alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Look for Leadership Close to Home, Not Down The Road in Montgomery

Wayne Flynt For The Birmingham News

October 17, 1999

Analyzing leadership begins with definitions. Who is a leader and what makes someone such a person? The question can quickly spin out of control into too much abstraction and speculation. So let’s attack the problem in a different way.

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower, George Patton, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Paul “Bear” Bryant – they have all been notable leaders during the past century.

Disagreeing substantially as they did in ideology, they nonetheless shared many characteristics: audacity; willingness to take risks; capacity to think in unconventional ways; disregard of what their contemporaries thought or said about them; the ability to boldly articulate what they believed; conviction that their opinions were correct even in the face of withering criticism and determination to persist in their course; visionary in their capacity to transcend their own times and think in terms of long-term benefits, often ignoring short-term discomfort.

A good definition can be also be found for what leaders are not. An early 19th century school teacher in Marion advertised that his geography class taught geography from the perspective of either a round world or a flat world, as the parents desired. He was not a leader.

Many Alabamians complain that their state produces few leaders worth the definition. But the evidence for this argument is not convincing. Actually, Alabama has produced its fair share of bold innovative, risk-taking, independent-thinking, audacious leaders in every sphere of life. In fact, the relative failure of bold political leadership has propelled into the public arena many individuals who would have preferred to remain in a quiet, private sphere.

It may be true that, compared to surrounding Southern states, Alabama’s gubernatorial leadership has been woefully inadequate. Comparing the dominant governors of my lifetime – John Patterson, George Wallace, Guy Hunt, Fob James – to those of other Southern states (Zell Miller and Jimmy Carter in Georgia; Winfield Dunn and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee; Reubin Askew and Bob Graham in Florida; George Bush and Ann Richards in Texas; William L. Waller, William Winter, and Dick Malbus in Mississippi) does not make Alabama rank well.

But during the same period, we were offered different choices – such as Albert Brewer, Ann Bedsole, Mike Figures, Howard Hawk, Jim Folsom Jr. and Jim Folsom Sr. Indeed, the much-maligned Jim Folsom Jr. may have been the boldest of them all, challenging Alabama to massive tax and educational reform, recruiting the world’s premier auto company, resisting conformist pressures from conservative social and religious zealots, and sympathetically trying to improve the lot of children and working-class people.

‘Outside agitators’

Because bold political leaders tend to be shot down in flames by Alabama voters, it seems fair to ask whether the state has been cursed by a failure of leadership or a failure of followship. Another way to put the issue, as unpleasant as it sounds, is that Alabamians have gotten exactly the miserable quality of politicians that they deserve for electing candidates who have wooed them with racial and religious bigotry, simplistic solutions to complex problems, and a steady diet of blaming all our problems on “outside agitators.”

If that assumption is correct, what can be done to overcome it? The answer is simple: education. And not just the education that occurs in school, either.

Alabama now has the best newspapers of the past half-century. Editors are boldly confronting readers with problems that average citizens don’t want to acknowledge.

Alabama journalists have won award after award for thorough journalism. They are publicly challenging politicians at every level of government to greater accountability and public scrutiny. Corruption and abuses of power still occur in Alabama – but not with the same guarantee of secrecy that once existed.

Business people and even some educators have been equally outspoken about public education. Fed up with a system that neither adequately educates our children nor polices its own members, various reform groups are demanding a higher level of educational accountability.

Even the Alabama Education Association has responded to some of those demands, al- though kicking and screaming most of the way.

Higher education, fractured into competing parts and usually too busy with its own selfserving agenda to offer broad and bold leadership, is finally beginning to work cooperatively, and to offer its resources for problem-solving, as well as classroom education. Public outreach may, in fact, be the most important service the state’s public universities offer its citizens during the next century.

Civic and business leaders, long frustrated at the ship, have fashioned a widespread array of leadership programs that select leaders from a cross-section of our citizens, then expose them to a year-long array of conflicting speakers and opinions.

This training is already bearing fruit by allowing liberals and conservatives, men and women, blacks and whites, businessmen and labor leaders, religious con servat- ives and secular humanists to listen to each other, argue, disagree, but come away with some new approaches to problem-solving and even occasionally with mutual respect, if not agreement.

Best of all, leaders have discovered they don’t have to live part of the year in Montgomery to change their communities. Indeed, the most exciting leadership is not statewide but local. People weary of being last in everything that really mat- ters and first in everything that is embarrassing have taken matters into their own hands.

Alabama Arise, the Gift of Life Foundation, Success by Six, A+, Voices for Alabama’s Children, the Alabama Poverty Project and Children First are just a few of literally hundreds of local initiatives to make Alabama a better and more just place to live.

So, if you believe Alabama’s leadership has failed, it is likely that you are looking for leaders in all the wrong places. Look close to home and you will probably be surprised by what you find.

Wayne Flynt is Distinguished History Professor at Auburn University.