According to The Tuscaloosa News, there are more than 500 churches in Tuscaloosa County. Churches in Alabama are like Starbucks in New York City–you can’t stand on a street corner without seeing at least three of them.

However, there’s no question that the way people view religion and God is changing. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which surveyed 54,000 American adults in 2008, 15% of Americans now identify themselves as non-religious. That’s up from 8% in 1990, and it actually eclipses every religious group in the U.S. except Catholics and Baptists.

The world is growing increasingly secular, and for many young adults, their first true interaction with “the world,” unfettered by parental oversight, is the day they step foot on a college campus.

College is a period that will shape the worldviews of many students as they enter adulthood. For some, it is a time of religious discovery and growth. For others, it brings a realization that religion and spirituality are not an important or necessary part of their lives.

At a school as large as the University of Alabama, with an increasingly diverse student body, it’s important to recognize and respect the entire religious spectrum, from the faithful to the faithless. We have tried to bring you the stories and images that reach across this spectrum, from the frenetic spiritual energy of an Unashamed meeting, to the simple battle for name recognition in the Bahai Faith, to the story behind the creation of the University’s first group for atheists and agnostics.

As a staff, we are extremely grateful to these individuals who allowed us a window into this very intimate aspect of their lives. We hope that their stories will help you, the reader, to understand backgrounds and perspectives that are different from your own.

Hopefully these stories can help all of us to apply the American ideals of equality and understanding in our daily lives and make the University of Alabama a more accepting place for people of every religious denomination and for those who choose not to practice religion.

Please e-mail your thoughts on this topic to changethetide@gmail.com or comment right here on the blog. It should be an exciting two weeks for Changing Tides!

In Friday’s Crimson White an opinion piece by Lauren Bryant ran, decrying the abusive treatment she received sitting in the Greek section of the stadium. Bryant writes about being threatened, hit with shakers and even shoved from her seat.

The actions of those that bothered her are indefensible—Bryant was perfectly within her right to sit where she chose. It’s a travesty that such bullying can occur unpunished on our campus. The situation reveals that deep-seeded divisions are still a problem on our campus.

But.

I think Bryant paints too broad a stroke with her final paragraphs: “To the Greeks: […] We hate you because you strut around our campus as though you own it, because you take your perks for granted, because you take advantage of your status and because you treat the rest of the student body badly, as though we are less than.”

Ouch. I’m sure everybody’s met a guy like that (probably on a Friday night, at a football game, or in some other drunken context), but I’m just as sure that most non-Greek students have at least a few Greek friends. It strikes me as counterproductive to uniformly lambast thousands of individuals form dozens of different organizations. It’s the back-and-forth stereotyping that will keep the Greek-GDI animosity chugging along forever. And I don’t think that’s what anyone wants (except maybe the journalists…that stuff creates some juicy stories).

What those guys did was definitely out of line, though, and the entire student section seating setup takes me right back to middle school. Now I’m wondering whether Greeks occupy the endzone at other SEC stadiums. Anybody know? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Writing about UA’s first botched attempt at integration and George Wallace’s segregationist grandstanding required quite a bit of research. One great resource for me was The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama by E. Culpepper Clark.

You can read the introduction and certain excerpts from the work at Google Books.

The book talks in detail about the entire integration struggle, from the initial legal maneuverings of the NAACP in the 1950′s to the June 11th, 1963 confrontation between George Wallace and the federal government. It includes commentary from many of the major players, including Autherine Lucy herself and several University administrators of the era.

The book does a really good job chronicling many of the black applicants of the period besides Autherine Lucy, Vivian Malone Jones, and James Hood. The stories of the students who were simply rejected outright are also important.

Also interesting are the dynamics between the University President, the Board of Trustees, and the state and national governments. The text really gives you a sense that the things going on here at UA had an incredible nationwide scope and impact.

Great narrative style, strong voice, fascinating information. Highly recommended. Book is available at Gorgas and McClure Education Library.

Ever since beginning research for Changing Tides, I have found myself compelled to look for tables that are not comprised of multiple races when I walk through the Ferguson Center food court. At first it was a reconnoisance mission as I nervously tried to figure out who I should interview, but it eventually became a subconscious habit. Here are some woefully unscientific observations gathered from interviews and my own wandering eyes:

• Most of the diverse tables are all guys or co-ed – I met several diverse groups of guys who had found a commonality through things like sports and weight lifting. I also occasionally see mixed groups of guys and girls, but girls-only mixtures seem rare
• A lot of out-of-staters seem to mix it up – When I talked to people who said they had diverse groups of friends, a lot of them seemed to be out-of-state or even international students. These students were probably forced to build all new friendships when they arrived at college, while a lot of Alabamians could just carry over their high school friendships. And there are a lot of segregated high schools in the state of Alabama.
• It’s more noticeable at the Ferg – Maybe it’s just the way the food court sprawls out in front of you while a lot of of other dining halls are more compartmentalized, but somehow the divisions resonate more here and seem a lot more stark. Ferg Director Carl Bacon acknowledged it himself in our interview. Something about greasy fast food, I guess.

I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and girls to devour a chicken nugget.

Exactly how many minorities are there on UA’s campus? I decided to find out by delving into the Office of Institutional Research. They are hidden in an old, cramped building behind Rose Administration, but the staff is really helpful and there is tons of modern demographic data readily available online. As of Fall 2008, UA’s undergraduate demographics shake out something like this:

In practical terms that boils down to: “Wow, there sure are a lot of white people here!”; “I see a fair number of black people walking around campus too”; “Was that an Asian/Hispanic person I just saw?!”; Chris Rock’s stand-up bit about how no one’s ever seen a Native American family chilling out eating dinner at Red Lobster.

