Dirty Boots: Backstories
Generation-Xers in the South were born into a society that was in flux, but the fact of this and the reasons for it were rarely revealed to us at the time. The oldest among us were born in 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March, and that group of children started school in 1970 or 1971, at the time of the Swann ruling. In the 1970s and ’80s, we grew up during a period of cultural and political change among older generations who knew the context and who had lived then-recent history. Whether we were too young to know or kept in the dark on purpose, the end result was the same: a lack of awareness, a lack of context, a lack of comprehension. Continuing to live in Alabama as an adult, I have learned that the generations who raised us were reticent and unsure, sometimes bitter, usually skeptical, but often hopeful about a new way of living as they tried to grasp it themselves. It makes a man my age interested to know more about that old world, the one that was dying out as I came into being.
One interesting set of facts about modern Alabama’s backstory comes from William Havard’s 1972 collection The Changing Politics of the South. In the chapter “Alabama: Transition and Alienation,” historian Donald S. Strong wrote, “It is doubtful that Alabama can fairly be called an agricultural state, since only 5.8 percent of the income of its people came from agriculture.” In that passage, Strong was writing about the 1950s and alluded to the trend of urbanization that reduced the state’s rural population by 14.3% in that decade alone. The national average for that trend at that time was a 0.8% reduction, but Alabamians were moving into cities at a rate almost eighteen times higher. Strong was elucidating a significant shift in our culture, which occurred right before GenX came along.
I have heard for my entire life in Alabama that agriculture is and has always been paramount (the elevated status of college football notwithstanding, of course). Many generations of my family have lived and worked on farms in Alabama, from the first arrivals in the 1850s until my maternal grandparents moved to Montgomery permanently in the 1950s. My grandparents were among the people Strong was describing, those who formed the exodus that Jack Temple Kirby discussed in Rural Worlds Lost. By the time I was born, in the mid-1970s, the primacy of farming was no longer a fact of life here. It seems that I and other kids were receiving a myth about a bygone time, one newly handed down across generations.
Why does that matter to me, growing up then and living here today? Because the Democrats of the early to mid-twentieth century were not just the party of segregation; they were also the party of rural people and values, of small towns and farmers. Their “base” was in the countryside, so they governed with a conservative outlook that focused on slowly improving quality of life and public services. That approach served poor white voters in outlying areas well; the ugly side was that those improvements rarely came to black communities. Urbanization then opened the doors for the modern Republican Party in the South. Strong wrote that, even though the Republicans did have some party infrastructure in Alabama, “it was only in 1963 that a permanent professional staff was established in the state headquarters and a serious effort made to develop an active committee in every county.” By contrast to their Democratic counterparts, Republicans in the South in the 1970s and ’80s offered a new brand of conservatism that appealed to people whose quality of life was noticeably better. By emphasizing low rates of taxation, traditional values, and policies that allowed privatization when public services and accommodations became undesirable, the GOP’s vision and platform was viable among people who had moved into cities and suburbs. The mass shift in population laid the groundwork for the suburban politics of a post-Civil Rights South at the end of the twentieth century.
(This explanation doesn’t extend into the twenty-first century. First, there has since been another flip-flop whereby Democrats have become the party of the cities and Republicans the party of rural people. That’s a-whole-nother story. Second, with respect to farming, the Alabama Farmers Federation reported in February 2024 that there are 62,777 farmers in Alabama, a state with five million people. Of course, that figure doesn’t include the people who work in the agriculture industry: feed stores, processing plants, trucking, brokers, etc. Yet, it’s fair to say that there are still millions of Alabamians living in rural areas, but very few of them are actual farmers.)
Looking even further back, another interesting aspect of that backstory to consider about Generation X’s upbringing – this also from Strong’s chapter – is that Alabama’s population was 47.5% black in 1870 but that had dropped to 32% by 1950. By the 2020s, the proportion has become 25–26%. Much focus today is put on the racism involved in slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, but the practical reality of outmigration has played a role, too. This long-term trend/movement reduced Alabama’s black population from one-half to one-third between 1870 and 1950, which affected the economy, the society, and the politics. Granted, some of this net loss in population could be attributed mechanization, which meant fewer farming jobs for black and white laborers, leading many families to move in search of work. Some of those folks went into Southern town and cities – see above – and some left the region for the North or the West. But one has to know, mechanization or not, that a whole bunch of black Alabamians looked around between 1870 and 1950, and left.
Why does that matter to me, a middle-aged GenXer? Because Alabama would be a different place if the statewide black-white racial balance had remained almost fifty-fifty throughout the twentieth century. I can’t even imagine how the politics of that would have played out over fifteen decades . . .
I don’t think about these things like a history buff, but as a person who wonders about life as we’re living it now. Knowing about history is one thing, considering how it has affected us personally is another. As an example of the past affecting the present and future, in the 1990s, Alabama’s congressional map was redrawn to create one black-majority district, District 7. The Democratic Party of the 1970s and ’80s had not created enough viable political opportunities for black candidates, instead sprinkling black voters into multiple districts to bolster the vote totals of their moderate white candidates. So support was garnered, and a black majority district was created. Today, District 7 has Alabama’s only black House member and its only House Democrat. About thirty years after that, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling led to the creation of a second district with a near-majority of black voters. Next year, there could be a second black Democrat, in the newly aligned District 2. This development could alter the racial proportions in our House delegation to be more representative of our population: 28% of our delegation will be or could be black, which nearly parallels a 26% black population in the state.
Why have those moves been necessary? The lack of a two-party system with biracial politics that listens to all voices. Even though we had a period of greater balance in the late twentieth century, it dissolved rather than becoming entrenched. Today, in Alabama’s State House, the Republicans have supermajorities with virtually the same ratio in both bodies. In the 105-seat House, all of the leadership positions are held by white Republicans, with seventy-six Republican members, all white, and twenty-eight Democrats, twenty-five black and three white. (There is one vacant seat right now.) In the Senate’s thirty-five seats, we have twenty-seven white Republicans, and eight Democrats, seven of whom are black and one white. Alabama’s population is 74% white, its state-level House is 76% white, its state-level Senate is 80% white, its US House representatives are right now 86% white . . . and of Alabama’s statewide offices – governor, lieutenant governor, supreme court, US Senate – 100% are white and 0% are Democratic. That scenario is neither two-party nor biracial. Once again, I wonder what those numbers would be, if Alabama had remained 47.5% black from the end of the Civil War until today.
People often wonder about Alabama’s current politics, how did we get here? If more of our forebears had talked to us, if we were taught our own history in school, more people might know the answers. Some of the answers that we are seeking lie in backstories, such as the ones that Donald S. Strong was telling to an audience of academic historians in 1972. Between the end of slavery and the end of World War II, many black people left Alabama. When the population changed, the workforce changed, and the electorate changed. By the end of World War II, mechanization had permanently altered the nature of small-scale farming, and many black and white people looked for work elsewhere. The politics of rural people became less relevant, when the population shifted. The Republican Party became established with infrastructure and a relevant platform, and post-Civil Rights Democrats tried to counter with a platform that ended up being unpalatable to the white majority and unacceptable to the black minority. Those socio-cultural changes created the situation that we have today. We might actually have a two-party system that values biracial cooperation and the good of all.
