alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Wayne Flynt

The Birmingham News – Editorial

December 20, 1998

This is a tale of three books, each one appropriate to the season of Hanukkah and Christmas.

The first book and the most influential is the Bible. That book has many themes, but one of the most prominent is justice toward the poor, the oppressed, widows and orphans.

In fact, theologian Jim Wallis, editor of the evangelical magazine Sojourners, claims that justice for the poor is the second most prominent theme in the Old Testament, exceeded only by admonitions against idolatry. Perhaps that emphasis explains the historic emphasis of social justice and charity that has characterized Judaism throughout the centuries.

Christians retained that emphasis as a major part of their religion as well. The founder of Christianity, whose birthday Christians around the world celebrate, described his mission thusly: “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

That compelling proclamation has galvanized two centuries of Christian charity, and has made Americans arguably the most generous people in responding to the material needs of their own poor and the world’s suffering and oppressed masses.

The second significant book of this season owes much to the first. Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Christmas Carol stands unrivaled in literature as a modern incarnation of the biblical message of justice. An English novelist whose life (1812-1870) spanned much of the industrial revolution in Europe, Dickens grew up in a devout Methodist family. (Because they were religious dissenters in a country with an Anglican state church, Dickens’ parents are buried in a back section of Highgate Cemetery in London, despite the eminence of their son.)

That heritage made Dickens particularly sensitive to the injustices which he observed throughout England between those who had and those who had not. No single person of his time did more to publicized the poverty of industrial England or to bring about reform than Dickens.

The messages of his novels are twofold. All of us have a duty both to personal charity (something which I believe Jews and Christians have attended to with some consistency) and also to social justice (on which we have a mixed legacy.)

The third book borrows themes from the first two, but brings the Hanukkah/Christmas story perilously close to home. The Alabama Poverty Project has just released its Executive Report on Poverty for the State of Alabama and Its Counties. This is the most extensive study of poverty in this state ever done. Compiling reams of data from the 1990 census, from the Public Affairs Research Council at Samford University and the Center for Urban Affairs at UAB, the book reveals a world as dark and menacing as Tiny Tim’s in A Christmas Carol.

In 1990, nearly 1 in 5 Alabamians was poor. Nearly 44 percent of Alabama’s poor lived in extreme poverty, surviving on incomes of less than one-half the federal poverty threshold. That year 28 of Alabama’s 67 counties had poverty rates of more than 20 percent and four had rates of more than 40 percent.

Children under the age of 18 and adults over the age of 64 experienced the highest rates of poverty. Only three Alabama counties that year had high school graduation rates equal to or above the national average. Twenty-three counties had unemployment rates for poor workers that exceeded 25 percent.

Those wishing to examine how their own counties fared can obtain this report for $15 from Jo Dohoney, director, Alabama Poverty Project, Samford University, Birmingham 35229. Too bad we have no novelist who has yet done for the poor children of Alabama what Charles Dickens did for the Tiny Tims of London – transform them from dry statistics into living, breathing children, the ultimate casualties of an unjust economic and social system.

The poor children and the indigent elderly are still out there, down the dirt roads, in the public housing projects, in the shacks and hovels carefully hidden from sight so they do not intrude upon our abundance, complacency and materialism.

As we indulge ourselves this Christmas, this new publication of the Alabama Poverty Project should haunt all of us. If the banquets and plenitude leave us feeling physically bloated and spiritually empty, perhaps our unease is God’s gift to us this season.

It may be the divine presence reminding us of whose children we really are, and of all our brothers and our sisters whom we have left behind.