Alabama Museum - Full Mix
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the Great Depression and World War Two unleashed forces of change in Alabama change that would transform virtually every aspect of life in the state. On Alabama farms, powerful new machines, along with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, brought huge increases in productivity. Old sharecropping system faded into history when I first started farming out from mute UN file. Now you got a tractor on, uh, you know, welcome, do nothing. How to get out, get off track and go home and get down. When we came with mechanization thing that come along, attracted over here and way could just four treated, we could just bomb the world. Alabama's iron and textile industry surged on a wave of new post war prosperity. Massive military installations provided jobs and better wages than many Alabamians had ever known. Hundreds of thousands of rural and small town residents had migrated to the cities. Work opportunities expanded for African Americans and women. They always saying that a woman's face in the home and it's not your place. I got other jobs. Not that it's in a bottle could do with a woman on making you know there are so many ways that the world changed between 1,902,000. And in many of the colleges and universities in the state of Alabama, you have as many women and engineering and the mathematics and sciences in medicine and that medicine and pharmacy and so forth as you do men and sometimes many more women. No place in the state reflected Alabama. Sweeping change like Huntsville, Cold War defense spending turned Huntsville into the birthplace of America's space program. The Army consolidated rocket research there, by 1950 in 1960 NASA created Marshall Space Flight Center. The growth brought thousands of new high skill jobs and intellectual capital to the state way. Choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that gold will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. By the end of the decade, Alabamians have helped put the first man way. Alabama's resurgent Postwar economy meant more people across the state enjoyed access to technologies like television and air conditioning. More cars and better roads made Alabamians more mobile. Alabama cities grew, especially in expanding suburbs. Healthcare improved doors opened firm or educational opportunities, thanks to the G I bill. But despite so much Cheney in Alabama returning African American veterans found that old segregation laws and old patterns of race relations still remained. They did not believe that once they came back to this country, having defeated the likes of Mussolini, the likes of Adolf Hitler, that they should be force to succumb to second class citizenship. Decades of civil rights activism and legal victories had set the stage for the modern civil rights movement. In 1955 Alabama became a central battleground in big confrontation, such as Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, and many smaller ones. Struggles in Alabama led to the destruction of legal segregation not only in Alabama, but across the U. S. In the civil rights movement. We we know about Mrs Parks and we know about Dr King, and we know about Congressman John Lewis. But people don't know about 50,000 African Americans who stayed off the buses in Montgomery and the hundreds of people who might from Selma to Montgomery and hundreds of people in Birmingham who was stood the hoses and the on the dogs and the literally hundreds of individual who have filed lawsuits across the country to change the complexion of this nation. It took all of these persons in order to do so. I have a difficult from over, however frustrating the hour. It will not be long. Truth will rise again. Do not know of the moral universe is long, but it's been I will send the Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote because it's not just Negroes, but really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. Way Alabama produced a black population that was systematically undereducated, cheated in terms of tax policy of resources for public schools. And they produced perhaps the greatest nonviolent revolutionary movement in America. In the 20th century, Aziz, the structure of segregation began to shatter black and white. Alabamians had to develop new relationships and discover new ways of working together. Voting rights for black soon brought African Americans to political office. There they joined with white allies to dismantle many of the legal and political underpinnings that still held the old system in place. Theo, last 50 years of the 20th century, brought revolutionary change to Alabama, Alabamians had made stunning progress, creating a diversified economy and a more equitable society. The area of the state is incredible. A state that enters the 20th century where cotton is king, exits the 20th century, producing $20 billion a year worth of products that are exported abroad. There's a community of people that comes first, whether we compete together or work together. That sense of community is the most important aspect, and it's about making the whole community successful. The tension of Alabama is largely attention of strongly valuing tradition, strongly valuing your past and since a community and a sense of place and yet being pulled into a world where those really valuable characteristics of a population are increasingly stressed. The tug of traditionalism and provincialism in so many ways has held a state back and yet in so many ways connects it to a set of values. Principles, added tears, which sustain population. So the very same forces that create our problems tend also offer us the source of our solutions. At the dawn of the 21st century, Alabamians grappled with the enormous changes of the past even as they turned to face the future challenges and opportunities of a new era and forces of change as powerful and dynamic as any that had come before. Oh!