Browse Items (210 total)

Fayette lost one of its leading citizens in 2010 when former Mayor Guthrie Smith died at 97. He had committed himself to the residents of Fayette as a city councilman and mayor for more than four decades.

Smith was born in the small Fayette County…

Portrait of Morris Loveman Friedman as a World War I soldier.

Morris Loveman Friedman was born in Tuscaloosa, the second child of Victor and Hanna Mills Friedman. He attended local schools and the Manlius Military Academy in Syracuse, New York. …

Victor Friedman was born in Eperyes, Hungary to S. Marcus Friedman and Luela Black. He left Hungary arriving in New York in April 1865. He then went to Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked as an apprentice in the optical manufacturing firm of J.S.…

Sam Friedman was a pioneer in the development of Tuscaloosa and an authority on the history of the area.

Friedman was the son of the late Bernard Friedman, a Tuscaloosa merchant who immigrated from Hungary.

Friedman and his brother, Victor Hugo…

Robert N. Almon Sr. was the founder and longtime head of the engineering firm Almon & Associates. During a career that spanned decades, Almon planned and helped implement Tuscaloosa's first sewage collection system, the widening of 15th Street from a…

Lue C. Mims Jr. coached football at Tuscaloosa Junior High and Druid High School — the only high school that blacks could attend during the 1960s before desegregation — from 1951 to 1986. Mims is viewed by many of the city's West End residents as a…

Dr. James Oliver Ellis (1951-2004) was a pastor and educator known for his love of his community and willingness to sacrifice his own resources for the betterment of others. As pastor of Tuscaloosa’s First African Baptist Church, he oversaw an…

The Rev. William McKinley Branch stands behind the stop sign in this barricade during a Greensboro, AL, march in the 1960's. To his left is the Rev. Thomas Gilmore.

Branch was an iconic figure in the 1960's-era civil rights movement in Alabama. He…

Dr. Cordell Wynn was president of Stillman College for 15 years beginning in 1982 and enrollment at the predominantly black liberal arts school almost doubled to more than 1,000 students under his leadership.

A native of Eatonton, Ga., Wynn…

Julia Tutwiler was an Alabama advocate for education and prison reform and a poet. Graduating in the first class of Vassar College, she served as co-principal of the Livingston Female Academy, and in 1891 became the first woman president of…