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good evening how's everyone this evening it's wonderful to see such a large crowd for this presentation tonight we're so delighted to welcome you to Wallace Community College my name is Ashley Wilkins and I'm the Dean of institutional services and community development at the college and I bring you both greetings and apologies from dr. young she wishes she could be here but she has the flu so we're delighted she didn't join us to share that bug with us but she does sends her regrets and asked me to welcome you on behalf of our president tonight we are here for a very exciting event and we're pleased to have you on our campus for this grant project that is funded in part through the Alabama humanities foundation tonight we are honored to have dr. Wayne Flint distinguished University professor emeritus at Auburn University as our keynote speaker this humanities program is designed to pay tribute to the businesses and industries that have shaped eufaula since the turn of the 20th century and also to look ahead at what's to come so we're honoring the past investment and we're looking forward to the future as a comprehensive Community College we at Wallace are devoted to our students and to providing them with educational opportunities so that they can contribute to the economic health and quality of life and you follow in the greater region we actively seek ways to provide hands-on learning opportunities whether it's in career technical programs or in an academic course this project tonight represents one of the many ways that our faculty and staff work collaboratively to promote multidisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning as I mentioned a moment ago this project is funded in part by the Alabama humanities foundation it's also funded in part by the sparks campus foundation we are so appreciative of their advocacy and their support and I'd like to take a moment and introduce those who are here would you please stand Albert Adams and remain standing please ring quite Shane seaburn Bob Dixon and Mary Floyd Kirkland can we please give them a round of applause again we'd like to thank you for being here tonight and we hope that you will revisit us soon the college has so many activities and events and we welcome you back anytime again on behalf of dr. young welcome and now I'd like to turn the program over to miss Amy raspberry who is the project director and an accounting instructor of the college good evening good evening it is a pleasure to introduce this humanities program on the sparks Cape us tonight we are grateful to the Alabama humanities foundation for funding support I would like to say a special thank you to those who provided pictures artifacts a special thanks to the Wallace committee who worked tirelessly on this project to dr. Marty Olaf and mr. Doug herself for their constant help and encouragement the humanities include the stories people tell the art and music they make the building's they live in and work in in short the humanities include all of those things that make us human and more humane the subjects that make up the humanities history music art languages philosophy religion and literature do not merely provide a record of human civilization they provide an interpretation or a way of looking at events in the past the traveling exhibition entitled a local history of eufaula where have we been and where are we going contains photo panels and artifacts to chronicle you fall as economic history from 1900 to present day it will provide a stroll down memory lane illustrating you follows resilience as we travel visually through time it is our hope that you not only will learn how people lived in earlier times and made their living and how our community lived in made them the people they were but will gain more insight into the community we live in now and how this community makes us the kind of people we are we hope that you'll be enlightened as we revisit and remember the past those economic challenges but also our successes of eufaula and we look towards and envision our future after the initial exhibition on the sparks campus the panels will travel a circuit which includes venues in eufaula and open our expectation is to share this event with over 2,500 people while its Community College is pleased to welcome our lecture tonight dr. Wayne Flint professor emeritus at Auburn University dr. Flint grew up primarily in Alabama and graduated from anniston high school in 1958 he attended Stanford University as a ministerial student where he double majored in history and speech he received his PhD in American history from florida state university in 1965 three of dr. Flint's thirteen books or bride surveys of alabama history including two of his most acclaimed poor but proud Alabama's poor whites and Alabama in the 20th century following dr. Flint's discussion panelists for the evening include mr. billy houston mr. J Jackson and mr. Doug Purcell and now it is with great pleasure that I introduce and turn the microphone over to dr. Wayne Flint thank you Amy if it won't bother you too much i'm going to spend most of my time out here so instead of thinking of me is lecturing to you it will perhaps bring you into the conversation more and if you think of it is sort of a conversation i think it would be a lot better first of all i want to thank Kay and Amy because I've never seen a project that has unfolded as well as this one has and the levels of importance here first of all the oral history collection so that people who are local can tell their own stories so that you can both know those stories and preserve those stories for your children and grandchildren because the ability to preserve them is to some degree the key to how you survive as a town people sometimes staying in town even when their heads tell them they'll go elsewhere because their hearts are treated in that place so that for instance when people tell me they wished if I didn't like Alabama I to leave it I tell them I like it okay my people have been here seven generations and so why don't you get out because you came later than idea so I intend to stay and then because i love it because my heart is here and the stories are hear the stories of my family so you have those stories now second thing the panels I think k and Amy have a lot to do with the panel's I just want to say that there must be a sense of clairvoyance here I know there's something in the water that makes everybody in monroeville write books and and maybe here in in eufaula it's your capacity to think exactly like I do about what's important because separately i was writing this lecture while Amy and K were doing the panelists and and Amy send me the panels I said it's incredible the virtually everything on those panels is something i'm going to say here which means that i could just stay home and you could just look at the panels and you'd be fine in addition to that i want to say a word or two about the town of you follow i don't know how many times i've been here but lots and at least once every month or two when Louise Connor was a lie my wife and I would drive over and we would take her to her favorite soul food restaurant in lumpkin Georgia and have turnip greens and sweet potato casserole and cornbread and actually they served buttermilk which is my bottom line for a good soul food restaurant she liked it too so we we fell in love with Louise so you have this great presence in our life and you may know or not know that the novel now lost that Harper Lee wrote on the Reverend which was a gruesome murder in alexander city she actually finished at louies Connors dining table here and you follow and I don't know what happened to it hopefully someday we will because Louie said it was better than in cold blood our tequila Mockingbird which is saying a whole lot so this is really a special place I think it's the most beautiful town in Alabama and if I were just reinventing myself to go to one place and live it would be here and Doug Purcell and all of you've done such a great job with historic preservation and I'm going to talk about that at the end I'm gonna do this in four parts 1 i'm going to talk about King Cotton because that's what made you in the first place secondly i'm going to talk about your ability to adapt to a new world aborning and that's the textile industry and you'll have to help me here cow ikki mill kayaking man guy Aggie Aggie all right I'm gonna get that right because I've been corrected so many times especially by David alsobrook whose father worked out there so if you don't talk about where my ancestors live say it right I know there are Indians but I don't know how to pronounce it proper I'm also going to talk about the sense of community here which is really special and I'm going to use examples of that then i'm going to talk about your ability to adapt to change and your ability to fight respectably I e431 and happen what happens to the medium and what that tells you from the standpoint of someone from anniston alabama where I grew up and where they cut all the trees down and we lost quintard and it became all businesses we lost all the historic buildings along it and now aniston has nothing to preserve which is a tragedy and i'll get to that too in a minute okay let me go back to start click cotton I brought the book but I'm going to summarize it for you and I know you're going to be glad that I'm going to summarize it for you because it's much too longer long for you to read spin bereket I know that doesn't sound like a name of somebody who would write about cotton right spin bereket he's not from around here in case you wonder he is an economic historian at Harvard he worked for a generation on this book and this is the best book ever written about cotton now if you want to read about cotton in india and the Indus Valley 3,000 years before Christ sets where it all started believe it or not it's Indian and then it goes across the ocean gradually and it winds up in the south so that's the story I want to tell you he says in the first part of this book I'll quotas sentence cotton was the core ingredient of the world's most important manufacturing industry and I know you sort of believe that if you live in barbour county and it's sort of in your blood but after a while you think is that really true or is that just sort of a fiction that my high school history teacher taught me about I important you fall on Barbara are no that's the truth let me summarize some of his evidence by the early part of the 19th century cotton was responsible for one in every sixty five persons who lived on the globe's employment you start off there it's one of every 65 people anywhere in the world either grew it or gendut our warehouse it are transported it our spun it are made something with it in England which was the largest textile manufacturer in the world in the middle of the 19th century one out of every four jobs derived from cotton and one in every ten dollars invested anywhere in the world by brits was invested in cotton sometimes in the south sometimes in Britain sometimes in other countries France had a large textile industry Russia had a large sectional industry the Brits help them develop their industry one out of four jobs in England not only that but by the early part of the 19th century the center for cotton production was not India where they'd begun 3,000 years before Christ it was in the American South three reasons for that number one great soil and I'm going to get to Barbara County and its soil in just a minute number to serve I'll labor cause growing cotton as a nasty business if you don't believe it I'd like for you to listen to my father's oral history or my grandfather's oral history my grandfather was a sharecropper and Calvin County could not read and write and grew cotton my father grew it until he was 18 years old and decided he didn't want to grow any more cotton in his life and so he dropped out of high school never to finish in 1937 and went to work in a steel mill in Birmingham because he was tired a grand cotton so the lineage of this industry in the south is pretty deep and it's based on good land survial labor and easy credit easy credit because there was no industry or agriculture in which you could make more money over a short period of time than growing cotton in the 19th century so British banks knew they were not taking much of a chance when they long money two southerners to buy land and to grow cotton by the time you get to the 1830s when America has 1 million slaves growing cotton and the south is producing forty percent of all exports sold by the United States ice a pretty big number forty percent of all US exports by the 1830s consist of cotton grown in the south furthermore if you want to look at shipping and navigation and shipbuilding the number one port in the United States was new york city number two port was New Orleans the number 34 twas mobile and the number four port are you ready for this apalachicola florida i mean you can't get your head around that if you've been to apalachicola lately right it's doesn't look all that dramatic and you know what it's draining the strain the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers named of course in my honor so the Flint's coming out of Georgia and the Chattahoochee is coming down here and cotton is going south now if you don't believe that cotton is important after what I've told you here's some more evidence by the 1830s and in the 40s 50s 60s same way early 60s if you look at where white wealth exists in America if I were to ask you a question now you'd probably say Connecticut seattle washington state New York City so we're here the states and the rankings of white wealth owned by Americans at a time when one out of every five jobs in the United States depended on cotton and where the value of slaves was 1.3 billion dollars by 1850 and that was one fifth of the entire investment in America all together when fifth of it consists of the value of slaves which tells you something about what's happening the economy state number one South Carolina wealthy estate for whites in the United States state number two of Mississippi State number three Louisiana State number for Florida State number 5 Connecticut State number six alabama state number seven texas right through the south in fact of the top eight states the only outlier is connecticut you know how I Connecticut yes there they manufacture cotton gins and cutting equipment and ships to send it over so