Alabama Quotes

“There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”
― Naomi Klein

“When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.”
― Robert Stacy McCain

“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.”
― Jesse Owens

“I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian.
I just looked at them.
How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me?
I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn’t know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back:
“Roll Tide.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.
You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“Everyone tends to think of October as being an autumn month. Not so much in south Alabama, usually. There, it's another warm, if not hot, summer month. But the Alabama summer heat will sometimes get broken by cooler days. The haze of the depth of summer lifts, the humidity backs off, and the sky takes on a clearer, sharper blueness that the more languid summer days rarely could manage. And sometimes, there will be a day where the temperature gives a clear peek of what's coming.”
― JF Smith

“You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers. In that first week at the Creek, the cafeteria served fried chicken, chicken fried steak, and fried okra, which marked my first foray into the delicacy that is the fried vegetable.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Nine Negro boys in Alabama were on trial for their lives when I got back from Cuba and Haiti. The famous Scottsboro "rape" case was in full session. I visited those boys in the death house at Kilby Prison, and I wrote many poems about them. One of those poems was:

CHRIST IN ALABAMA

Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black--
O, bare your back.

Mary is His Mother--
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.

God's His Father--
White Master above,
Grant us your love.

Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth:
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“What’s the biggest problem facing teenagers today? Ourselves. We’re a generation of lazy underachievers who need to learn that hard work pays off. What’s your town known for? Cow manure! Hold for laughs... Actually Irondale is the setting of Fannie Flagg’s famous novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Why’d you enter the Junior Miss Birmingham pageant? To win... to go to State... then Nationals... maybe get the hell out of Alabama.”
― Nadria Tucker, The Heaviest Corner on Earth

“Nothing had come easy to him. School, sports, or girls... it seemed to Oswald that everyone else had come into this world with a set of instructions but him. From the beginning he had always felt like a pair of white socks and brown shoes in a roomful of tuxedos. He had never really gotten a break in life, and now it was all over.”
― Fannie Flagg, A Redbird Christmas

“Even when there was segregation there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.”
― Rosa Parks

“I later read a survey about Southerners' knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor.
This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them.
But Alabaman's seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King's famous speech. "I have a dream," he said, of an Alabama where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him except her. Cries every time his daddy picks him up. Every time he looks in those wet blue eyes, he nearly loses it. His own son hates him. Can’t blame the kid for having an opinion.”
― Nadria Tucker, The Heaviest Corner on Earth

“Peace is the byproduct of understanding in conjunction with the ability to agree or disagree in harmony”
― Lamont Renzo Bracy

“Your Honor, I just want to say this before we adjourn. It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn't do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious problems and important work that must be done in this state.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“As he reached the river, Oswald suddenly felt as if he were walking around in a painting. Then it dawned on him. Everywhere he looked was a painting! Everything was alive with color: the water, the sky, the boathouses that lined the river with red tin roofs, silver tin roofs, and rusted orange tin roofs. Red boat in a yellow boathouse. Green, pink, blue, tan, yellow, and white boathouses. The wooden pilings sticking out of the water were a thousand different shades of gray and each individual piling was encrusted with hundreds of chalk-white barnacles and black woodpecker holes. Even the grain of the wood and the knots on each post differed from inch to inch and pole to pole.”
― Fannie Flagg, A Redbird Christmas

“Certainly Birmingham had its white moderates who disapproved of Bull Connor's tactics. Certainly Birmingham had its decent white citizens who privately deplored the maltreatment of Negroes. But they remained publicly silent. It was a silence born of fear—fear of social, political and economic reprisals. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Nothing beats a glass bottle of Coke and a trusty Moon Pie under the heat of the Alabama sun.”
― Joseph Carro, The Little Coffee Shop of Horrors Anthology 2

“Mobile’s reputation as the birthplace of Mardi Gras in North America does not rest solely on the fact that a few half-starved French colonists observed the pre-Lenten feasts here 300 years ago… In 1852, a group of Mobile "Cowbellians" moved to New Orleans and formed the Krewe of Comus, which is now that larger city’s oldest and most secretive Carnival society.
…All of Mobile’s parading societies throw Moon Pies along with beads and doubloons, providing sugary nourishment to the revelers lining the streets.
The crowd is very regional, mostly coastal Alabamians. Everyone seems to know each other, and they are always honored and often extra hospitable when they learn that you traveled a long way just to visit *their* Carnival. Late into the evening, silk-gowned debutantes with their white-tie and tail clad escorts who’ve grown weary of their formal balls blend easily with the street crowds…”
― Gary Bridgman, Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South

“Mobile's AfricaTown:
Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves.
The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents…
…While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis…
…Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.”
― Gary Bridgman, Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South

“Race determines variables that yield results undesirable to one sector, while rendering a noticeable favor to others.”
― Lamont Renzo Bracy

“Where are you from exactly?” he asked his state-based colleague, after exchanging first pleasantries.
“Gulf Shores.” Paul replied.
“I know we’re at the Gulf shore,” Garry said. “But where exactly?”
“Gulf Shores is a place.”
“Where’s Gulf Shores?” Garry went on with questioning, feeling increasingly silly.
“Baldwin County.”
“Where’s Baldwin County?”
― Krzysztof Pacyński, A perfect Patricide: Part 1

“After Alabama football integrated in 1969-70, the South made a greater, more profound change for good, in a shorter period of time than any region in all of world history.”
― Steve Travers, CALIFORNIA LIBERALISM IS EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN SPORT’S POLITICAL EFFECT

“The liberals of the world would have us believe that Alabama is still racist and backward, but the Najee Harris's of the world are disproving that by voting with their feet.”
― Steve Travers, CALIFORNIA LIBERALISM IS EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN SPORT’S POLITICAL EFFECT

“How are the white folks treating you?" He looked at me and sneered.

"This is Alabama, son," he said, though he seemed younger than I. "How do you think they're treating us?”
― Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

“Monroeville was hard to get to and easy to get stuck in.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Grammy was a little disappointed, I think, to see there weren’t too many customers. We’d accidentally scheduled our trip on a Saturday during football season, which meant the entire state of Alabama would appear to have been raptured unless you were in a stadium or in front of a TV.”
― Beth Duke

“I'm taking a big risk by coming clean, but the pressure of hiding my true self done really took a toll on me and I can't take too much more.”
― Mary Monroe