Before 2005, Pearlington, Mississippi, wasn’t known for much — if at all. The small riverside town, population 1,153, hugs the southern corner of the state’s western border with Louisiana near the mouth of the Pearl River.
When Warren Tidwell arrived that fall, it was mostly rubble. After Hurricane Katrina made its second landfall a couple of miles from Pearlington, it became known as the town left behind.
“With Pearlington, I saw what happens to rural communities when they’re forgotten,” said Tidwell, then a mechanic by trade.
The Alabama native would spend two years working to rebuild homes there, organizing a nationwide network of grassroots organizations to help people put back together what they could of their lives.
Tidwell worked for decades in disaster relief both before and after Hurricane Katrina. He volunteered his time to aid communities hit by crises before founding the Alabama Center for Rural Organizing and Systemic Solutions (ACROSS) in 2023. ACROSS has expanded from managing immediate and long-term disaster recovery efforts to supporting communities as they work to build self-sufficiency and resilience and to strengthen bonds.
The drive that compelled Tidwell to found ACROSS is what unites him with other graduates of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Alabama Advocacy Institute. The nine-week program is designed to equip people working in communities across the state with the tools they need to create transformative change through collective action. The curriculum focuses on strategy, coalition-building and advocacy.
The selected applicants — 15 of them — met from June through September of last year at the SPLC’s Montgomery headquarters, where they attended sessions and workshops orienting them on the history of systemic racism in the U.S., structural barriers to change such as housing and social policy and a punitive legal system that incarcerates more people per capita than any other democratic country in the world.
“In the South, the fight for justice and real change has always begun in our own backyards,” said Tafeni English-Relf, the SPLC’s Alabama state office director. “When people rise up to confront issues in their communities, they’re not just responding to a moment, they’re building movements rooted in the lived experiences of their communities. That’s the kind of local advocacy that drives lasting, transformative change.”
Building partnerships, sharing resources
In spring of 2023, Angie Hayden stood before the city council in Prattville, Alabama. She had learned that a local parent had demanded the town’s public library remove books affirming LGBTQ+ families from the children’s section. Finding the library’s board uncooperative, the parent had called on the city council to order the library to remove the list of books.
“That was not something that I was willing to stand by and watch happen,” said Hayden, another graduate of the Alabama Advocacy Institute.
Hayden’s two daughters had grown up in the town’s library. As children, they often left the red brick building on Doster Street with a stack of books piled up to their noses. Her eldest daughter, now an adult, identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Hayden couldn’t stand the thought that the library could become a place where people like her daughter could be seen as dangerous or wrong. She felt moved to speak.
“I said, ‘I’m here because I want you to understand that there’s more than one kind of concerned parent in Prattville.’”
That was the beginning of Hayden’s opposition to library censorship, and the creation of the grassroots group Read Freely Alabama.
Neither Tidwell nor Hayden set out with the goal to enact broad change. At the heart of their work is the belief that people — their joy, their pain, their stories — matter.
Programs like the Alabama Advocacy Institute reinforce the SPLC’s commitment to fostering dialogue and strengthening bonds with communities across the South. The SPLC first launched this initiative in 2022 with the Mississippi Advocacy Institute. The SPLC plans to expand the initiative to Florida, Georgia and Louisiana — covering all five Southern states that are home to its operational offices.
Working in partnership with local, grassroots organizers like Tidwell and Hayden enables the SPLC to extend its knowledge, resources and skills — gained over more than 50 years advancing racial justice in the Deep South — to the frontline advocates striving to make people’s lives safer, healthier and more inclusive through community-driven work.
The fellows received training on organizing, data collection, fundraising and media strategy, as well as guidance on how to ally with legislators that could help bolster their efforts in the statehouse. Over the months of learning sessions, institute fellows heard from communications experts, attorneys, advocates and community organizers about everything from leadership development to visual storytelling and building bridges between Black and Brown communities.
“From beginning to end this was some incredible programming,” ACROSS’ Tidwell said.
Facing disaster
Things came to a head for Tidwell after a historic hailstorm devastated Camp Hill, Alabama, in 2023. Balls of ice, some 2 inches in diameter, battered the town of 1,000 people. Then the rain pelted down, instigating a flood.
Ninety percent of cars were totaled. Hundreds of roofs were destroyed. Days later, a mass shooting at the birthday party of a local teenager, held in a nearby town, led to the deaths of four people and left more than 30 injured. Many of the victims were from Camp Hill.
