The complexity of the struggle to desegregate public libraries can be seen in the way it played out very differently in two Southern cities: Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Jackson, nonviolent protest unleashed brutal white violence against blacks, and was resolved only by means of federal intervention and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s filing of a class action lawsuit. In Birmingham, despite initial pushback from whites, public libraries were desegregated surprisingly quietly and relatively peacefully, though the city would soon be reeling from a series of bloody confrontations elsewhere.

In Mississippi, the participants in the struggle included a band of courageous black college students called the “Tougaloo Nine.” Named after the historically black Tougaloo College, a private, liberal arts institution that had been founded by Northern Christian missionaries to educate free slaves and their descendants, the Nine were highly disciplined and organized, and used the tactics of nonviolent resistance to draw attention to the institutionalized racial discrimination and inequality around them.

Shortly after opening the Jackson, Mississippi Public Library on March 27, 1961, the white director was asked by two newspaper reporters if she was aware that a group of black students was coming to the library that day. She was not, she said, but after the reporters left she immediately phoned the police. “Contact us when the students arrive,” they responded. Unbeknownst to the director, while she was talking to police, the nine Tougaloo College students—four women and five men, and all members of the NAACP—were preparing for Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration. NAACP mentors told all to dress well, sit quietly in the library, and avoid violence.

The four women wore dresses, the men dress shirts and ties; some added sport coats. First they visited Jackson’s George Washington Carver branch, which served blacks, and requested books that they knew were not there. At about 11:00 a.m., they walked to the main library.

“I went into the library and I stood up by the card catalog and was thumbing through it,” Ethel Sawyer later recalled. “After I didn’t see the…title of the book I wanted, I went over and sat at one of the tables…until the time I was interrupted.” Albert Lassiter stood in front of the card catalog with a clear view of the front door. “I had seen what a billy club could do to a guy’s head, so I positioned myself so I could see the blows coming. I didn’t want to get a blind shot.”

Ten minutes passed. During that time, the librarian called police, then approached the students, asking if she could help them. We’re doing research, they responded. She suggested that they visit one of the two black branches. Immediately thereafter, a group of policemen came in and told the students to get out of the library. But “nobody moved,” Sawyer said. About a minute later, the police chief told them they were under arrest. Six officers placed all the students into squad cars, and at the station charged them with breach of the peace.

In jail that evening, Tougaloo students worried. “Reflecting back on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” Joseph Jackson told an OC Weekly reporter in 2015, “the later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.” He began rehearsing what he would say if the Ku Klux Klan came for them. “Please, Mr. Klansman, don’t hang me. I have a wife and two little children in Memphis, and if you release me this night, I promise you I will never, ever come back here to Jackson, and violate your Jim Crow laws.” “Well, that sounds very good,” one cellmate responded, “but you know what the Klansman would say? ‘N—–, you should have thought of that before you entered our segregated public library!’”

Several days later, the students were taken to the courthouse to be tried, and, again, reporters were ready. So were a hundred supporters who cheered the “Tougaloo Nine.” When the crowd began to applaud the students as they arrived for their trial, the police chief yelled, “That’s it! Get ‘em!” Police then set upon the crowd with nightsticks and dogs, as once again reporters captured the event with cameras snapping. In the melee, NAACP representative Medgar Evers and several women and children were beaten, two men were bitten by the dogs, and an 81-year-old man suffered a broken arm when police beat him with a club.

To describe the melee, white segregationists defaulted to their canned response. In his daily column, a Jackson newspaper staff writer complained, “A quiet community has been invaded by rabble-rousers stirring up hate between the races, and following are the…publicity media feeding an integrated North the choicest morsels from the Mississippi carcass.…The Negro who has so long held the guiding and helping hand of the white,” he warned, “may lose that hand as he climbs the back of his benefactor and teacher to shout into halls where he is not welcome.”

