By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – Mobile may soon appear on the list that already includes Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and less famous places lately in the news, because their people were slain in the streets by police sworn to serve and protect the community. Or Mobile may miss the list.…
Kimi Maeda’s solo performance, Bend, tells the true story of two men interned in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II: Maeda’s father, an Asian Art historian who suffered from dementia at the end of his life, and the subject of his research, Isamu Noguchi, a half-Japanese-half-American sculptor. Weaving together live feed projections…
Will the City Government Side With the People or Industry? By Joe Womack – The “okey-doke,” as defined by Urban Dictionary and Africatown folklore means to pull the wool over your opposition’s eyes, to outsmart your opposition, to say one thing and mean another or to gain the upper hand by using trickery. President George…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — It’s beginning to look a lot like spring on the Gulf Coast. Today is the day clocks will spring forward and give us an extra hour of sunlight. But that does not mean all is right with the world. It never got cold enough…
By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — If Apple CEO Tim Cook was an anti-gay activist judge like Judge Roy Moore, an openly Christian conservative Republican like Richard Shelby and/or a football star like Kenny “Snake” Stabler, there would be a bronze statue of him in his home town of Robertsdale in the center of…
By Glynn Wilson and Walter Simon – MOBILE, Ala. — About 100 people rallied and marched downtown on Saturday, taking to the streets along with 70 other local groups nationwide in support of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont. Speakers and chanters called for economic equality, demanding an increase in the minimum…
Alabama Democrats react to the Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton PBS televised debate on Feb. 10, 2016. Watch the video here:
By Darryl Fears and Glynn Wilson – Exposure to emissions from coal-fired power plants over a long period of time is significantly more harmful to the heart than other forms of carbon pollution, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, released early Wednesday to coincide with the world climate talks…
By Glynn Wilson – MOBIlE, Ala. – While the national news is rife with stories about the death of the Keystone XL Pipeline out west, the ongoing climate talks in Paris and the low price of oil internationally, a local petroleum industry front group and the politicians and media they are trying to buy seem…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala – The temptation was too great for New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz. Photos of Donald Trump’s August 21 campaign rally at the football stadium here showed a throng so white it might have been a convention of albinos. Perhaps a spy agency’s scanning technology could pick out a few…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – After a couple years trudging through the weeds and thickets of laws, regulations, technical standards, hazard assessments, health effects, economic impacts and other consequences of petroleum storage tanks, Mobile has arrived at nearly the same place it began this trek. On June 11 a three-member subcommittee presented its…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – Thoroughbreds charging around the final turn and down the homestretch. Blinders strapped on the sides of their faces to keep their attention on the finish line straight ahead. Preakness Stakes at Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore. Second leg of the Triple Crown later this week. Delegations of civic leaders…
MOBILE, Ala. — Here’s a chance to support art, music and the victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam. There will be a special live music fundraiser at Gallery 450 on Dauphin Street Friday the 13th that promises to steel the show for the monthly Art Walk for March. What sparked this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Alabama…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – The threat of gay marriage in Alabama has roused governor George Wallace to rise from the dead and stand again in the schoolhouse door. When Roy Moore, chief justice of the state supreme court, flung himself this week between a federal judge in Mobile and the local bureau…
Will the City Government Side With the People or Industry? By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — The citizens of Mobile, especially those in the historic Africatown community along with members of the Mobile Bay Sierra Club, have held public meetings and spoken up: They do not want the Mobile Planning Commission and the City…
Africatown News – By Joe Womack – On December 16, 2014 the Africatown Community attended a meeting hosted by The Yorktown Baptist Church to voice their opposition to local industries attempt to re-zone a section of Africatown just North of The Community Gardens from residential to industrial. More than 150 Africatown residents, supporters and friends…
Planning Commission Denies Rezoning By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — More than 140 residents of Africatown turned out at a town hall public meeting Tuesday night to oppose an industrial rezoning that would open the way for a steel storage warehouse right across the street from a proposed tar sands crude oil tank city…
MOBILE, Ala. — A video tells the stories from December’s Art Walk, where controversy spurred a movement to set the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest gathering of Santa’s Elves. The count fell short. But according to observers, it would was great to see such a large and diverse number of people having…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – Remember those photos from Pakistan several years ago? Squadrons of unruly lawyers in suits and ties, some with flowing wigs left over from British imperial days, wielding brief cases like cudgels in the streets to protest an insult to themselves and the constitution by autocratic rulers? Now picture…
By Joe Womack – To commemorate the 155th anniversary of the beginning of the Africatown saga and the 154th anniversary of the landing of the last recorded shipment of slaves to this country, here is a summary of the “Africatown Story” from 1859 to today. (As told to me by Mr. Henry Williams as he…
