68 Books Like Alabama Afternoons

I grew up in the 1960s and '70s, during a time when segregation ended, but racial strife continued, particularly in the South, so this book hits somewhat close to home.

Byron Woodfin sheds a meticulous inside light on how some people of privilege believed to be above the law and speaks to a time that all should remember so as not to repeat past mistakes. I found the storyline to be captivating, from the investigation of the attempted murder car bombing to the dramatic legal proceedings that later ensued.

This book is a real page-turner for those who enjoy true crime set in what one hopes to be a bygone era of racially motivated bigotry.

William James Edward is the grandfather of the author Donald Stone. The author does a great job of highlighting the importance that William J. Edward placed on lineage at the beginning of the book. The author shows the forgotten legacy of Edwards as one of Tuskegee’s first graduates. Edwards goes on to start a secondary school in Wilcox county Alabama, following the legacy of Booker T. Washington. The school was called the Snow Hill Institute and in its prime employed over 20 teachers and had over a dozen buildings on the campus. The curriculum was like Tuskegee, where the students learned trades and received a formal education. Under the leadership of William James Edwards, the school thrived until it was forced to close in the 1960s. Donald Stone mostly uses primary sources to paint a picture of the opposition that Edwards faced in trying to operate a school outside of… show more.

After the Civil War, the South was in turmoil, with ruined farms, destitute people, and existential uncertainty about the future.

John Hollis Bankhead of Alabama was one who stepped forward to ensure that little would change. He voted against the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and helped institutionalize convict leasing. As author Kari Frederickson writes, "Confederates may have lost the war, but white men like Bankhead were determined to thwart any possible political or social revolution."

Other Bankheads continued in the same vein including Marie who, as director of the Alabama state archives, embraced the Lost Cause narrative, rejected symbols of Reconstruction, and, in the name of state’s rights, opposed voting rights for women. Learning about this family’s success in molding the post-war South gave me new insight into issues of today.

In my writing I love to relate the stories of important historical actors that are unknown. Especially young actors.

Phillip Hoose apparently shares those loves. He gives us the story of Claudette Colvin who, at fifteen, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a White person. This was nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous stand. Through Hoose’s beautifully-rendered narrative, we are on the bus with Colvin that day and we are later in the courtroom when she bravely tells her story. 

As I said previously, I love to use the actual words historical actors spoke in my books. Hoose seems to share that passion as well. The author carried out fourteen interviews with Ms. Colvin. Through her own voice, we come to know this amazing young woman.

No can deny that pie is magic, but in this book, pies are literal magic: anyone who eats the fruit pies at the Blackbird Café will receive messages from their long-lost loved ones, thanks to the blackbirds who arrive at midnight and sing their dreams.

I adore the touch of magical realism in this gentle novel, and I can never read it without wanting a slice of pie and a glass of blackberry sweet tea. There’s something so quintessentially summery and wholesome about this book that you can practically taste it as you turn the pages.

Sara Brooks was one of seventeen children raised by landowning African American farmers in Alabama. Hers is a lively and evocative account of growing up on the land in a loving family and a harsh coming of age at the hands of an abusive man. Like many southern black women of the era, Brooks is able to escape the bleak conditions of her life by moving first to Mobile and then to Cleveland where she worked as a domestic, eventually acquiring her own home and reuniting with the children she had been forced to leave behind. Hers is a hopeful and richly textured story of resistance and resilience.

I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for graduate school in 1986, eleven years after this book was published, thirteen years after Nate Shaw’s death.

Reading the life of a man whose parents had been enslaved, a cotton farmer and sharecropper who bravely joined a union and stood up for other Black farmers, opened my eyes to the reality of life in the twentieth century for Black farmers in the state I now called home.

Told in expert storyteller Nate Shaw’s (a pseudonym for Ned Cobb) voice, based on interview transcripts, the book introduced me to a person and a way of life unlike anything I had encountered growing up in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

I used this adult coffee table book as a main reference for writing my children’s book of the same title. The amazing reproductions of the quilts are beautiful. The colors glow. I could see the bits of patterns –flowers, triangles, plaids – ingeniously composed like abstract paintings. Captions give the names of the quilters.  And there are photos of them as well as vintage pictures. Quotes from the quilters tell their histories. One of the most touching stories was by Missouri Pettway who told that when her Daddy died her mother took his old work clothes to make a quilt “to remember him, and cover-up under it for love.” I have seen this extraordinary quilt displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and remembering the story behind it, was deeply moved.

Southern sass and situational humor anchor Susan Sands’ novels.

Her first series set in fictional Ministry, Alabama, and her second in fictional Cypress Bayou, Louisiana, allow readers to meet a large cast of characters, some of which are sure to become favorites. Any book in her series can be an entry point as a stand-alone, but starting with Again, Alabama is an entertaining first step. 

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Rick Bragg’s writing is poetry.

He grew up dirt poor in Alabama. I grew up in a middle-class suburb in New Jersey. He and I have little in common but our love for our mothers. This story touched me on many levels. All mothers sacrifice to some extent in raising their children, but Rick’s mother went above and beyond while facing dire circumstances to provide for hers.

It made me appreciate my mother even more. And though I hadn’t discovered this book prior to my story, it reconfirmed my commitment to my mother.