Amid the din, the Tougaloo Nine went to trial. They were quickly found guilty of breach of the peace. Each student was fined $100, and their 30-day sentences were suspended on condition that they “participate in no further demonstrations.” None of the students testified, but a police captain said they had been arrested because their presence at the library could have caused “trouble.” Medgar Evers later argued that the brutality exercised on those black supporters set into motion the broader desegregation activities in Mississippi. On January 12, 1962, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit and five months later a federal judge ordered the Jackson Public Library to desegregate.

In Alabama, the desegregation of Birmingham’s Public Library progressed quite differently.

In early April 1963, Southern Christian Leadership Council Executive Director Wyatt Walker recruited fair-skinned Addine “Deenie” Drew to pass as white and case the downtown library to prepare for a public library sit-in. Attired like a middle-class white, in blue and white silk dress and hat, she entered the library unhindered, walked through reading rooms and stacks, and after noting all entrances and exits, left the building to call Walker from a pay phone across the street. The experience was so traumatic, she later recalled, she had to “look down at my feet and tell them to keep walking.” On April 9 she and other black students entered the library, and sat reading at desks, undisturbed. Whites stared, but said nothing. When librarians took no action, students left quietly.

Disappointed that they had provoked no incident, Walker planned a second sit-in the next day. He told 12 students to approach the library that afternoon, and asked Shelley Millender, a student at Miles College, another historically black school, to speak for the group once they got inside. As they approached the library two white men came up to Millender. “I was really afraid that day,” he later recalled. If violence occurred, he hoped the media would be there to photograph the incidents. He was unaware the two men were newspaper reporters whom Walker had tipped off. They followed him into the library, and as the other students gathered, Millender spoke to librarians at the circulation desk.

Birmingham had a library for Negroes, the librarian said; Millender should go there. Millender and the librarian then had “quite a little skirmish in terms of rhetoric,” he later recalled, and when finished, Millender sat at a desk with several other students. Police came, but after several phone calls and much muffled conversation refused to arrest them. Forty-five minutes later students left “voluntarily and without incident or disturbance,” the library director later told his board, although when they walked through a crowd of young whites, some uttered remarks like “it stinks in here,” and “why don’t you go home?” “We were there to get arrested,” Millender said; when that did not happen, they saw no purpose in staying.

At a quickly assembled board meeting the next day, the library director wanted approval of his actions the previous day and guidance for what he perceived would be inevitable future sit-ins. The board discussed alternatives, and although it rejected any use of the library for sit-in demonstrations, it approved the director’s actions and unanimously passed a resolution that “no persons be excluded from the use of the public library facilities” because of race. The very next day, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and 132 other protesters, and in subsequent weeks, millions of television viewers across the county watched Connor’s minions using fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. Then, on September 15, the nation was shocked when four adolescent black girls attending Sunday School died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

By “quietly desegregating” in the midst of a violent summer, the Birmingham Public Library actually functioned as a lone mediating site for facilitating racial reconciliation. Perhaps board members approved the effort to counter the national image of violence Connor helped create for their city; perhaps they feared cameras capturing and news media reporting on similar violence in their library. At a July board meeting, the library director reported a distinct increase in the number of blacks using the main library facilities, and particularly the formerly white branch closest to a black neighborhood. When the director testified in court in December, he reported that the Birmingham Public Library was an integrated institution. But the media—national and local—had largely ignored the library in its coverage.

For many years the activists who desegregated these libraries remained “hidden figures” in the history of the civil rights era and the South.

It wasn’t until June 24, 2018, that the American Library Association (the world’s oldest and largest such organization) formally recognized the activists and their struggle, by passing a “Resolution to Honor African Americans Who Fought Library Segregation” at its annual conference in New Orleans. The resolution apologized for the role the Library Association played in supporting segregated libraries and discriminating against African American librarians. And it commended, “African Americans who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing public libraries to live up to the rhetoric of their ideals.”

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When I became a historian in the 1960s, I gravitated to a man on the move and through him achieved mobility myself. I wrote a book about Daniel Webster, the greatest orator of his day, who progressed from New Hampshire farm boy in the 1790s, to Massachusetts Senator in the 1830s, to U.S. Secretary of State in the 1840s. Riding his coattails, I moved from merchant’s son in Texas to college professor in North Carolina.

