and say, ‘I forgive you’ — was beyond measure,” Judge Thompson said. “The only thing that was greater than his ability to forgive was his ability not to forget. The two go hand in hand. I think what he was saying is that hate saps us of our energy to move forward and do the right thing.”

Seven members of Lewis’ family attended the Alabama Colloquium and accepted Lewis’ Alabama Humanities Fellow honor on his behalf. Those family members included Rep. Lewis’ youngest brother, Henry. “They often called my brother — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. always did — the ‘boy from Troy,” Henry Lewis remembered. “I think my brother should have been called The Forgiver. Because he had this uncanny ability to forgive people for the most grievous things that they could do…and he did it because he believed hatred is too heavy a burden to bear.”

An emotional highlight of the Colloquium came when Ashley M. Jones, Alabama’s poet laureate, delivered “Freedom Sermon — Alabama USA,” an original poem in honor of Lewis and Stevenson.

“When we think about the story of this nation, we have to know that the movements that keep us moving toward liberation for all people often begin in the South — often, in Alabama,” Jones said. “This place is full of the spirit that moved in the late John Lewis. It moves now in Bryan Stevenson. And I hope that spirit continues to move as we enter new decades of struggle, of challenges here and abroad, and of what I hope is our shared desire to see this world truly become equitable.”

 

ADDITIONAL HONOREES

Greenhaw Service to the Humanities Awardee: Trey Granger
“We really are an Alliance now, an Alliance that acts as a prism for all the wonderful things that happen culturally across this great state…that prism, through this Alliance, really helps us understand who we are as Alabamians.”
—Trey Granger, deputy clerk of court, U.S. District Court
Immediate Past Chair, AHA Board of Directors

Greenhaw Service to the Humanities Awardee: Hon. Sally Greenhaw
“Just to be on the same program honoring John Lewis and Bryan Stevenson, that in itself is an honor. These two gentlemen embody not only the best of what the humanities are, but what the humanities can be.”
—Sally Greenhaw, Circuit Judge (retired), Montgomery County
Former AHA board member (2014-2021)

Charitable Organization in the Humanities Award: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama
“The mission of our Caring Foundation is to give back to communities by supporting initiatives that support the health, wellness, and education of all Alabamians. We’re proud to support the Alabama Humanities Alliance and its efforts to provide Alabamians with opportunities for lifelong learning, appreciation for our diverse cultures, and connections with communities around our state.”
—Rebekah Elgin-Council, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama

 

About the Alabama Humanities Alliance
Founded in 1974, the Alabama Humanities Alliance is a nonprofit that serves as the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. AHA promotes impactful storytelling, lifelong learning and civic engagement. We provide Alabamians with opportunities to connect with our shared cultures and to see each other as fully human. Through our grantmaking, we help scholars, communities and cultural nonprofits create humanities-based projects that are accessible to all Alabamians — from literary festivals and documentary films to museum exhibitions and research collections. Learn more at alabamahumanities.org.

 

About Alabama Humanities Fellows
The Alabama Humanities Alliance bestows its highest honor to Alabamians who make the state a smarter, kinder, more vibrant place to live — all through the humanities. The recognition highlights those who explore what it means to be human, provide context for our past and our present, and help Alabamians see our fellow neighbors more clearly, and with more empathy. Since 1989, the Alabama Humanities Alliance has honored writers, scholars, community leaders, storytellers, and more. Some past recipients include W. Kamau Bell, Wayne Flynt, Fred Gray, Cynthia Tucker, Harper Lee, Howell Raines, Judge Myron Thompson, E.O. Wilson, Odessa Woolfolk, and Kathryn Tucker Windham. alabamahumanities.org/about/alabama-humanities-honors