It’s difficult to gauge whether Alabama’s numbers would be considered “good” or “fair” or “progressive.” When it comes to college admissions, such words mean different things to different people. But I thought an interesting metric would be to compare UA to other SEC schools–all of them are large public universities that serve as premiere institutions in their respective states (excepting Vanderbilt, which will be woefully unequipped for SEC football now and forever). How does the Capstone compare to these big-name Southern schools?

These numbers look only at undergraduate enrollment (except Arkansas, where undergrad-only data was not readily available) and exclude non-resident aliens and multiracial or race unknown categories. Alabama seems to be floating in the lower middle half on this “diversity” scale, just looking at hard data. Florida further cements their status as not really being part of the South by blowing away every other school in recruiting minorities.

I wonder whether the average student would guess that UA is 15% students of color? Anectodtally, many of the students I interviewed, specifically minority students, thought the number was less.

“Minority” is a broad category, though. Looking at specific races tells very different stories.

(please note that Ole Miss did not have racially specific data available on their website)

When it comes to African Americans, UA is almost leading the pack in terms of percentages. Ironic for a school that so desperately wanted to remain all white half a century ago. Seeing a specifc-race breakdown also conveys different things than the general minority graph. For instance we see that Mississippi State’s minority population is almost exclusively black.

Ouch. Alabama’s low number here may be related to my exclusion of non-resident aliens from the calculations. I don’t really know. It’s also worth noting that the state of Alabama has about a 1% Asian population according to 2007 Census data (though using state demographics as a metric opens up a nasty can of worms when looking at other races, as I will discuss later). Florida, Vanderbilt, and Georgia also benefit from being more academically prestigious schools, which often attract many Asian American applicants.

Here UA is in the middle once again, though the data is pretty lopsided thanks to Florida’s huge Hisapnic population. Again UA’s percentage isn’t too far off the state’s (2.7%).

Overall Florida and Vanderbilt seem to be the most racially balanced schools in the SEC, at least in numeric terms. But Vanderbilt is an elite private school and the state of Florida is the most diverse in the Southeast. Here in the Bible Belt, UA seems to be performing decently, but it would be difficult to call the Capstone a leader in promoting diversity in enrollment.

Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Taking a magnifying glass to an issue as touchy as race relations was definitely an intriguing experience. Here are some of the things I learned I didn’t really know before:

1. Students have a lot to say – While I’ve never been a big fan of the “bother random students in the Ferg” reporting game, the method worked for this topic because a lot of different people were ready to have their voices heard on the topic. This was especially true with the natural segregation story, which everyone seemed to have an opinion on (not necessarily a negative one; many students saw no reason to fight natural tendencies). It was definitely encouraging to see students actively interested and engaged in the topic.

2. Administrators don’t really have too much to say – Faculty and staff were open and available to talk, but it was very difficult to get perspectives from UA’s top brass on race. When I finally was able to get some responses, they weren’t quite as candid as I had hoped. Maybe it was just the fact that it was the end of the year or maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough, but I hoped to get a better understanding of the institutional perspective on race relations. Admittedly there is a Strategic Diversity Plan (who knew?) which I haven’t really had a chance to look at yet. Still, it’d be nice to hear the University’s stance straight from President Witt’s mouth on a lot of the issues we brought up.

3. The undercurrent is always there – There’s an underlying tension among races, especially between whites and blacks, that flares up during volatile circumstances, such as the KA Old South parade incident at the end of the year. It’s always interesting how quickly events like that can explode into headline news. It speaks to a continual unrest teeming just below the surface of our interactions.

4. People love reading about the Greek system – Our feature on the segregated Greek system was by far our most popular story. Makes sense on a campus with such an active Greek community, I guess. The history of attempts at integrating Greek life were what I found most interesting. It’s surprising that events that caused national media to descend to campus in 2001-2003 are now completely forgotten except for in the pages of The Crimson White (and now Changing Tides). I guess oral history only last four years here.

I hope we’ll be able to tackle the next topic with even more in-depth research and interesting student and faculty perspectives.

No rest for the weary, right?

Changing Tides launched last month thanks to the efforts of an incredibly dedicated staff, some helpful colleagues at The Crimson White, and the support of the Office of Student Media. We came, we saw, we put together a collection of articles and multimedia projects aimed at illuminating an oft-suppressed campus issue, race relations. While I won’t say we hit a home run—if only you’d seen our initial, much more ambitious news budgets—I do think we were able to do the research and collect the student voices to accurately depict the state of race relations at the University of Alabama in 2009.

But the story doesn’t end there. This is a topic with a sprawl and scope that can’t be wholly encapsulated in a set of static articles and videos. So while the Changing Tides website will remain mostly unchanged over the summer (content-wise, anyway; expect a visual redesign at some point), the staff will move into the Wild West of the blogosphere. We will offer personal insights and perspectives on various subjects pertinent to the topic of race relations in hopes that you, the audience, might do the same. We’ll provide some of the research and interviews that we could not fit into the structure of the magazine. We won’t let the conversation die because it deserves more than that.

Again we encourage your participation and response. An endeavor such as this is nothing without active interest and engagement from its userbase. So speak up! We’re listening, and we can help others listen too.

As we move forward you’ll also be able to see the thought process that goes into choosing the next topic for Changing Tides. Where that roulette wheel might land is still anyone’s guess, but there are some ideas perculating.

If you follow this blog, I promise we’ll make it worth your time. Give you something to think about on those plaintive summer nights (yeah, I don’t really know if that’s an appropriate phrase either).

Keep reading.