So nothing in my experience prepared me for what I found when I ventured to Alabama in 1978 on a very different project—namely, to see if I could locate descendants of enslaved African Americans who had been sent to work a plantation in western Alabama in 1844. I wanted to learn if they had an oral tradition that might shed light on the Great Migration of the 19th century. Termed by historians as the Second Middle Passage, that disruptive event, which took place between 1815 and 1860, forcibly moved a million enslaved persons from the eastern part of the South, where none of the mainstay crops—tobacco, wheat, corn—paid as handsomely as cotton, which grew bountifully to the west. By the thousands, black workers were relocated to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where they would toil on the rich, cotton-growing soils of those newly settled states.

I found many descendants of these dislocated workers, who told me stories from the vivid oral tradition about the forced migration. But, to my amazement, I also came upon the incredible story of one family whose first freed generation bought the 1,600-acre plantation of their former owner, a distressed property known as the Cameron plantation in Hale County, Alabama, where cotton had once grown. Their descendants shared with me the history of subsequent generations, who remained on the land throughout the 20th century and into the second decade of our own time.

Many of us are familiar with the dramatic story of the Great Migration of the 20th century, the saga of millions of rural black Southerners who left the poverty and Jim Crow shackles of the region for the cities of the North, Midwest, and West, a tale most recently chronicled in Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificent oral history, The Warmth of Other Suns. But as historian Eric Foner has noted, many more African Americans stayed in the South than left—albeit most on land different from the plantations where they’d been held in bondage.

The descendants of Alice Hargress. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

What happened at the Cameron plantation was historically unusual. As a research subject, it was unusual as well. Generations anchored on a single stretch of land, documented in a white planter’s archives and black families’ oral histories, allowed me to trace a narrative of black life in a single community from 1814, three decades before the migration to the west, forward to 2014.

It took me some time to realize that this history of continuity was emblematic of a much bigger story—that of the millions of African Americans who remained in the rural South, for a century and a half after Emancipation. It is the story of when and why black-owned land mattered, and matters still.

No one knew the history of the black people who bought the Cameron plantation better than one man. Louie Rainey, I came to find out, was the oral historian of the community. Born in 1906, he grew up in the household of his grandmother, who shared stories of slavery and freedom with her inquisitive grandson. Gifted with a prodigious memory, Louie Rainey became a collector of narratives for the entire settlement. For decades, his porch was the place where everyone came to visit, the old to share stories of the past, the young to hear him retell the tales. On that porch, starting in 1978 and until his death in 1986, he shared those vivid accounts with me.

“You can go where you want to go, can do what you want to do!”

That’s what Louie Rainey’s grandmother told him that she heard at the “speakin’” at nearby Greensboro, Alabama in June 1865, where the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau told her and thousands assembled in town, “You’re free, you’re free!” Many newly emancipated men and women of that first generation collected their spare belongings and moved, eager to leave behind planters, overseers, and places where they’d been held captive. But on the Cameron plantation, Louie Rainey and others told me, emancipated people found ways—already in place—to achieve their foothold in freedom.

Louie Rainey. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

Paul Hargis, his two brothers and their wives, who had been enslaved on the property, bided their time after Emancipation, staying put “against all comers” despite crop failures and better prospects elsewhere that led others to depart. The Hargis brothers knew from the plantation overseer that the planter wanted to sell out; if they remained, they might be among the buyers.

The chance they had been waiting for came in the 1870s, when they bought 100 acres from their former master, a man named Paul Cameron, who by 1873 was indebted and ready to sell. The Hargis family made a deal with the hard-pressed planter on the only terms they could afford and he could get—no money down, and five years to pay their debt in cotton. Their gain was not only self-supervision. Acquiring the land also allowed them to keep their family intact. For the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, family members made a living off their land by staying and farming together.

