Martha Barksdale of Collinsville Alabama versus the Yellowhammer and Tuberville Know Nothings

      Martha Barksdale is well known in Collinsville and NE Alabama to be the woman who keeps the trains running on time with her civic work, Women's study clubs, Historic association and a legend among Home Ec Teachers across the state. One of her mentors was Mary Katherine Reed of my Mothers 1940 Collinsville HS Class, MKat the first woman in the county to earn a doctorate, longtime mid 20th chair of the Home Ec department at U Bama who leaned forward in her day on race relations.

    Martha is a longtime Republican with her husband of Sand Mountain, Thomas who played football for both the Bear and Bobby Bowden.

    It is doubtful the Collinsville Baptist church would be solvent without the tithes of the Barksdales and their influence of the last 60 years and her father before that of the WV Graves Hardware store.

     I think Martha knows in her heart the Bama GOP today is not the same party of Eisenhower and Judge Frank Johnson. I was proud of Martha and Thomas for reading Furman grad Ed Bridges Bicentennial history of Bama just last year and hosting him at the Cricket Theatre with the Historical Society.

      The current GOP of Tuberville and Yellowhammer News is poison. See the links and conversation at the Covenant site of Baptistlife.com forums.

    It is a Know Nothing party and Kyle Whitmire easily googled recent column of Tommy Tuberville at the Rotary Club tells you all you need to know.

     In the 90s I read Harold Bloom's The American Religion that made a strong case the fundamentalists who took over the Southern Baptist Conventions had its antecedent in the Know Nothings of the 1850s who gave Lincoln Hell. Now they are on the march in Bama against Doug Jones.

     Among folks who understand that or have recognized it in other places include Hillary Beard of FBC Ft Payne whose father is associate pastor of FBC Guntersville; Cherilynne Crowe product of the same church, Samford and Vanderbilt grad now in the DC offices of the Baptist Joint Committee; Wayne Flynt and Mark Wilson of FBC Auburn and the Auburn Democracy project which has had an 8 year and counting relationship with the Collinsville Library which Martha's Study Club sponsors; Susan Weaver and her parents and her husband John Morgan the Third of Auburn UVA and now Habitat for Humanity; Coach Neal Thrash of Collinsville now in Fyffe and I have to believe when they think it through the 8 couples who hosted Judge Raines when the Know Nothings came after him ten years ago. Eight of Collinsville influential families came together to show their support at a reception at the Library to show their public support for Raines.

     I am hoping those folks connect the dots that even though stakes were high for Raines, they are exponentially higher now in the Senate Race and Doug Jones is the way forward for people who now know George Wallace was wrong in the 60s. Tuberville is just as wrong now and Wallace is his most flagrant Demagogue days was then. Vote for public education the leads to civic discernment, is not anti science and does not continue the distortions of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

   In Collinsville, if you really really understand what it means to be a Christian vote for the Hispanic children you have invited to Vacation Bible School for 25 years now, the Jesus of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Lottie Moon, Frank Johnson, Tom Corts, Harper Lee, Becky Kennedy, and Maria Fernanda Moreno.

   Don't be suckered by the hypocrisy of the mendacity of the politics of abortion which Lee Atwater adopted as a strategy because as he said you can't say the Nword in public anymore. Doubt me? Read Stuart Stevens the GOP operative from Mississippi in his book It was All a Lie.

    Vote with my Sunday School Teaching Mother and her Daughter my sister. Vote with the overwhelming Girl Scouts of America and their legacy.

     Vote with Nick Saban and Paul Finebaum Greg Sankey and the Honors Program of the University of Alabama, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the leadership of the United Methodist Church, Episcopalians, Jews and the Catholics at Nick Saban's St Francis.

    I don't know how Martha will vote. She played the piano at my Father's funeral and I am forever grateful for that and her friendship and Thomas over the years in Collinsville. She is a real person, but she is also a symbol.

    Progressive women talk and have their networks. As never before they can make a difference if they show up and lean forward in Alabama this year and add one more blanket on the fire to snuff out the Know Nothings.