When you look at apartment websites, you are always greeted with pictures of immaculate living rooms right out of “Good Housekeeping,” smiling middle-class families, sparkling swimming pools and accolades such as “exquisite apartment homes.” But beneath this carefully crafted veneer lies a different reality documented in reviews by actual Alabama tenants. Because Alabama law favors […]
Curtis Price
Incident at Waffle House
On July 4th, I went to a local Waffle House with a Black friend. Our usual Waffle House that we hit up on University Drive was packed solid so we drove to one in Five Points, a mostly white area of east Huntsville. When we entered, there was only one booth that looked open so we […]
Marching into Low-Wage America With God on Their Side
The Von Braun Center sits in downtown Huntsville, a brutalist concrete slab of a building that reminds you of an old Stasi interrogation and torture center. Or, more appropriately, a Nazi one. Wernher Von Braun, the father of America’s rocket programs and whose work transformed Huntsville from a backwater Southern textile town into a major […]
Conversations with “The Enemy”
Last year on my then-job, work was slow. A late middle-aged RN supervisor who worked in a different wing came in to file papers. We exchanged superficial pleasantries, the mask everyone wears in everyday life. And then suddenly that mask dropped for some reason I still don’t understand, she sat down and started talking very […]
Scottsboro
We’re driving down Route 72 Saturday morning from Huntsville to Scottsboro, a small blue collar city of fourteen thousand that the Tennessee wraps around like a fat brown snake before uncoiling down river. Scottsboro, that Alabama town historically stained with the legacy of the Scottsboro Boys trials, even if many of the later trials took […]
Guntersville, Alabama: Eugene Debs, Sweet Tea and the Quest for Cheap Housing
The first time I saw an unfurled and flown Confederate flag in Alabama was about four years ago on my first trip to Guntersville. In a small squatter trailer camp nestled in a field off Route 431 , the main drag linking northeast Alabama to points south, was a large weather–beaten Stars and Bars draped […]