Race in the South in the Age of Obama

State representatives for Cullman County, Alabama: The Democrat James Fields (center) and the Republican Jeremy Oden (right), with Oden's nephew Jeff.

By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
NYT Magazine

SEVERAL DAYS A WEEK, a tall, broad-shouldered African-American Methodist preacher named James Fields drives his black pickup truck toward the quiet Alabama city of Cullman. An hour into the red-dirt hills above Birmingham, Cullman is the seat of a farming county where the strongest legal drink you can buy at the pool hall is Pepsi; the kegs at the annual Oktoberfest hold only root beer. “Welcome to Mayberry!” strangers are greeted. And then, “We all do have bathrooms and wear shoes!” With its steeples, grain elevators, striped barber poles, fireflies and wisteria, Cullman has the faraway feel of a small Southern town untroubled by time. “Sweet Cullman!” Fields sometimes says when he’s on his way in. “It’s home!”

For Fields, the trip to Cullman takes him 17 miles north. He lives in Colony, a mountainous backwoods hamlet that in Cullman is usually called the Colony. Among the 81,000 people in Cullman County, there are only 401 African-American voters, and all reside, as far as most people in Cullman know, in the small houses and rusting trailers scattered through Colony’s hollows. Fields serves on several boards in Cullman, with white men who, in the midst of conversations with him, may refer to Colony citizens as “those people down there.” A composed, practical person, Fields responds without expression. He’s similarly inscrutable when he hears claims that what is known in Cullman as “the sign” never existed. Even though Fields says, “It was there and folks know it,” he doesn’t push back: “You just let it go. Sometimes things like that need to stay buried. That was in the past. Let us move forward.”

Versions of Cullman’s old sundown sign hung beside county roads well into the 1970s, and all of them repeated the message that the travel writer Carl Carmer saw when he visited Cullman in the late 1920s: “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.” The sign was notorious all over Alabama, and coupled with Cullman’s powerful Ku Klux Klan, it created a racial deterrent so effective that even today, Cullman’s are exits off the Interstate that most African-Americans avoid. A district judge at the Cullman courthouse named Kim Chaney told me, “I do have black people who are very reluctant to come to court here because of the reputation we’ve had for so many years.” As for younger white people who grow up in Cullman, they sometimes feel forced to justify themselves when they go elsewhere because, as Rozalyn Love, a medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham explains, “Cullman is known, especially among Birmingham folks, as the racist white bigot county.” In Alabama, this is, of course, saying something.

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