Reading Roadtrip: 50 Books for 50 States: Alabama

A special assistant to George W. Bush and executive vice president of The Aspen Institute think tank chronicles his vibrant coming of age in a small Alabama community founded by freed slaves, where he learned valuable lessons about helping others, embracing faith and fighting racial injustice.

In a fascinating memoir, retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter shares his journey from the days of the Great Depression in Mobile, Alabama, across decades of Deep South segregation, and into the interracial struggles for racial justice in Alabama. The founder of the Selma Inter-religious Project, Walter grew up in multiethnic, segregated Mobile and learned life lessons at theology schools in Sewanee and New York. Those disparate educations were a prelude to his years as an Episcopal priest navigating how to serve white parishes in Alabama while challenging systemic racism.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates' direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it. An evocative and epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants in the face of persistent racism.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past-memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution.

Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow. But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the protests extremist and "untimely." King drafted a furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail"-a work that would take its place among the masterpieces of American moral argument alongside those of Thoreau and Lincoln. His insistence on the urgency of "Freedom Now" would inspire not just the marchers of Birmingham and Selma, but peaceful insurgents from Tiananmen to Tahrir Squares. Scholar Jonathan Rieder delves deeper than anyone before into the Letter-illuminating both its timeless message and its crucial position in the history of civil rights. Rieder has interviewed King's surviving colleagues, and located rare audiotapes of King speaking in the mass meetings of 1963. Gospel of Freedom gives us a startling perspective on the Letter and the man who wrote it: an angry prophet who chastised American whites, found solace in the faith and resilience of the slaves, and knew that moral appeal without struggle never brings justice.

Neal Wooten grew up in a tiny community atop Sand Mountain, Alabama, where everyone was white and everyone was poor. Prohibition was still embraced. If you wanted alcohol, you had to drive to Georgia or ask the bootlegger sitting next to you in church. Tent revivals, snake handlers, and sacred harp music were the norm, and everyone was welcome as long as you weren't black, brown, gay, atheist, Muslim, a damn Yankee, or a Tennessee Vol fan. The Wootens lived a secret existence in a shack in the woods with no running water, no insulation, and almost no electricity. Even the school bus and mail carrier wouldn't go there. Neal's family could hide where they were, but not what they were. They were poor white trash. Cops could see it. Teachers could see it. Everyone could see it. Growing up, Neal was weaned on folklore legends of his grandfather--his quick wit, quick feet, and quick temper. He discovers how this volatile disposition led to a murder, a conviction, and ultimately to a daring prison escape and a closely guarded family secret. Being followed by a black car with men in black suits was as normal to Neal as using an outhouse, carrying drinking water from a stream, and doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp. And Neal's father, having inherited the very same traits of his father, made sure the frigid mountain winters weren't the most brutal thing his family faced. Told from two perspectives, this story alternates between Neal's life and his grandfather's, culminating in a shocking revelation.

A man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit describes how he became a victim of a flawed legal system, recounting the years he shared with fellow inmates who were eventually executed before his exoneration.

From the renowned Tuskegee Institute of Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, this one-of-a-kind narrative cookbook traces the history and heritage of Tuskegee through reminiscences, vintage photographs, poetry, journal entries and more than 200 recipes that celebrate the diverse and mothering flavors of Southern African American cuisine.

Journey along with the king of nostalgia, Tim Hollis, for a tour of lost attractions of northern, central and southern Alabama. Alabama has had an enviable success rate when it comes to tourist attractions, with some that date back to the 1930s still drawing crowds today. But many others have come and gone, sometimes leaving little evidence of their existence. Join Alabama native Tim Hollis as he revisits iconic attractions such as Canyon Land Park and Sequoyah Caverns, the floral clock at Birmingham's Botanical Gardens and the traffic safety torch held aloft by Vulcan, the iron man. Many Gulf Coast attractions are gone, including Styx River Water World and Spooky Golf, but the memories remain.

The dramatic story of one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement and its role in the ongoing reckoning with racial injustice in the United States. On Bloody Sunday, activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and faced attacks by oncoming state troopers. Footage of the violence shocked the nation, galvanized the fight against racial injustice, and made it an iconic event in the nation's history. Yet the previous year an even more brutal incident dubbed Bloody Tuesday took place in Tuscaloosa. On Tuesday, June 9, 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Police smashed the historic church's stained-glass windows with water hoses and fired rounds of tear gas inside. As demonstrators streamed from the church, many choking and soaked, they beat them with nightsticks, cattle prods, and axe handles, arrested nearly a hundred, and sent over thirty to the hospital. Here this event is recounted through the eyes of locals--a charismatic Black preacher trained by Rev. King, an aging police chief, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Black women who were the backbone of the protests. It was a pivotal moment in a southern city unwilling to shed its long history of racial control and Klan brutality until forced to do so by armed Black self-defense groups, a bus boycott, and the federal government. In Bloody Tuesday, John Giggie powerfully recovers one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement and its role in the reckoning with America's ongoing struggle for racial justice.