Most of the land of the state is like the rest of the South: slightly rolling hills with fields and some forests, scattered with post-war housing, condensing on the edges of small towns, with gas stations, fast food, and shopping centers, then a few blocks of a worn, old main street at the core.ĬLUI photo A dramatic walk-through public sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park. Other pockets of affluence and industry include a major munitions plant and arsenal at Anniston a still active textile industry, which includes one of the nation’s leading sports clothing manufacturers, around Alexander City the State Universities at Tuscaloosa and Auburn isolated and periodic massive car plants and wood product plants and fancy vacation communities along the shores of Alabama’s small stretch of coastline. Supporting deal-making businesses such as these is a string of 18 golf courses, spread out from Huntsville to Mobile. These companies, like some of their out of state competitors Bechtel, KBR, and Fluor, build infrastructure and industry around the world. Birmingham also has the headquarters for a few major engineering firms, such as Rust International, Herbert International, BE&K, Brasfield and Gorrie, and Blount International. Birmingham, the largest city in the state, now has a service economy, with the headquarters of a number of national corporations, such as Healthsouth, Liberty National Insurance, and the three big southern banks: Amsouth, Regions, and Southtrust. The north central part of the state has a number of major steel and pipe manufacturers, though Birmingham’s steel industry no longer dominates the regional economy (the landscape around the city has many former- and some active- steel plants). The north has some large TVA power plants and dams that spurred federally supported industry in the 1930’s and 1940’s, such as fertilizers and explosives, and which laid the foundation for a high-tech industrial belt that is still strong today, centered around Huntsville. Its largest industry, in financial totals, is automobiles. ![]() As a result, folkways and localized regional culture is strong, as frequent flourishes of unique folk art and crafts attest.Įconomically, Alabama is an industrialized state now. It is also one of most “provincial” places in the USA- people tend to live near where they were born. One in six people (750,000) live in “mobile homes,” whatever that means. Alabama has 4.4 million people, 71% of whom are white, 26% are Black. Despite its reputation, it is only the 7th poorest state in the USA in per capita income (it is beat out by Mississippi, West Virginia, New Mexico, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Montana). Chicken is the largest farm product (only Arkansas makes more “broilers”). THERE ARE STILL COTTON FARMS in Alabama, but now the state’s largest agricultural outputs are forestry products and peanuts. This time the Center’s normal staff of researchers were assisted by a group of graduate students from the Curatorial Practice Program at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. CLUI photoĮvery year the Center takes one state to focus in on and study in depth. ![]() CLUI photo The Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, a town that is still steeped in the Southern exotic.
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