San Antonio College Library

Nate Shaw's father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story...

Autobiography of George C. Wallace, the governor of Alabama who was left partially paralyzed by an assassination attempt in 1972.

In telling the Wallace story, Lesher brings to life what C. Vann Woodward calls the "burden of Southern history, placing Wallace and the sentiments he exploited in the context of Reconstruction and the long struggle, not just of black Americans, but of the white Southern poor as well. By tracing Wallace's rise from the rural poverty of Depression-era Alabama, Lesher allows us to see the whole, complex picture of a small-town politician who had always...

In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life. This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...

"A heroic reconstruction of the forgotten life of a wrongfully convicted man whose story becomes an historic portrait of racial injustice in the civil rights era."--

By the creator of the Web site, A Year to Remember, this book includes poems, photos, and journal entries from that site.

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda, to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers...