ED NOTE: This is the last of a 12-month series by renowned historian Wayne Flynt on the occasion of Alabama’s bicentennial year of 2019.
During the Fall of 1923, Episcopal missionary Augusta Martin, a native of Russell County, Alabama, began a school in Long Hollow near Scottsboro, Jackson County, in the state’s northeastern corner.
Few children in the remote Appalachian community were literate, so she advertised her school by horseback riding from cabin to cabin. She equipped a dilapidated building with rough benches made by local men. Parents enrolled 20 children, but on the first school day 56 between ages 5 and 21 appeared. In the afternoons, their sharecropper mothers and fathers came to learn how to read and write while the children played. What the school lacked in equipment students made up for in enthusiasm.
Like many Appalachian religious reformers, Martin reported to her superiors that isolated farm families overflowing with children provided an environment where incest and “feeble-mindedness” flourished. Lack of medical care, poor sanitation, and moonshining complicated these problems.
Although Alabama had established a Child Labor Department four years earlier, no public programs had reached Jackson County whose southern boundary, Scottsboro, was on the Tennessee River and whose northern expanse consisted of rocky mountains bordering Tennessee.
Martin’s efforts resulted in what she soon called the “House of Happiness” in Santa Bottom (also known locally as “Hell’s Half Acre” for family feuds and violence), where she administered the gospel of the “three s’s” for soap, soup, and salvation. By Christmas, 1923, the building contained class rooms and an infirmary. That Christmas day a simple Christian service emphasizing hope, faith, joy, and love preceded distribution of toys, clothes, and books, the first store-bought gifts most of the children had ever received. In such humble fashion the Protestant Episcopal Church, Diocese of Alabama launched ministries that continued until 1952.
This Alabama Christmas story contains most of the important elements of two hundred years of Alabama history: the conditioning role of nature in shaping history; the opulence of the easily traversed and cultivated Black Belt compared to the poverty of the isolated Appalachian landscape; the laudable spirit of charity, generosity, and neighborliness amidst strong resistance to systemic reforms based on fairness and justice. And some mountain Christian cults appealed to marginal people by bizarre practices such as handling poisonous snakes to validate their faith. One leader of such a group forced his wife’s hand into a cage of rattlesnakes and copperheads, where she was bitten, a true story brilliantly crafted by Alabama novelist Dennis Covington crafted into a National Book Award finalist entitled “Salvation on Sand Mountain.”
Then there was the infamous Scottsboro case in the Spring of 1931 when two white female textile workers from Huntsville accused nine Negro men and boys of raping them on a freight train passing through the county. As word of the alleged attack spread, a mob gathered in Scottsboro, and only the intervention of the National Guard likely saved the town from what might have been the nation’s largest mass lynching. And the ensuing sham trial was little better than a legal lynching. What missionary accounts of backwardness and debauchery framed, the “Scottsboro boys” incidents fully developed.
But Jackson County’s isolation and reputation for backwardness also helped preserve Russell Cave where 10,000 years of human habitation bequeathed us one of the most complete records of Southeastern prehistoric culture; the picturesque Paint Rock Valley; and the Walls of Jericho. And during the 1930s, the New Deal established Cumberland Farms resettlement community, one of the most important Federal attempts to transform sharecroppers into land owners. Although the economic enterprise largely failed, an invitation from the White House to provide entertainment by the farm’s country band and square dancers provided an international audience exposure to authentic Appalachian folkways.
I personally encountered Jackson County people in the person of Edward (Eddie) Akin, son of a Scottsboro postman, who became one of the best students in my 40-year career at Samford and Auburn universities. He helped pay his way through college working at a Birmingham mill, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Florida, and afterwards taught at Lawson State and Mississippi College. He wrote multiple highly regarded books about Florida and Mississippi. His brother, Bruce, succeeded equally well as an executive with Southern Living and as C.E.O. of Bassmaster, receiving TIME INC. President’s award for innovation in publishing.
Now, the Akins’ hometown boasts the unique Unclaimed (Airlines) Baggage, a huge warehouse stretching for blocks and visited by tourists from around the world. One of the newer Scottsboro restaurants, Tokyo Japan Hibachi and Sushi, is a tribute to globalism’s reach even into Appalachia.
Like so many attempts to understand Alabama, the most successful ones balance triumphs with tragedies. Boosterism may play well in economic recruitment and football. But 200 years of Alabama history presents a more nuanced and complicated story.
Wayne Flynt is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Auburn University and co-author of “Alabama History of a Deep South State, Bicentennial Edition.” See FLynt’s earlier columns.