basically all eight states that are the wealthiest states for whites depend upon cotton in the 1830s 1840s 1850s during that period of time for instance take the 1850s when cotton production doubles from two million bales in eighteen fifty to four million bales in 1860 doubling in one decade and if you wanted evidence of this go over to West Alabama and just drive through the area that has not changed very much and see the Greek Revival mansions almost every one of which dates from 1852 1860 during the opulent high-water mark of cotton cultivation in Alabama yes in Alabama because whereas the wealth had been centered in other southern states older southern states primarily along with Louisiana and Mississippi by the 1830s by the 1850s it shifted to Alabama because the lens worn out of the eastern seaboard so the center's shifted here start off with a Tennessee Valley and the slaves along the valley and the cotton was shipped on the Tennessee River to the Cumberland River the Ohio River downriver on the Mississippi and shipped out of New Orleans and then gradually after the first Creek war after 1814 they opened the black belt west of the coosa river and the Alabama River and all of a sudden the black belt that you know over there is created in such a Greek war and they open this area and Barbara County becomes a state and 18th County in 1832 and then the this cotton shifts in this direction and the Chattahoochee Valley becomes the conduit for carrying it down to apalachicola by that time if you start with eighteen fifty fifty percent of all US exports we're up now fifty percent of all US exports consist of cotton I'm sorry 1860 and in 1860 of the decade before 1850 Alabama produced twenty-three percent of all cotton exported in the United States so fifty percent of all US e
ports consists of cotton twenty-three percent comes from Alabama most from the black belt Tennessee Valley is completely eclipsed and it's coming from a black belt by 1860 the figure is eighteen percent of all us cotton came from Alabama 1870 fourteen percent of all US Cotton's coming from Alabama so you see our percentage is going down and that's the reason why I now Texas is becoming a major wealthy state because East Texas with very fertile land is beginning to grow lots of cotton and the Mississippi Delta has been opened as well you see the argument the argument is that this county and eufaula were simply sub parts of this vast drama you were one act in this huge play and certainly by the heyday of eufaula and Barbara County it was a cotton producing sugar not in fact the first alabama state geologist eugene smith wrote a description of Barbara County and 18 82 and in fact it's in Matty Thompson's book if you know many Thompson's wonderful book on the history of Barbara County she quotes this report from the US and Alabama and geological surveys and this is what Smith wrote about Barbara County the sandy soil and heavy dew are favorable to the growth of cotton cotton occupies four-fifths of the cultivated land of Barbara County and the height of the stalk is three to four feet the northern part of the county has calcareous soil with a substratum of moral and lime strong southern barbara soils are a bit sandy but are pronounced to be some of the finest cotton lands in the state of Alabama so that's the grand day as a matter of fact there are more than a few Barbour County and so you really feel everything's been downhill since 1865 it was sort of the glory days are back then and you can understand why look at the houses look at the warehouses look at the river think of the romance of this story and think of the old days the glory days of the old regime and it seems really great I would just warn you that there's a downside to every story in history for instance millions and millions of Irishmen and others who came to america in those decades before the Civil War did not settle here whether whether it was good and whether real and was easily acquired and the reason they didn't settle here is because they didn't want to compete with survial labor if you got a labor supply of slaves why would free labor ever want to come here and form because there is such a disadvantage so when people came from Europe to settle in the decades between eighteen hundred and eighteen sixty generally they state north which is the reason at a time when both areas south and north were about equal in population by the Civil War the north is twice as heavily populated as the south because the immigration goes that direction because of the weather and because the labor force they could not compete on the grounds that was the most important grounds economically in the world which was growing cotton so what did they do they manufactured stuff like cotton gins and all sorts of other stuff and I know about Daniel Pratt and prattville but that's an exception to the rule that southerners really had contempt for industrial labor and working inside in factories and you might remember that actually Daniel Pratt was not from these parts he was from up in Vermont so the truth the matter is most of the industrialist in the South were not southern born they just came here to create industry but basically we didn't like industry very much and we thought cotton was King on the eve of the civil war the South thought the South could win the war despite the fact they were outnumbered two to one and much heavier than that if you just count white population and the reason they thought they would win is because the world could not do without southern cotton you know why seventy-seven percent of all the cotton turned into textiles in Britain on the eve of the Civil War came from the south ninety percent of the cotton used in French textile mills came from the south ninety-two percent of the cotton used in Russian textile mills came from the south as you can imagine getting on a boat and mobile and winding up in Russia yep what happened all the time and in friends yep in England especially and the entire Midlands of England was dependent upon cotton so the South's attitude is if we can just hold out long enough the English will have to enter the war on our behalf because we're going to destroy them because the blockade will cut off all their cotton and they won't have a textile industry and will we're for four-fifths of their people work and therefore their people will rise up and say help the south because otherwise we lose our jobs and our economic future well when you gamble big you can lose big and we lost just about as big as you can ever lose when you make a bit based on arrogance and hubris now I was shift altogether we're not going to talk about cotton I'm done with cotton we're going to talk about a sense of community and I want to pick this pic i could pick lots of institutions which have that sense of connectedness but i'm going to pick one that i've written lots about because years ago i was commissioned to write a history of alabama baptist and i know some of you think oh my lord don't tell me we're going to listen about Baptists today well yes you are in another life I was a Baptist minister and I like them a lot and I've had friends who were pastored pastors at First Baptist you follow and so I want to tell you a story about First Baptist you follow and this is the story number one it is one of the most important churches in Antebellum Alabama it has one of the largest sunday schools in any Church of any denomination in the state of Alabama in 1860 it is without question the most important political church in the state of Alabama other than first baptist church in Montgomery the capital which was maybe a little bit more important because all the legislators went to that church when they were there but the city school here was terrific it was very large in an age which most churches didn't even have a cindy skoo it met every sunday in an age in which most churches met only once a month so it's really important church not only that but it has some really important members very powerful members like John Gill shorter I'm sure all of you in the audience know the John go shorter was not only a Baptist but a deacon at first baptist church and a very influential deacon at that I don't know that you knew that about half a congregation of of first baptist church eufaula was african-american and I bet almost none of you knew that almost uniquely among all the Baptist congregation in the state of Alabama in the antebellum period they had a black church conference in a white church conference and the idea was white people won't fool with black people in matters of discipline or anything else and like people won't food with white people in matters of discipline or anything else let me give you an example back in the 1840s there was a pastor at First Baptist you followed by the name of Jonathan Davis who apparently was a stem mining preacher but not too careful with his personal conduct and so in the church minutes which are at Stanford University there is a charge filed against brother Davis which accused him of I won't read this so you don't think I'm making this up immoral intimacy immoral intimacy and when I read that I thought mmm that sounds really interesting for a Baptist preacher this may be more interesting book than I thought it was going to be so I began to do some research on this charge of immoral and as it turns out there is a slave woman who is also a member of you follow first baptist church by the name of the lessee incidentally and almost all Baptists rushing this period if you're a slave you don't have a last name you're just lessee servant of and so you don't have a last name if you're a free black they give you a last name and incidentally you fall I had free black members as well as slave members but Lisa was a slave of a white member of you follow first baptist church and so this immoral intimacy occurred when pastor davis and lee CR out by themselves walking in the oscars of you follow and he is accused and admits to imprudence and indiscretion in conversations walking and talking with we see the slate he is tried by charged by and tried by the white conference and he is found to be guilty of imprudence in indiscretion and so they temporarily dismiss him as pastor and he preaches at different churches during this brief interval of being not pastor of the church until finally they bring the charges up again and by a very close vote he is acquitted and he becomes pastor again now it's very interesting that you remember there are two conferences right there's a black conference in a white Conference well the owner of lessee charges her before the black conference of having immoral intimacy with pastor davis and the black conference tries her and her master reports to the black conference that she has a long tradition of seducing white men apparently that was not a hard thing to do and you follow at the time and since this was a pattern the black conference kicks her out nuclear here the white conference has cleared the pastor of charges which the black conference finds her guilty of and expels her from the congregation the white congregation the white conference then has a median in which they restore him as pastor with leasing now removed from the church until two years later when a delegation from a former pastor in Georgia arrives and you follow first badness to inform them that when he was pastor over in Georgia he was brought before the church for charges of immoral intimacy with a slave woman so apparently this is a pattern at which point the white conference and you follow First Baptist follows the pattern of the black conference and kicks him out of the church I bet you didn't know Baptist well yeah you did now Jo shorter rolling this was not really very significant but all of a sudden he comes on the stage by this time he is now an adult he was a deacon in the church and Johnny Gill shorter it really becomes disturbed because a whole series of really well-trained Baptist ministers come to you follow because they like the town and they like the church and it is one of the most prestigious churches in the deep south but they come here and they say a few years and then they leave because they can't live on the salary y'all paid down here I understand this that was during my Baptist ministerial era that Baptists don't play very well so even school teachers do better than Baptist preachers generally in Alabama so John Hill shorter gets really angry that they're having this parade of really skilled people coming here as pastor and then leaving so Johnny Gill shorter proposes something kind of unique among all babies churches that I studied and I studied hundreds of them in writing the Alabama Baptist book and you follow us so fascinating i made it one of the ten churches that I just follow all the way through history and partly because Johnny o shorter says I think we ought to pay the pastor in a different way because the Deacons have been in charge of raising money and that's been a failure so what I want to do is create a Finance Committee and what the finance committee will do is the first of each year the finance committee will receive an an estimate from each male member of what his net worth is how much money he made something caught in that year and based upon that we will assess him a prorated a share of what it takes to run the church and higher and keep good pastures well you have to really appreciate the hard headedness a Baptist in general and apparently you follow Baptist in particular to be told that you have to tell a Finance Committee how much you're worth and then the Finance Committee based upon what you tell them will then charge you I mean this is not a voluntary tithe right they're saying you're going to give us such an such amount of money based upon the wealth you out so a lot of I'm just men who own cotton land and you fall Baptist Church said I knew it too wish John Gill shorter said that's fine we'll just do it for you will tell you how much we think you're worth it will probably be more than you think you're worth but you have a choice of either telling us or we will tell you and we'll just pro rata will charge you well I don't have to tell you that most of the men began to turn in their own estimate because they didn't want John Gill shorter in the Finance Committee to tell them what they thought they were there for you had the best pastors you can imagine because of the way in which you finance their salary for a decade not only that but you remember the black-and-white conferences and if I