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Poverty in Alabama

The Twentieth Century

The Civil War

The Future of Poverty in Alabama

Alabama

  • At the end of 2016, it was estimated that nearly 900,000 people in Alabama were living in poverty.
  • That number is expected to grow in the coming years due to the rising number of children who live in poverty.
  • These children are likely to carry their poverty into adulthood because they are unable to get an education due to their respo
  • The state's educational system remained in neglected, especially for blacks and rural whites,
  • Family welfare payments were the nation's second lowest.
  • The state income tax by the end of the twentieth century was the nation's most regressive, taking affect when a poor person earned only $4,600 a year.
  • Poverty in families:
  • Children under age 18 experienced a poverty rate of 24 percent, and nearly one in three of all children lived in a single-parent family.

  • The state of Alabama's residents and government have always struggled with severe poverty.
  • The state's long history of slavery, racial discrimination, and segregation explains some of the reason why the state has struggled with money, but the problems continued long after the Civil War .
  • Alabama's poverty began in the early 19th century, after the state's constitution was put into place in 1901.
  • The Civil War and Reconstruction made things worse for poor white families and only helped African American's marginally.
  • The effects that were detrimental to white farmers included:
  • globalization of the cotton industry
  • the decline of land values and cotton prices
  • population growth that divided farms into smaller parcels that were kept in family trees
  • How African American's profited from Reconstruction:
  • gained some control over their own mobility
  • earned the right to negotiate their labor and residency through labor and tenancy contracts

How Poverty Affects Different Races

  • Black single mothers had nearly a 50-50 chance of being poor.
  • White single mothers: a 1 in 6 chance,
  • Black couples: a 1 in 10 chance.
  • In 2010, 15 percent (487,100) of Alabama's whites were poor.
  • 37 percent (457,900) of its African Americans were poor.
  • A staggering 45 percent (81,700) of Hispanics were poor.

1950

2015

1910

2020

1900

21st Century Poverty

The 1940's-1960's

The Past

  • Alabama's rural landscape was an economic and social tragedy.
  • A 1940 statewide survey valued white rural land owners at only $681 and white and black tenants at only half of that.
  • Only 1.4 percent of these rural houses contained running water, 0.7 percent a toilets that flushed, 11.6 percent a refrigerator, and 19.9 percent a radio.
  • The 1960 Census revealed that 28 of Alabama's 67 counties had poverty rates of 20 percent or more, with children under age 18 most likely to be poor.
  • The poverty rate is more than 19 percent according to the 2010 census.
  • The rate of poverty among elderly Alabamians has gone down, but the rate among children has gone up.
  • For all the efforts to bring jobs to Alabama in the era of open markets and free trade, there were clear winners and losers.
  • In Alabama, low-wage timber and pulpwood workers, textile operatives, and other low-skill employees lost jobs while well-educated skilled workers found enhanced economic opportunities.
  • The 1901 constitution was the start of poverty in Alabama:
  • It disfranchised and deprived nearly all African American males and a large section of working-class White men.
  • It enacted tax limitations, making it very difficult to raise property taxes. This placed many of the tax burdens on state sales taxes that fell onto the shoulders of the poor.
  • Due to insufficient tax revenues, the state's education system and public health programs were neglected which could have helped those in poverty rise above it.
  • Individual choices by the poor, such as, drug and alcohol abuse, added to the rising problem of poverty.

Trying to Overcome Poverty

  • Alabama's poverty has inspired a number of reform efforts, ranging from private charity (food pantries, thrift stores, clothing closets) to systemic attempts to change Alabama's 1901 Constitution and the regressive tax system established by it on the other.
  • Alabama Arise, Voices for Alabama's Children, Greater Birmingham Ministries, Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, A+ for Education, the Alabama Poverty Project, and many other groups came together to address poverty by changing the economic systems put in place early in the twentieth century by Alabama's Big Mules, planters and industrialists who viewed low-skill, low-wage, non-union labor as exactly what the state needed to bring prosperity.
  • The failure of their century-long dominance of Alabama politics and economy to bring wider prosperity or to reduce poverty was the very force that created the new reform efforts at century's end.
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