Take a drive through Alabama’s Black Belt for a glimpse of history

The afflicted terrain and the old federal highway running through it define the mise-en-scene of wealth, poverty and despair along Alabama’s Black Belt.

So-called for both the rich soil and the labor that worked it, the region begins on U.S. Highway 80 at the hamlet of Cuba, 20 miles east of Meridian, and stretches across central Alabama to Georgia, passing a few of the South’s most desperate-appearing locales.

Its plaintive narrative is historically written by the battles fought amid the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, timed a century apart.

Alabama has designated a strip of the road from Selma to Montgomery as the “John R. Lewis Memorial Highway” to remember the late congressman who peacefully led protests on Selma’s Edmund G. Pettus Bridge and was savagely beaten by Klansmen on “Bloody Sunday” March 7, 1965.

A memorial to Civil Rights activist Viola F. Luizzo sits on an anguished hilltop between Montgomery and Selma, where the Detroit housewife, 40, was gunned down by the Klan 18 days after Lewis’ beating. Watch who’s watching you at the emotive roadside shrine.

It’s the best and shortest route on our back-and-forth trips from Mississippi to Georgia. There’s meager vehicular traffic, providing leisurely passage but often perilous due to speeders and no law enforcement presence.

I’ve traversed this track countless times since long-ago duty at the Albany, Georgia, air base. Due to the low vehicle count, it should be a peaceful journey until reminders appear of a time that many would like to forget, as if the troubles never happened.

Demopolis, with 7,200 citizens, is the first real city encountered going back east and seems to thrive due to its isolation, midway between Meridian and Selma. Its economy is enhanced by the nearby Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and a jobs-heavy paper mill.

Next up is Uniontown, characterized by its crumbling downtown area and an even-more crumbled cotton industry. This two-stoplight speck of desolation with 1,800 people once had cotton gins and a cotton mill to service adjacent fields.

Today, as you poke along to avoid a speeding ticket that might cost hundreds to help fund the dreariness, you praise a catfish feed mill and processor for their existence.

There is another Uniontown industry if it can seriously be called one — a landfill containing 4 million cubic yards of hazardous coal ash shipped there after a Tennessee disaster 20 years ago. The landfill accepts toxic waste materials from 30-plus states. Nobody sleeps easily in Uniontown.

Selma, with a depleted population of almost 17,000 (it has lost a third of its people since the 1960s), strikes me as somewhat a larger McComb, my hometown, which suffered its own monumental racial past and, like Selma, wears scars of the disharmony.

Conflict over race didn’t arrive in Selma in the 1960s. It came in March of 1865 with the Battle of Selma, which ended badly for the home team with federal occupation of the Confederate stronghold and the capture of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, later elected the first Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

McComb, too, hosted an Imperial Wizard, Robert Shelton of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1964.

Selma today rides yesteryear’s turmoil as something of an industry, “heritage tourism,” with museums recounting the past violence and reenactments of Bloody Sunday featuring contemporary heroes of civil and voting rights activism.

Once motorists reach Montgomery, the scenery improves along another familiar road, U.S. 82, leading to Eufaula, the gateway to Georgia. The state border town hugging the Chattahoochee River is resplendent with springtime ornamentals fronting antebellum mansions, displaying prosperity not currently enjoyed anywhere else across Alabama’s Black Belt.

— Mac Gordon, a retired newspaperman, is a native of McComb. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Alabama’s Black Belt has a history