had they govern each other separately some really interesting happened because the the blacks were very poor free blacks as well as the slaves of course and so they began to argue that a fairly significant portion of the total revenue raised that you follow should not be spent overseas or on foreign missions or on the building or carpets or whatever but should be spent on poor people within the congregation and so you follow First Baptist became a sort of trend setter in taking the money they were raising and sharing it with the congregation based upon need the black congregation as well as the white congregation in fact i found a record in 1859 when the black congregation which of course was made up of slaves primarily and they had very little money at all and they donated twelve dollars for missions in africa because they thought the africans needed help more than they did which is kind of wonderful in a kind of an incredible story of people sharing what little they have with people across the seas from where their ancestors came to you follow well then the Southern Baptist Convention was created in 1845 and I know this is going to shock you too but the Baptist of eufaula could not agree on whether the Southern Baptist Convention was a good thing or a bad thing because some said this is an example of southern nationalism and our pendants and our free thinking and so it's good thing but others said this I've just have a way of fighting an argument all the time as you know and in this particular case of the member said I think it is not a good thing that we create a new Baptist Convention i dissent from this I regret the establishment of a separate Southern Baptist Convention discovering the body of Christ thus duplicating programs thus wasting resources and deepening sectional divisions between north and south I found that really interesting at a very time when southerners overwhelming we were trying to separate themselves from the North there's this Baptist Laban here and you follow with some followers who say that and when the Civil War began is kind of interesting what happened first of all you remember the Deacon jong-il shorter in 1861 he's like the governor so he's Governor of Alabama during the period that the war begins the first two years of the war and not only that but during that period of time you have a spellbinding pastor of the church named WN Reeves REE VES Reeves was a phenomenal preacher but he was also according to the Alabama Baptist one of the handsomest men in Alabama so at least the eufaula church women always look upon an agreeable object when he is preaching to them I can truthfully say that having read thousands of church reports I have never read a single report that talks about how much women generally went to church and sort of daddy's on the on the pastor but it may be that there's something to this because when when W and Reeves decided to resign as pastor the church and form a company of infantry here and you follow which consisted incidentally of many male members of his church and marched off to war the ladies decided to take the carpet in the church which incidentally was rare as hen's teeth no baptist church had carpet in that period and they ripped up the carpet and they sent the carpet to the confederate army to be torn up into pieces and to be used as blankets for confederate soldiers and i always had a punch that some of the women probably had a crush on Reverend Reeves and hope to blanket they gave was the blanket th
t he used but any rate I don't know that for sure but i changed the theology of the church to for instance on in one minute the church says that they want to placate an angry god by tightening discipline expelling miscreants and declaring repentance of all the members and then in the minute they said Baptists have ever been a peculiar people there was never greater truth written than that Baptists have ever been a peculiar people in their unflinching adherence to all the commands and teachings of the Word of God and so the reason they were losing on the battlefield was because they had lost the battle of morality back home according to this reasoning incidentally of all the people I run across and you follow the one that in driggs me most his women named elizabeth rhodes rhod yes elizabeth rhodes was a very prominent woman her husband while the member of you follow first baptist church she and her husband were good friends of the Reeves and they had them over for dinner frequently and they were good social friends and during the Civil War elizabeth rhodes kept a diary the diary is now at the archives at samford university and i would urge you if you ever get a chance to go to birmingham go in to see the elizabeth rhodes star and actually one of my graduate students at auburn actually probably dissertation about elizabeth rhodes and you'll see why in just a minute well in her diary but she not only talks about local people who go off to war and don't come back but she also talks about the providential care of god is strongly Calvinist theology and for instance she says we don't repent of our sins it will not produce better results on the battlefields no matter how courageous our armies and when a young physician in you follow who just graduated from University of North Carolina medical school went off to war and was killed in his first battle she writes in her diary sort of Calvinist resolution of his life he was cut off on set on just entering his long life of usefulness by an overruling Providence that saw fit to remove him and we should not reminisce we've owned life like a piece of wheat goodbye Sith then she talked about pastor Reeves last sermon before he went off to war based on Psalm 99 his text of the words clouds and darkness are all around us righteousness and judgment are the tribulation of his times we talked about prescient about what's going to happen in the next two years but survived Barbara County did and believe it or not by 1900 the South was producing twice as much cotton as it had produced in 1860 as the world population boomed and the need for cotton now grown in the indus valley of india and shipped through calcutta and grown in egypt and brazil was supplemented by the cotton grown once again in barbour county where cotton was once again king of the economy until about 1890 when all of a sudden a transition occurred and the transition was you follow cotton mill now it is in a way you'll probably say well what difference did it make whether it was tried and grown or cotton warehoused or cotton shipped or cotton gin because it's all about cotton and you follow cotton mill was all about cotton so it's not so much of a transition well it's really quite a dramatic transition here's the reason because all of a sudden you go from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and you know that's what we didn't want right because the best life was life on the landing you grow things and now all of a sudden you're inside a factory all day and it's hot and cotton lint is all around you all day long and it was awful he was absolutely awful the reports of you follow cotton mill or like so many others from the four largest cotton million states now of textile state's largest one North Carolina South Carolina and Georgia