The Crystal Springs Community Every Other Year Sometimes Spur of the Moment Christmas Parade

Seeing the recent Gadsden Times article entitled Webster’s Chapel Redneck Christmas parade Saturday reminded me of another Gadsden Times holiday article from 2004, World's Shortest Christmas Parade kicks off Christmas in Crystal Springs.  I remember reading the piece while I was home from Denver for the holidays.  It made me shake my head at the hilarity and the familiarity of the behavior, and it reminded me of just one more reason why I love Alabama so much...we have an abundance of characters.  They may be crazy characters, but they are all ours.

The 2004 "Crystal Springs community Every Other Year Sometimes Spur of the Moment Christmas Parade" consisted of three laps around the Crystal Springs One-Stop gas station and boasted farm tractors, lawn mowers, four wheelers, some crowd-pleasing animals, and over two-hundred folks looking to share the holiday spirit.  It was a year of technology (the first time that a generator was used to allow for Christmas lights on a float...Christmas lights that Carl Owen took down "'for the first time in twelve years so that [he] could finish decorating [his] float.'").  It was a year of larceny (the float of the same Carl Owen carried a snowman that was evidently stolen from the yard of competitor Tammy Parris).  It was a year of bribery ("'it's not unusual for judges to take bribes and not deliver -- that's why they're the first to leave after the parade.'")

Things threatened to not crank and stuff caught on fire.  But no one was hurt. 

Civil Rights Movement In Gadsden, AL

On June 11, 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace took a stand against integration by placing himself in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium in order to block the entry of two African American students who were trying to register at the university.  One of those students, James Hood, was from Gadsden, AL; a graduate of Carver High School.  Thankfully, that day in June, President John F. Kennedy sent the National Guard to Tuscaloosa, to assist those two students in their endeavors to get an education, and eventually Governor Wallace stepped aside to allow Vivian Malone and James Hood to enter the building and enroll as students.

Ms. Malone would go on to receive her degree in business management from the university, and would enter into a lifetime of civil rights work.  She died from a stroke in 2005.  She was 63 at the time of her death.

Mr. Hood left the university after two months…for reasons I’ve yet to discover.  He would return many years later to the University of Alabama to finish his Ph.D.  He has since settled back here in Gadsden, AL.  Andy Powell of the Gadsden Times interviewed Mr. Hood in early 2011.  You may watch that interview here.

While trying to find more information about Mr. Hood on the internet, I discovered a collection of Gadsden, AL Civil Rights demonstration photos on the Penn State University Libraries website.  They are part of the Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists.  You may find them here.  As I looked through the photos, they spoke volumes to me about the Gadsden, AL of 1963.  Notice the number of demonstrators, and their ethnicity.  I am happy that there were citizens here in Gadsden who cared and believed enough about the cause to demonstrate for it, but I cannot help but be disappointed in the turnout, and the seeming lack of support from the white community.