Paul Cameron sold the rest of his plantation in parcels to eight other families who had worked his land. For Eli Williams, land ownership provided liberty undreamed of in bondage. He hired others to work his crop, and spent his days riding round the settlement high on a horse, sporting a wide-brimmed hat, wearing a blue chamois shirt with a high “city-lawyer collar.” Slavery had been on his master’s terms. Freedom would be on his own.

For severely bow-legged freedman Tom Ruffin, farming and riding were out. Instead, he learned how to manage oxen, and parlayed his skill into hauling timber, hiring hands, and earning enough to become the largest black landowner in the county. Asked often by baffled whites how he’d acquired 2,000 acres, he cagily replied, “I worked while you slept—and if you’d slept another wink, I’d a got it all!”

For the second generation, the children of those who bought the plantation, the primary goal shifted to holding on to the land. Overuse and land division made their farms less productive than places worked by sharecroppers and renters on adjacent white-owned properties, which had richer soil. But from their vantage point, land ownership still gave them sanctuary from pressures to which their landless neighbors had to bow: deference to white owners, demands always to yassir and yes-ma’am white bosses, silent acceptance of year-end settlements where they always seemed to come out in debt. Worst of all, second-generation landowner Alice Hargress told me, many renters came to think that they simply couldn’t get along without “cap’n bossman.” Then, she said, “they were truly lost.”

Alice Hargress. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

Land meant even more during the Great Depression, which descendant James Lyles called “that Thirties wreck.” The New Deal agricultural policy of controlling “overproduction” led to massive evictions of sharecroppers and renters, turning dispossessed tenants into tramps. However depleted their soils, landowners didn’t “have to git!” After World War II, the third generation of landowners watched its sons and daughters leave farming for “the warmth of other suns,” as Richard Wright poetically termed hopes pinned on the North and West. Nonetheless, those who remained held on to the land for new reasons. Some hoped, vainly it turned out, that changing to different crops and joining in cooperative credit and marketing ventures could allow them to make a living even after cotton was replaced by cattle and catfish.

Others like Alice Hargress and James Lyles chose to keep even unremunerative land intact—for those who left to come back to, if they ever wished to return. They called it “heir land,” property held in common and undivided for “all the heirs.” If those who left fell short in their new lines of work, they wouldn’t have to become late-20th-century tramps.

Realistically, though, would those who fled ever wish to return to a South where, outside the bounds of their settlement, blacks “had to bend?” In 1965, the 51-year-old Alice Hargress and 69-year-old James Lyles faced up to that question, and marched to make Greensboro—and Alabama—a place to which their children want might to come home. They joined Civil Rights demonstrations that summer, endured tear gas, and went to jail. They gained voter rights for themselves and their children and grandchildren.

Fulfillment came, starting in the 1970s. Four of Alice Hargress’ eight children did move back to Alabama after working in California. They headed home to retire, look after their mother, and reconnect with relatives and friends who never left. Thousands more also decided to come back to the rural and small-town South at that time, an unexpected return-migration beautifully depicted by anthropologist Carol Stack in her 1996 book, Call to Home. Today, passing by the black-owned enclave of the former Cameron plantation, you can see a few older dwellings and a number of newer trailers, homes of those who have returned to “heir land.” Their return—and that of others to the rural South—has vindicated the striving of generations before them and replenished the community that landowning anchored and made possible.

By the early 1980s, I realized that I too had become an heir—not to property but to the family heritage which Alice Hargress and Louie Rainey and so many others generously shared with me. Alice Hargress died in August 2014, 18 days shy of her 100th birthday. For more than 30 years, she made her home my home, and her history my history. Her family’s story and example taught me not only why black land mattered. It taught me the transcendent importance of a home place: for them, for African Americans, and—no longer a tumbleweed—for myself.

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It was 1975, and the British rocker had traveled to Sheffield, Alabama, with a specific mission in mind: He wanted to record at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio with the musicians who created Aretha Franklin’s unforgettable, hit-making sound. Before she made the pilgrimage down South, Franklin was a Detroit gospel singer beginning to find success as a pop singer. She recorded her album “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You)” in Alabama.