Alabama four largest textile States so you've gone from producing cotton to now make it into text those yourself not sending it to England and the results of this is I that you have tens of thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people like my grandfather who were sharecroppers producing that cotton in the 1890s who were looking for something better because the man was worn out because they couldn't make a go of it because they were always falling deeper and deeper in debt and as a consequence of that they began to think in terms of going to a cotton mill and beginning to work there the idea of what is called the family wage the family wage was so low that a hit of family male who worked in a cotton mill incidentally they weren't good textile workers generally women were better because the dexterity of their fingers especially in handling the thread was so much better so the loom people were always good the males who were hired general intend to be the fixers the mechanics you prepared equipment but the women were good this is really amazing because all of a sudden women now either deserted divorced widowed too young to marry found a place where they could make a living for themselves you follow cotton mill classic example and because the salaries were predicated on the idea that the male worked but did not make enough to take care of large families and the families were very large my grandmother's family was 18 well the storytelling had said your grandmother was the 10th in the first batch and I was thinking biscuits coming out of the oven I mean what is this first batch stuff and she said oh her mother died in childbirth when your grandmother was born and then he remarried because he needed somebody take care of 10 children and she had eight more so their 18 children and my dad was one of eight children we had big populations here and what are you going to do with all these mouths to feed because a man doesn't make enough it you follow up cotton mill to take care of that so the idea was everybody in the family has to work the man worked women worked all the children worked as soon as it were old enough to get in the meal just give you an idea in 1900 there were roughly 1,000 texts of workers in Alabama who between the ages of 10 and 13 and I found lots and lots of examples of seven eight nine ten year olds working 10 hours she have six days a week with all the health problems associated that with the loss of literacy because they can't go to school and I want to give you some samples of this from interviews done in the 1930s by the federal writers project because four of the interviews were done here at the mills and you fall and when I read them I just I just couldn't believe the stories the first one is Nancy Nolan some of you may know Nancy Nolan she had three sons her husband died when the oldest one was nine they lived in Dale County for five years she tried to share up with her nine-year-old son and her as primary laborers and the little kids not much help after five years she decided there was no hope of making a living that way so she moves into you follow she goes to work at the mill and during the ensuing years on two of the signs are put in the mill and work with her the younger son goes to school so three of them are working so one of them go to skoo and the last time I talked in you follow there were two men who hung around after all of you talked to me about your ancestors at the end of the lecture and I could tell that they really wanted to wait until I finish because they wouldn't talk to me maybe when I'm still here live I hope so but any right one of them had on overalls and here in a service station here down end of town north end of town and the other one was dressed in a designer suit and I thought this is a strange pair but it turned out the wind the designer suit had gone to Boston University and he gotten a PhD in psychology and he was a counselor psychologist in boston and he had come home to visit his brother because i had mentioned their mother Nancy Nolan in the book poor but proud where I mentioned all this you follow sure textile workers and he said I just wanted to tell you the story our mother is listed on page he had every page that where I had mentioned her and she no one he said that's our mother and I'm the one who went school and this is my brother who did not say a word you just sort of shook his head when he was learning to use he said this is my brother who worked in Boyd Camille's in order to make sure that I got to go to school and you follow and then that made it possible for me to get my PhD and our brothers did our older brother the one who started at nine in the mill is dead but the two of us are still alive interesting story you know I i took some quotes from the story of Nancy Nolan about her son's but i thought i would read you a quotation from the Alabama development brochure in the 1890s to try to get the mills to come to Alabama the state of Alabama commissioned a man named Stephanie to write a little brochure about recruiting textile mills to Alabama I'm going to read you two paragraphs from the manual this is think of economic development people who are trying to sell a community or a state this is what he wrote it is astonishing how rapidly these little folks seven eight nine years old learn to keep up an end to peace a yarn to spin too real to rot warp to weave to perform the multifarious duties which go to make up daily routine of a well aware cotton mill it is a sight gratifying to any philanthropist to see 80 or 100 comfortably dressed well fed cheerful little people of both sexes engaged in their daily duties bright cheerful good-tempered orderly obedient young folks as they pass rapidly among their exquisite machines sometimes singing in concert and absolutely content the very people who all their lives had nothing to do before except idleness strikes are unknown among these really worthy people who fill their appropriate squares in the great chess board of life dutifully and gladden simply as good citizens as much worthy of respect and consideration as the merchant princes of this land well that was written in the 1890s but by 1934 apparently the gladsome contented and cheering little children had suddenly grown angry because the largest strike in American history began in textile mill in Huntsville Alabama and quickly spread across the state and before long there were 250,000 textile workers not only on strike but they were out in front of textile mills with Winchester's in fact it places where they didn't have the union here are in opelika are in the Chattahoochee Valley there were flying squads from Phoenix City who would come and the Flying Squad would get outside the mill and tell workers come out of your your jobs and call them scabs and in the case of the Chattahoochee Valley our and across the story of a company doctor he was called to deliver a baby let it lay it would night and went through a guard post without proper identification and they shot anything and he was the company doctor are there opelika Mills had a machine gun from World War one posted outside and a warning that any blind squad that came from phenix city would be immediately shot if they came on opa-locka manufacturing property so