Black Montevallo: An Inheritance of Legacy, a Holy Heritage

Ed. note: This reflection was first published as the forward in Untold Stories of Montevallo, Vol. 4. Read more here.

Salaam Green -- poet, storyteller and healer – is Birmingham’s first Poet Laureate. A native of Greensboro, Alabama and longtime resident of Birmingham, she attended the University of Montevallo more than thirty years ago, earning a degree in English. She has held residencies at UAB, Auburn University, and the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation in Harpersville. She uses poetry to create healing spaces rooted in Southern history and resilience, most recently in The Other Revival: Poems & Reckonings(2025). “The stories and images she shares in verse testify to the remarkable resilience of Black Alabamians,” writes Imani Perry. “Honest, vulnerable, insightful, and hopeful, Green’s poems are soul food.” Green invites us in this foreword to cherish Montevallo’s remembered stories as nourishing remembrances.

Culture shapes story. Story lifts a place and its people.

The heroic contributions shared in this volume of Untold Stories of Black Montevallo hold sacred memory, preserving evidence of a people shaped by coal and prayer – the coal mining economy began as early as 1830 in Montevallo. Within these lives is a narrative strengthened across generations, bearing witness to belonging and to the enduring hope of a culture that continues to flourish, like soil reaching toward sunlight.

In 1994, the campus I chose was less than seven percent African American, a fact I now hold with both clarity and grief.

Montevallo became a kind of home for me, even as I entered one of the most tenuous seasons of my life as a Black Southern woman. An early chapter of my story begins here, at the University of Montevallo, more than thirty years ago. I still remember my tires rolling over the uneven brick road, my car gently shaking as I drove toward Tutwiler Hall. The intimacy of the small college town and its classrooms allowed me to form community quickly; yet the lack of diversity left me questioning how both the city and the campus might reckon with their storied past, including the legacies of slavery and segregation.

The beauty of storytelling is that between what is written and what is remembered, a collective resonance lives. As the daughter of a teacher who worked at my school my entire life, I understand how institutions shape our understanding of collective knowing. Reading about figures like Barbara Belisle, Montevallo’s first Black high school teacher, and her husband Rudolph feels like a homecoming. 

Their stories and so many others in this issue offer that same depth of kinship to readers: a recognition that says, you belong here, too.

As a graduate of the University of Montevallo, I now better understand both the ghosts and the gentle giants who helped inform and cultivate a town built on promise and betrayal. The tenderness of this community gathering on front porches, worshiping in Black churches on Sunday mornings, uniting around faith and care – these reveal a deliberate village. 

Community trailblazers found in this issue are our nation's inheritance: holy remembrances that refused erasure.

Holiness, here, is honest truth-telling. It holds gratitude as theology. It makes room for Black bodies and Black thought to exist. Rituals of love, creativity, innovation, and care call us to awaken to the full history of a place. 

When we celebrate prayer, storytelling, laughter, and communal healing rooted in an ethos of love we embrace dignity in an era that attempts to malign humanity. 

The stories in this issue of Untold Stories testify to the importance of rural Black narratives in a world increasingly disconnected from place and memory.

Ancestor and poet Maya Angelou reminds us, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” May these pages release what has been held too long. May they lift the lived truths of voices, some newly named, others finally honored with the visibility and acclaim they deserve.

Among them is Pfc. Susie Irma Middlebrook Willis, a pristine and accomplished member of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the famed Triple Six Eight. She was one of only twenty-four Black women from Alabama to serve in the battalion, and the only one from Montevallo. 

Susie Willis is legacy. A thoughtful woman who helped shape America and later rested and watched the world go by from her front porch she remains a Montevallo treasure.

We must also enact mutual advocacy for valuing lesser known stories that were hidden historically and sometimes purposefully. In partnership with the City of Montevallo, the Montevallo Legacy Project dedicated three new African American Heritage Trail markers recognizing Epsibeth and Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Churches and The Little School. 

These markers are public acknowledgments of memory made visible.

Memory also lives in play. In the echo of a bat striking a ball at Montevallo’s Sandlot remembered through the story of Elvin B. Thompson; we hear Black life lived out loud. Nostalgia, freedom, pride, and presence travel from one end of town to the other, reminding us that joy itself is historical evidence.

Some stories are loud. Others are quiet yet fervent.

In the three-part memoir written for the Untold Stories, “Born to the Suburban League: The Legacy We Inherited,” Tompson tells a story and history of growing up in Montevallo that affirms the healing power of testimony.

“Born to the Suburban League” is the story of an act of quiet resistance that nearly remained buried. During the civil rights era, brave men and women organized without spectacle, desegregating white only spaces and modeling coalition building amid great risk. 

Their work reminds us that transformation often comes without headlines.

The poem that follows honors those whose human fire continues to burn and whose lights will not dim. 

Born to the Suburban League

But if I ever sounded sure of myself in those rooms, it’s only because I had already seen that kind of conviction back home from my mother. The kind of fire that didn’t need fanfare to burn-Bishop Elvin Thompson

Before the meetings,
There was the Suburban League.

Not a headline.

Not a fancy title.

A rhythm.
A way of being.

They planned without praise,
built what would last,
never asking to be named.

Before activist was a word,
there were people who acted
showing up when no one was watching.

They didn’t call it organizing.
They called it
doing what needed to be done.

Sarah Lacey, 1970,
hands steady on a register
never meant for her touch.

Ethel Mae Thompson,
raised in quiet resistance,
carrying memory like muscle.

Montevallo made no headlines,
yet became a civil rights city anyway.

A demand as simple as it was dangerous:
Put a Black person on the register.
Not someday --
Now.

Change required a we.
Wise Black Women worked where no one looked
in University kitchens, classrooms, and homes

moving through danger with grace.

This is how legacy moves:
not loudly,
but faithfully.

This is Black Montevallo
an inheritance of holiness.

This collection is an invitation to read with reverence. This collection is a decree to notice how  memory moves through generations as tradition, as living archive. These beautiful stories teach us that inheritance is not only part of history, it is what refuses to leave us.

May these pages serve as both witness and offering. May each untold story be a mirror and remind us that legacy is not static and heritage is not finished. It is still unfolding, still asking to be tended, still lifting our eyes toward a culture that tells the truth unapologetically -- still holy, still powerful.