Stewart was seeking the rhythm section that Mavis Staples had called out to on “I’ll Take You There.” But instead of the shaped-by-their-struggles black musicians he expected to find, when he showed up Stewart met a bunch of white Alabama fellas—the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

“We looked like—you know, short hair, you know just ‘Duh?’ you know, guys that worked at the supermarket or something,” bassist David Hood later told NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Stewart asked for a word with his producer, Tom Dowd of Atlantic Records. Surely Dowd had lied to him.

But no. Appearances aside, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section were crack instrumentalists who, beginning in the mid-1960s, were coveted as collaborators by some of the biggest names in the recording industry.

Their singular talent was being able to shape-shift to fit virtually any artist. The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section aimed to sound like Aretha when backing her up. When the Rolling Stones were in the studio in 1969, the Swampers, as they were known, had guided the British blues-rockers to three timeless songs in as many days of recording: “Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses,” and “You Gotta Move.”

And when Stewart arrived in 1975, all four Swampers—David Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins, pianist Barry Beckett and guitar player Jimmy Johnson—were ready to sound like Rod.

The four men had become known for their impeccable rhythm and ability to play with anyone when they were the house band at another venue. FAME Studios—an acronym for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises—allowed the young musicians to find work doing what they loved. FAME attracted great talent.

The legendary recording studio at 3614 Jackson Highway in Muscle Shoals. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Muscle Shoals, in northwest Alabama near the Tennessee state line, sits about halfway between the blues and jazz bars of Memphis and the honky-tonks of Nashville. The Muscle Shoals area includes Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Florence and, of course, Muscle Shoals. With a regional population of about 147,000 according to ESRI data, the area is steeped in a rich regional brew of R&B, country, rock, gospel, and soul, and the Swampers had an instinctive feel for each genre and how to weave them into sounds that were both rootsy and authentic, yet also startlingly original.

The region’s first hit had come from FAME, Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On.” Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding recorded there. “When A Man Loves A Woman,” Percy Sledge’s unforgettable hit, started its life at FAME. This talent built a reputation that drew more musical artists to Alabama’s quiet northwestern corner. But the members of the lauded rhythm section also wanted a stake in ownership, and FAME owner Rick Hall wasn’t interested in offering that. (Hall, known as the father of the Muscle Shoals sound, died this week at 85, after a battle with cancer.)

Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler had worked with the Swampers, and he saw an opportunity. The musicians found an available space, a concrete block structure on Jackson Highway. The building was constructed before World War II, part of a planned subdivision that never came to be. Henry Ford had planned to build an auto manufacturing center in the area, according to the studio’s National Register of Historic Places application. When he withdrew those plans, the area fell into a recession.

The structure and several nearby became part of a blind factory. Years later, the 25 by 68 square-foot building would become a recording studio, with Wexler’s financial support. Hood, Hawkins, Beckett, and Johnson would become studio owners and, over the years, grow the area’s musical reputation.

So many of the songs recorded at 3614 Jackson Highway and its successor, the studio’s second location at 1000 Alabama Avenue, remain classics. The studio’s unusual sonic qualities are evident even on The Black Keys’ Brothers, recorded in the original studio but without the benefit of its original musicians. That 2009 album was the duo’s first Grammy Award winner, and it has staying power.

The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s legendary recordings are emblematic of America: a melding of sounds and personalities, an opportunity for dissimilar people to bring out the best in one another. That’s rarely easy in the best of times, and the Swampers certainly weren’t living in them. The studio got its start in the turbulent late 1960s. The front line of the Civil Rights battle was only about 100 miles away in Birmingham. But artists of all skin tones found room for expression in the studio and others in the Muscle Shoals area.

“I could see that Southern whites liked their music uncompromisingly black,” Wexler wrote in his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music. “Despite the ugly legacy of Jim Crow, their white hearts and minds were gripped, it would seem, forevermore.”

The Rolling Stones, rehearsing before a 1969 concert on the stage of the Saville Theatre in London. Photo courtesy of Peter Kemp/Associated Press.

