Article Abstracts and Supplements
To Teach the Negro
By Judith Hillman Paterson
In 1878 a young, self-educated Scottish immigrant arrived in Marion, Alabama, to assume the reins at Alabama's first state-assisted black institution of higher learning, the American Missionary Association's Abraham Lincoln School. With his wife, Maggie, William Burns Paterson spent the next ten years nurturing a remarkable institution while often facing racially motivated hostilities. In 1887 following an act of arson, the state legislature voted to move the school -- then called the Alabama State Normal School for Colored Students -- to Montgomery, where the Patersons worked to maintain a balance of liberal arts education along with industrial training. In 1969 the school became Alabama State University, attaining university status almost one hundred years after its creation at Marion.
The Art of Howard Weeden
By Kay Cornelius
Nineteenth-century artist Maria Howard Weeden could have been just another maiden lady who used her talent to eke out a living after the Civil War. Like many Southerners of her day, Weeden found her comfortable life of only a few years earlier gone forever. Faced with the prospect of financial ruin, she determined to use her talent to supplement her family's meager income. Weeden's portraits of former slaves departed from the comic "minstrel" representations of her contemporaries, however, conveying great strength and dignity. Showings of Weeden's work in Berlin and Paris brought her international acclaim. In 1899 Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of "Uncle Remus," described Weeden's portraits as "powerful" and "charged with feeling." Now, almost one hundred years later, Cornelius's generously illustrated article lets us see for ourselves just what he meant.
Alabama Heritage Profile: Dr. James D. Hardy
By J. Mack Lofton Jr.
On January 23, 1964, Dr. James D. Hardy assured himself a place in medical history when he performed the first heart transplant into a human patient. "Death was imminent," recalls Hardy. "If a heart transplant was to be done, it had to be done at once." At a time before human-donor hearts were available, Hardy and his team at the University of Mississippi chose to use the heart of a chimpanzee. "Not too many people realize that chimp genes and human genes are about 97 percent the same," says Hardy. Amid overwhelmingly negative reaction in the United States, Hardy and other U.S. transplant teams put heart transplantation on hold. Today, however, heart transplants are fairly common, and the world that once criticized him now showers Hardy with honors. (The heart used in the 1964 operation is preserved at the Smithsonian Institution.)
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