Our Southern Home: Scottsboro to Montgomery to Birmingham - The Transformation of the South in the Twentieth Century

Our Southern Home, a creative nonfiction account of significant events in Alabama history in the twentieth century, is told through the lives of three eighteen-year-old teenagers whose lives are forever altered on March 25, 1931, when the infamous Scottsboro Boys tragedy starts in northern Alabama: Clarence Norris, black, one of the Scottsboro Boys; Waights Taylor, white, a student at the University of Alabama; and Rosa McCauley Parks, black, a resident of Pine Level, Alabama. All three will become involved in the Scottsboro events in different ways with profound implications to the region and their lives.

Our Southern Home is based on four broad themes: (1) The inevitability of change; (2) The importance the accident of birth places on most individuals, and the resulting extreme disparities between being born white or black in the South; (3) The Scottsboro period in the 1930s represents the nadir in Alabama’s segregated history; (4) Southerners, black and white alike, are inexplicably connected, both figuratively and literally, in ways the region has yet to fully recognize and accept. The life stories of Clarence Norris, Waights Taylor, and Rosa Parks are the manuscript’s consistent thread through the tragedy of the Scottsboro Boys and their trials, and other critical civil rights moments including Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham.