Anyone who has visited Huntsville knows how important Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team are to the town’s residents. Even a casual observer will notice that von Braun’s iconic name and image are featured on or in multiple public institutions, such as the airport, the civic center, multiple buildings at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on Redstone Arsenal, and least surprisingly, the United States Space & Rocket Center.
“Where are we drifting?” asked Thomas Fearn on the eve of the Civil War, “and at what point shall we land? God grant that it may end as well with us, as with the great many too.” Fearn was not an overly religious man, but he had reasons for invoking this small prayer. The Huntsville resident was seventy-two years old and not in good health; his career as a medical doctor had long passed, so too had his work as a cotton merchant, public works champion, and institution builder. What was left—his family, his farms, and his slaves— would soon be under siege from advancing Union forces. Long before the white man appeared in North America, Native Americans were making arrowheads out of the creamy white stone we know today as Alabama marble. In 1820 Dr. Edward Gantt, a physician who had accompanied Gen. Andrew Jackson through the Mississippi Territory in 1814, made the first recorded discovery of the marble. Even Gantt did not realize the extent of the deposit he had uncovered--400 feet deep, thirty-two miles long, one-and-a-half miles wide (and now the world's largest commercial deposit of madre cream marble). Nor did he know that he had located an outcropping of the purest white marble in the world.
On the successful third Selma to Montgomery March, Martin Luther King Jr. invited Rabbi Heschel to join him. In this famous photograph, King, center, walks with, on his left, Nobel Peace Prize-recipient Ralph Bunche, Rabbi Heschel, and Birmingham civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth. On King’s right is Ralph Abernathy. Future congressman John Lewis is on the far left. (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University) Martin Luther King Jr. was not at the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. On March 7, 1965—the day that Alabama State Troopers and mounted sheriff’s deputies beat demonstrators in a cloud of tear gas—King was preaching at his church in Atlanta, Georgia. In the hurt and anger that followed, some in the ranks of the civil rights movement bitterly criticized King for his absence, and even after he rushed to the scene, things at first did not get any better.
On August 18, 1910, Birmingham looked like a deserted city. All business had closed down, as had many stores in Bessemer and Ensley. It was "Baseball Day," and everyone in town who had the price of a ticket had gone to the grand opening of Rickwood Field. "There has never been such a day in Birmingham or in any other city of the Southern league," wrote one excited newspaper reporter. Sixty additional street cars had been put in service to aid in moving the anticipated crowd of as many as ten thousand people. |
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