Alabama

By Jose Cardenas. On May 16, I was taken to jail in Montgomery, Ala., along with six others after we sat outside the Alabama legislative chambers and refused to move as bigots inside were ramming through their revisions to the shameful HB 56.

While in handcuffs, I couldn’t help but recall the terror I once felt when I was a child who felt his future was in doubt.  [...Read more]

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As the BP oil disaster claims process leaves the hands of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility and goes under court supervision, there's unfinished business, or rather an unfulfilled promise that it looks like Kenneth Feinberg's old outfit may be trying to cover up. Meanwhile, Alabama covers up its ugly immigration law with an even uglier one. [...Read more]

An Inspiring Community Leader from Bayou La Batre's Historic African American Community Passes. By Zack Carter. I am sad to report that one of our inspiring community elders, Stella Mae Smith of Snows Quarter, Bayou La Batre, Alabama has died. She suffered a heart attack at her home. [...Read more]

By Ingrid Chapman, crossposted from Justice Roars. I arrived in Alabama 2 days before HB 56 went into effect with the original plan of being here for 2 weeks. That turned into 3 months. I have just returned for 6 more months to work with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice. [...Read more]

Yesterday, a crowd of about 3,000 - 4,000 crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; Today, the Civil Rights activists continue on a week-long, 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery.  These marchers, some of them veterans of the original 1965 march for voting rights that took the same route, are not just comme [...Read more]

A year ago, Orlando Rosa was broadcasting music and setting up on-air talent for La Jefa, the largest Spanish-language radio station in Alabama. Then, in June, Governor Robert Bentley signed into law HB 56, on paper the strictest state law for criminalizing undocumented immigrants. [...Read more]

By Hannah Adams, crossposted from The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center Blog.  A little over four months ago a federal judge upheld most parts of the nation’s harshest anti-immigration law to date- Alabama’s infamous House Bill 56 (HB 56). [...Read more]

By Kathleen M Walker-Gordon. On June 25, 2010, when oil had been flowing from BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico for 66 days, Kathleen Walker-Gordon sat down in her Orange Beach home and wrote.  She wrote of her anger that one corporation could do so much destruction, and she wrote of her family's history in charter fishing, a way of life she feared was gone.  Here's that original essay, and [...Read more]

Alabama fisherfolk and community organizers were recently featured on the Apex Express, a radio show by and about Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Hear from Siriporn Hall, Minh Van Le, and Zack Carter about the state of the fishing industry in Coden and Bayou La Batre, "the seafood capital of Alabama." [...Read more]