The Swampers were locals who made history without leaving northwest Alabama. They built a legacy of working with other musicians—from Paul Simon and Etta James, to Clarence Carter and Bob Seger—without regard to race any more than to musical genre.

A half-century after they first came together, their influence and legacy have spanned generations. Patterson Hood grew up around the bands that sought his Swamper father David’s expertise, and it shaped his own artistic future. Hood went on to found the alt-country Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers with fellow Shoals native Mike Cooley.

Former Drive-By Truckers bandmate Jason Isbell has made his own mark on the Americana charts, thanks to his hardscrabble but smooth vocals and introspective songwriting.

John Paul White, formerly of the band The Civil Wars, is now a co-owner of Florence-based Single Lock Records. Birmingham-based St. Paul and the Broken Bones released its debut effort on the label, whose lineup includes White himself, Nicole Atkins, and other modern hitmakers. It’s difficult to keep up with the rosters of some bands, as members often collaborate or belong to multiple projects. But it’s clear that locals and the international talent drawn to the still-quiet area are just as quick to work together as they were in the Swampers’ day.

There are more studios in the Shoals now than anyone can reliably count. FAME continues to record greats, including Isbell, Nashville Star winner Angela Hacker, and Gary Nichols of the Grammy-winning bluegrass band The SteelDrivers. Muscle Shoals Sound was recently restored to its former glory, thanks to investment by Beats Electronics, the headphone and speaker company founded by rapper Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine.

And although the earlier split between the musicians and Hall meant that there was tension between FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound for some time, these days the area’s two best-known studios collaborate to promote the area’s musical enticements.

Although the studios were a creative oasis for visiting musicians, they never were entirely shut off from the problems around them. Aretha Franklin, although she clicked with the musicians, decided not to return to Alabama after a racially charged incident outside of the studio.

But inside the studios, nothing was more important than working together to create great music. Decades later, Johnson offered a guess as to why the Ku Klux Klan tolerated the racially mixed enterprises: They liked the sound, too.

Like so many others before and after him, Stewart, the British soul man, found in Muscle Shoals not only the musicians he sought, but also something decidedly American: a collaborative environment where many influences join to show that the sum can be greater than the parts.

The post The Alabama Recording Studios Where Music Was Never Segregated appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As Washington increasingly cedes immigration law to the states, Alabama has displaced Arizona as the key cultural battleground on an issue that is ostensibly about work visas and regulations, but is really about national identity and membership in the national community.

Alabama, you may have heard, has passed the nation’s harshest law cracking down on illegal immigration. Undocumented workers here are afraid; many of them have pulled their kids from school and fled the jurisdiction. The state law is intended to make their lives here unsustainable, empowering schools and police to check everyone’s residence status at any time, and going so far as to invalidate the legality of any contract entered into by an undocumented immigrant. Courts have suspended some of the law’s provisions pending further review, but the core of the legislation is in effect. And some crops are rotting, as too many immigrants working the fields seem to have gotten the message they are no longer welcome.

I am a legal immigrant in this country, and next year I will become a U.S. citizen; hence my decision to take a celebratory stroll from New York to Los Angeles. I arrived in Alabama two weeks ago, and have been absorbing the maelstrom ever since, wrestling with conflicting emotions.

Last week I had dinner with a man I’ll call Rodrigo, who’s been living here since 1996. This is his home, the 33-year-old says, and he’s not leaving until they physically kick him out. And then he’ll come back. He walked across the desert once to get here, and he says he’s willing to do it again. Rodrigo’s friend, a woman I’ll call Ana, spent 16 years in California before she moved to Alabama two years ago. She is a victim of domestic violence who came here to get away from an ex-husband. The man had followed her to several cities on the West Coast. Two weeks ago, Ana packed a few suitcases and made preparations to leave on short notice if she must. She is living from one day to the next, but she’s also planning to stay for as long as she can.

They’re staying, they say in Spanish, because they have responsibilities here: “We can’t just walk out on our employers,” they explain, raising one of the oft-confusing contradictions surrounding illegal immigration. They broke the law to come, but someone is relying on their labor, and they are conscientious about their work. They asked me not to be specific about their jobs, for fear of being identified.