you know things are not going so well but guess where they did go they went well in opelika I'm sorry I like it you follow and you know the reason they went well and you follow anybody have any idea why wouldn't like this year Donald comer darling comer Donna comer was without question the most philanthropic social gospel oriented textile leader in a Cell in my opinion he was in fact during the 1930s head of the Alabama Relief Administration and New Deal's administration relief for the population of the state his father BB comer and native of this County a former governor one of the founders of the textile industry avondale mills was his empire Donald comer his son took over the company he bought the mills here in opal and you follow and he turned them in to a like a family and that's the reason I entitled this part of it a sense of community I those of you who know anything about the mill village about south side or south Randolph Street know that he came to graduations from school he had a kindergarten for poor kids to go to school free he provided scholarships to go to college including my father-in-law was a Baptist minister and worked at Avondale mills in sylacauga because there was no high school in his community and every school even public schools had tuition that you had to pay in the case of my father-in-law he worked one year at Avondale mills when school the ninth grade then he works another year 10th grade another year 11th grade another year 12th grade and at the age of 24 finished high school having paid his tuition and then Donald comer gave him a scholarship he it was so impressed with him to go to Howard College Sanford University become a pastor and ultimately to get a doctorate and become one of the most important Baptist pastors in Alabama that is my story but that story is replicated a thousand times here and you follow he created the community club he commuted created delighted a playground he created the ornamental gardens he committed he started three different bands he started baseball teams and it's probably the first time that mill people and uptown people as they were called people north eufaula and south eufaula actually met as social equals because on a baseball field if you got a good curveball nobody cares whether you let North you follow our South you follow doesn't make a bit of difference so this transition that moved out moved into a world where there were violent strikes and bloodshed all over the south but not here and you follow and I'm accorded some interesting comments from from this story business lease Snipes some of you may have known as a Snipes story like Nancy Nolan except her husband was an alcoholic who abandoned the family and she had to move into town to take care of her children she said when I moved here this was when it was you follow cotton mill she said I worked a 12-hour shift for subsistence wages and the only toilet was a filthy outdoor toilet that was never managed when Mr Comber purchased the mill conditions changed he installed decent toilets five commodes all cleaned every day it's interesting in an oral history what you record but if you've ever been to an outdoor toilet I have and my uncle's Nets I thought were the most barbaric people I'd ever seen because I came to town and they didn't have indoor toilets I know what that's like so that five toilets cleaned every day really impressed me too and then she said workers in each department were uniforms of different colors and then there's Tom also broken many of you know through David alsobrook who wrote the article in your local paper about the mill Tom ulcer Brook David's father said he installed new machinery and modernized the plant he sold houses to employees and he lent children of mill workers money to go to college life was not easy but I liked comer and I liked working in the mills Nancy Nolan again I especially like Mr Comber because he allowed workers to buy the houses business champion the sentiments of the other three are exactly hers too despite her own illiteracy and her husband's alcoholism she made living bought her house love Donna comer in the mill business Snipes again contrasted the worlds that had resulted from greed and paternalism elsewhere and then she said it used to be here and you follow we were just factory folk or we were lent heads now we are mill operatives new opera sieves and we hold our heads up high all work is honorable you know and we are proud of hours at the mills my work has just been all happiness so you have wars other places and here you have this deep sense of community let's put a remarkable then there are the transitions and here i want to talk about highway 421 431 sorry about that 431 I have a theory about towns that survive tens that survived our towns that have the ability to talk about their differences get over them and work together and I can tell you all sorts I can tell you a town is dying right now because it can't get over its disagreements over Harper Lee ice monroeville alabama they're fighting each other so hard that they can't see a common destiny and I'll keep trying to tell them that you're you know your population in Monroe County peaked in 1900 and your population in Monroevi
le peaked in 1990 and Vanity Fair is now in China and you got no future unless you can get together and work you've got sixty three hundred people and the person who's going to save you just died three months ago unless you get together you got no so if you think back to Barbara County Barbara County had 31,000 people in 1860 it had 36,000 people roughly in 1900 it has 27,000 people now according to the online encyclopedia of Alabama you're fairly stable but like almost every county in the black belt your population peaked in 1900 and you've got about 50 50 black and white and so that's your labor force not only that but whites are not reproducing themselves because white women go to school and then they go to college and then they don't get married until they're 30 like my daughter-in-laws then they don't have it one or two children like my two daughter-in-laws and so the result of that we don't even reproduce ourselves there are three Flint grandchildren in two families that's not even reproducing yourself and I tell people all the time and speeches like this if you want to keep America white which a lot of Alabamians do best thing you can do is give everyone a color a scholarship to go to college because they'll go to college and they won't have children until they're in their 30s and then whites will have more population so if you just give all the like women in the high school college scholarships that'll make sure that the demography changes because right now demography is headed for school system in Alabama that in 2017 will be majority minority and your labor force is going to be black and Hispanic and you don't have enough people to do the jobs to make this a viable state I'll tell you a corporate executives name I will not tell you but it's a it's a very powerful corporation in Alabama it hires lots and lots people some at low technical areas some in high tenant letters he said if we eliminated everybody can't pass a drug test and everybody who can't reach a simple manual of how to do something we could not get enough people in