Tidwell and a team of volunteers resolved to help the community recover — however long it took. When he began meeting with residents, he learned there were far more problems than the casualties of the storm and its aftermath.
People spoke of the poverty and joblessness that had blighted opportunity in their community. Parents worked double shifts while young people were often idle. The town lacked a grocery store and pharmacy. Repairing damaged homes proved costly and difficult. A mass of properties without titles, tangled in red tape, emerged from the wreckage of the storm.
In order for Camp Hill to thrive, it would take a community-centered coalition of people and organizations that could devote time and resources to slow, sustained work. Tidwell made the town ACROSS’ headquarters and formed a partnership with Auburn University to assist the rural community with planning and heirs’ property.
Getting aid money proved challenging. The town’s residents, 87% of whom are Black, were denied access to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has frozen a climate resilience grant approved under the Biden administration that would have helped to repair roofs.
“I think the biggest reason this work fails a lot of times is because people want instant gratification,” Tidwell said. “We’ve been in these communities for years doing the hard relational work.”
The organization’s reach is not limited to traditional disaster relief. In Parrish, Alabama, ACROSS is working to help that rural community recover from destruction in the wake of the opioid epidemic.
A war over words
For Hayden, the road ahead is not one of recovery but preservation. In states across the U.S., a war over words is taking place within schools and libraries that threatens to create a reality where the erasure of certain subjects — gender and sexuality, race and racism, gender and race-based violence — that offend conservative sensibilities could become commonplace.
“This is about people trying to define and limit who is a valuable and acceptable person in public spaces,” said Hayden. “Every child has a right to be represented on the shelves of their library. When the children of this community hear this controversy about books about people who are like them and they see people, in some cases, wanting to burn these books — what does that do to the soul of these children? Someone has to put a stop to this, because these extremists are not going to stop.”
After the city council meeting in the spring of 2023, Hayden began reaching out to like-minded people about her experience. Others found her. They formed a coalition of seven members with the aim of helping the Autauga-Prattville library block outside attempts to censor its books.
The group soon recognized the need to broaden its efforts.
The parent who called for Hayden’s local library to censor LGBTQ+ books was also a member of another coalition, a conservative group looking to “tidy up Alabama’s libraries.” The group currently has three active petitions calling for people to join them in their fight to protect children from what they call being “sexualized” by libraries.
The group is one of at least four pro-library censorship organizations that are active and making progress in the state. The Autauga-Prattville Library Board voted to fire its director last March, and its assistant director later that month. The state Legislature was considering a bill, HB 4, that would no longer exempt public libraries or their employees from criminal prosecution if charged with handling materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors.” Another piece of legislation, SB 6, would have given local officials the power to remove library board members at will. Both bills failed to make it to a vote by the full Legislature before the end of the regular session.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that it’s very difficult to fight not just misinformation, but disinformation that’s crafted with the intention to deceive,” said Hayden. “These extremist groups have become very skilled at crafting disinformation in a way that stirs up anger, and maybe more importantly fear, to the people in their community.”
Connection and community
The group’s efforts continue to expand as new challenges to library independence grow. In Fairhope, a city near the state’s Gulf Coast, conservative groups have also backed parents calling for the removal from the public library’s teen section two books that tell the stories of young girls facing sexual exploitation through trafficking and assault.
Read Freely rallied behind the library. Its board decided to keep the books on its shelves despite threats from the Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) to cut its annual funding of about $40,000 — which it ultimately voted to do, labeling the books’ content “sexually explicit.” APLS Board Chairman John Wahl is also the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.
Read Freely launched a public fundraising campaign that earned the library $46,000 in donations in less than a week.
At the end of the first Alabama Advocacy Institute program in September, Hayden was one of four fellows who were awarded stipends to fund a plan they pitched to their cohort. She received $20,000 for Read Freely’s campaign to fight hate and white nationalism in Alabama’s libraries.
The remaining awardees include Dalis Lampkins’ “Ban the Box: A Fair at Workforce Development,” $15,000; Anahita Maleknia’s “Page Pals and Parents Initiative,” $10,000; and Aurora Sanchez and Iralda Hernandez’s “Campaign for Voting Expansion,” $10,000.
“What I most needed in that moment — and still do — is that connection and that community that was formed in those rooms,” Hayden said of her experience at the institute. “Alabama can feel like a very hostile state if you have a progressive value system. Being in such a nurturing environment with people who ultimately have the same goal, which is to make Alabama better, was so fantastic.”
Image at top: Graduates of the 2024 Alabama Advocacy Institute at the SPLC’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama. (Credit: Hillary Hudson)