Tag: Alabama

Touring Trumpland

barryh1 Comment

In March we took a road trip through some of the Deep South US States. A few images stick in my mind.

Exploring the Louisiana flatlands down towards the Gulf, south of Lake Charles – Lafayette. This is clearly hurricane alley. There is evident poverty. Many plots of land have an aged RV next to the shack, ready for quick getaway. Some just comprise an RV in a shelter.

In Birmingham, Alabama the great industrial centre built by blacks for white money is no more, just a few museums, like the Sloss steel mill.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the famous choo choo runs no more and its very fine station is closed.

FT._PAYNE_OPERA_HOUSE
Fort Payne Opera house

Fort Payne in Alabama was built in the 1830s to intern and relocate Cherokee Indians. In the 1880s, due to the railroad, it was a booming iron and steel town until the minerals ran out. The opera house is still there. In the early 1900s a hosiery industry started and by the 1990s Fort Payne was ‘sock capital of the world’. Globalisation put an end to that, and the place now feels like it is struggling.

winona station
Winona station

Winona in Mississippi is another a town which owes its existence to the railroad. It now seems more dead than alive, with many shuttered buildings.

Vicksburg, Mississippi was the site of a major battle of the Civil War in 1863, and grew on the back of the trading boats plying the River Mississippi. Vicksburg has a history of suppression of first Indians and then blacks.

vicksburg mansion
Vicksburg mansion

It is now a tourist town, with an apparently prosperous posh residential area. But Main Street looks faded, with many closed shops. Drunks or druggies patrol the edges of the civilised area.

I see all these as symptoms that the great American Dream is not working. Struggling towns and communities, due to jobs destroyed or moved elsewhere, particularly due to globalisation. Donald Trump offered change from this failed system, which has been engineered by both Republicans and Democrats. It is not surprising that people voted for him despite reservations on his character.

There is no evidence yet that politicians other than the Bernie Sanders left wing Democrats offer any solutions.

Featured image is the now-static Chattanooga Choochoo.
Picture of Fort Payne Opera House courtesy Jerry & Roy Klotz, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hawks

barryh2 Comments

We had a good sighting of two birds of prey during our US trip, each conveniently sitting in a nearby tree for several minutes.

The first was at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham Alabama. It looks like a young buzzard in UK parlance, but according to Wikipedia such birds are hawks in the US. And there are a lot of types of hawk. So this is maybe a roadside hawk or a broad winged hawk? Apparently one book says it’s a buzzard!

 

The second was in the botanical gardens in Memphis Tennessee, and appears to be a red tailed hawk.

 

It will be apparent that my knowledge and experience of these raptors is minimal. They are usually just small bird-shaped blobs high in the sky!

** See comment by kingbirdgraphica, which gives the correct identification.

The four little girls

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Birmingham (Burr-ming-HAM) Alabama is renowned for its role in the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, that were spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963 there was the bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of the 16th Street Baptist church that was at the heart of the movement, 4 little girls were killed. Birmingham police with dogs and water cannon attacked defenceless crowds, including children, in the nearby park. All this was orchestrated by the renowned mayor Bull O’Connor. I remember it all so well from the UK media of that time.

That park (Kelly Ingram Park) is now a moving memorial to these events, with a number of evocative statues. Near the entrance are statues to the four little girls, and to King himself.Read More »

Rusty old ruin

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The Sloss Museum in Birmingham (pron Burr-ming-HAM), Alabama provided a very good introduction to this historic US city that has only existed since 1871. The city grew because of the coming of railroads and the discovery of all the ingredients for casting iron in the vicinity. At its height Birmingam was a major US iron […]