the state of Alabama to continue this company we'd have to move it someplace else or i can tell you another story when i facilitated the equity funding lawsuit and the education reform program and when i spoke here and you follow about those subjects i had a corporate executive from a steel company who call me he was from Massachusetts had just become CEO of a steel company he called and said dr. Flint I want you to tell me something I hired nobody except high school graduates and my high school graduates can't read he said can you explain to me Heidi as you can be a high school graduate in Alabama can't read this is 1993 and I said I don't know but I'll find out because I've got a former student from Sanford who works in the State Department of Education so I call him I call him I said I just call I'm gonna call him back I want to know why is it that students who graduate with a high school diploma in Alabama can't write can't read and can't do math and he said well I'll tell you whine but not on the record you can't quote my name because I'll be fired if they find out you told you this I said okay tell me I'll give you an anemic he said because the Alabama State High School test is pegged at fifth grade six month and math and sixth grade third month and writing now ask you what good does it do to have a hundred percent people graduate from high school when they read it a fifth grade level and I've got some reservations about No Child Left Behind but I'll tell you this if we do not make sure that every kid who graduates Alabama High School's can read and write and do math at a 12th grade level there is no future for us because the South Koreans in Auburn don't have that route and the fins don't have that room and the Germans don't have that rule and we're no longer competing with Georgia we're competing with South Korea and Germany and Finland and so we have got to have tough standards and that brings me to the question of how people can disagree agreeably and let me start off with two fundamental premises that are almost always true in every argument even the Baptist ones number one you've got traditionalists and they don't want anything to change they don't want any new him in the baptist signal they only want the ones that they say when there were little kids and then when all the stained-glass windows just like they are now and the carpets and everything else and the biggest arguments we have at Auburn First Baptist is when we do a renovation of the church about what color to paint the walls and what color to have carpets and the traditionalist one it the way it was and the other ones want to want to innovate like for instance would it really hurt to have the kind of music played that young people like and attract them the first baptist or shall we just have you know mighty fortress is our God every Sunday so they're traditionalist okay then there are the people going to drop out of first baptist if they don't get something different so is there any way to find common ground okay 431 right because you got people who say I sell gasoline and I sell hamburgers and I sell antiques and if people don't come through here I don't sell that stuff and they're not going to keep coming through here if they have to queue up five miles north of here to get through town so they're just trees so just cut them tail and the Auburn forestry department says no they got roots and if you if you widen the highway it may not kill the tree but it's going to kill the roots and you know generally speaking trees die when you kill the roots so it's going to take a while but you're all going to die so here we have this argument think more largely preservation now you probably already know you're pretty economically diversified in barbour county and you follow your number one employer according to the online encyclopedia of alabama i know it's right because I'm the one who founded it and I commissioned a really good person to write the articles on eufaula and Barbara County your number one source of income is manufacturing you have thirty percent of your jobs or manufacturers but then next to that is education and Social Work and that cluster of jobs and you got retail but then you've got this incredible forest area wild forest area 11,000 makers up the road north of here it's just priceless then you've got bass fishing then you've got recreation then you've got what is it blue lake or blue yeah okay which is apparently I've not been there but it's apparently just a great place of legend in terms of attracting tourists and then you've got lake point where i'm staying the night because i insisted on staying at like part point possible because i'm going to leave the money here and you follow and not drive home tonight some lestat's part and so if you put all this together you've got a pretty diversified economy a lot more than Monroe County which had Vanity Fair and public that's it and Harper Lee of course and so you've got something going for you but you've got two positions one preserve everything which can't happen and the other is the almighty dollar is what drives everything and so tear everything down like Auburn is done if we once upon a time or the loveliest village I don't know where it went because it ain't there now it's grubby when you approach Auburn from almost any angle it looks like Schenectady or or Detroit or San Diego because it's just overgrown and wallowing in itself because we're going so fast we can't process change and so the advocates of tradition and the advocates of change fight over the size of buildings and the height of buildings and we're torn all apart in town just like Monroeville is so here's the thing sooner or later you're going to discover what my sign from Seattle told me as he drove through today he said that it's a beautiful town if we drove around he said you know I can just see all sorts of young millennium people coming here to start software firms which is his job he's vice president of soft of a company in Seattle and he said because it doesn't make any difference where you lived in the Millennial Generation you can do it anywhere and you look at the houses and you look at the land prices and you look at the property taxes and you talked about the Smith family and the paper they created in Jay Jason the kind of incredible leadership you gave this town as mayor you chose him and you think of Billy and the banks and you think of what's happened here and you've got so much going for you so much going for you so much more than most places but you have a choice you can be a part of the 22 counties they're growing or you can be part of the 50 counties that are dying that's your choice because two-thirds of our counties are going to be effectively dead within a generation effectively dead because they're not putting money into education they're not putting money into leadership and they don't have any vision of who they want to be and so I've told you tonight who you were I've told you who you are and I've told you who you can be but when Flint's not going to get you to where you can be you're going to get you to where you can be that's the sermon now you want invitation will have an altar call Amy what do you want me to do now you want questions you want the panel okay good