They are clear as to why they don’t want to go back to their native Mexico. “There are no rules there,” says Ana, “and you can’t live in a place where nobody obeys the law because then it’s like you have no rights. Everywhere you go, people want to get something out of you; you can’t drive a car without bribing someone, you can’t run a business without someone shaking you down.”

Again, the disconnect …

I could not help but point out the irony of someone who came here illegally complaining about the lack of law enforcement in the country she left. But Ana is unfazed. “I broke that one law, because I had no choice,” she says. “I could not get a visa, yet I knew that there were jobs available here. And ever since I came, I have abided by all other laws in the books. In California I even had a driver’s license and a Tax ID number. I filed taxes for years.” She wants me–someone who played by the rules in obtaining my legal residency–to think that the “original sin” of her life north of the Rio Grande, that failure to get a visa, ranks somewhere near jaywalking in the hierarchy of violations to the common good. Obviously, plenty of Alabamans feel differently, judging by the new law suggesting that these undocumented workers are Public Enemy 1, given the efforts prescribed to identify and uproot them.

At Ana’s mention of taxes, Rodrigo jumps in. “I pay taxes too,” he said. “I’ve paid them since day one, because no one would hire me without a social security number. Everyone here [at his place of employment, where six out of 10 people are here illegally] gets taxes taken out of their paychecks, and we don’t even get to file for a rebate at the end of the year.” He then fished a crumpled receipt from his pocket. “And look, every time I go to a store I pay sales tax.” Alabama, it should be noted, does not exempt food from sales taxes.

They were getting upset. I didn’t point out the fact that the social security numbers they use are fake, but I could see their point. They see themselves as pulling their own weight, not asking for any handouts. They do not see themselves as a drain on the system.

So I ask them if they are taking jobs away from American citizens. Ana responds with an anecdote. “My old roommate,” she says, “is a white American citizen. She didn’t work a single day we lived together. She was receiving unemployment, but when I told her there were jobs available at the chicken processing plant where I worked, she told me that she could make more by staying at home and collecting her welfare check.”

Rodrigo points out that there are jobs available now where he works, and that more are becoming available as immigrants leave the state. “Yet I don’t see anyone lining up to take them,” he says.

It’s hard not to respect the tenacity of people like Rodrigo and Ana. And I must also give them credit for their refusal to yield the moral high ground. They don’t think that what they are doing is wrong–all they want is to live and work in a place where their efforts pay off. It’s an American aspiration, even if they lack the right papers to be a part of the American community.

As is the case with similar state measures, who knows where the law will settle once the U.S. Supreme Court examines the constitutionality of the patchwork of state immigration laws coming into being. In Alabama, religious organizations and immigrant aid groups succeeded in delaying the provisions that would criminalize the “transport” or “harboring” of illegal immigrants. The particularly creative Alabama provision was the one making any contracts with illegal immigrants void and null. In Anniston, Alabama, I spoke with a personal injury lawyer who pointed out that people who are injured at work would have no recourse to worker’s compensation under the new law, because they could never be recognized as employees–their contract with their employer would be void.

But again, this law isn’t really about whom you need to show your papers to where. It’s not even about who is needed to pick the crops come harvest season. The law is about Americans–including the well-intentioned, the fearful, the bigoted, the economically anxious, the law-abiding rule-of-law types–wrestling with their culture and identity. Who belongs in our society, and what must we all share to preserve our cohesion?

It is too compelling a moment and story to shrug off and keep walking. I am interested in seeing how this law–and its enforcement–affect life in Alabama, not only for immigrants, but for the people who employ them and benefit from their services. I am interested in seeing how the debate about immigration evolves in this state and informs the national conversation. That is one of the reasons why I have decided to stay here through Thanksgiving, and to get a couple of jobs during the interim. I want to become a part of the community, and hear the stories of people on both sides of the debate.

The purpose of my cross-country walk, after all, is to discover the meaning of being an American, and for now I sense Alabama is a key part of the puzzle.

Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.

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