I had an art teacher who's the reason I got there in high school who encouraged me to go to Alabama. That's where she had gone and kept raving over their art department.

I just grew up a poor black kid in Alabama with a single mom and two brothers.

In appointing someone to serve on the Alabama Supreme Court, it is imperative to appoint someone with impeccable legal credentials and with unquestioned character and integrity - Judge Brad Mendheim exceeds those requirements.

May God continue to bless sweet home Alabama.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

I tell people I live in Atlanta. Georgia's outside of Atlanta, absolutely. But my family's from the very rural south. My family's from Tuskegee, Alabama. And they're from Eatonton, Georgia. Places like Greenwood, Georgia, my family is from... so I've seen it both ways.

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

Every day, the hard-working men and women of Alabama's Department of Environmental Management are on the ground, protecting Alabama's rivers and lakes in a way that is beneficial to all. EPA should support them in that work, not make it more difficult.

Like all soul singers, I grew up singing in church but sometimes I would leave early and sit in the car listening to gospel band, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Hearing their lead singer Clarence made me connect the idea of church and show business and see how I could make a career singing music that stirred the soul.

For my 23rd birthday I had a house party that was '90s themed and I dressed up as Alabama whirly from 'True Romance.'

I'll be singing with The Blind Boys of Alabama, which is a great joy to me. I've done some work with them before, and they truly are amazing.

"No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say - snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola - something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

"People ask me how I can stay in Alabama. Why wouldn't I leave? Alabama is my home. I love Alabama--the hot days in summer and the thunderstorms in winter. I love the smell of the air and the green of the woods. Alabama has always been God's country to me, and it always will be. I love Alabama, but I don't love the State of Alabama. Since my release, not one prosecutor, or state attorney general, or anyone having anything to do with my conviction has apologized. I doubt they ever will.

In my heart I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

People in north Michigan are not different at all from people in southern Alabama. Trust me someone who's spent a lot of time in both places. They're all hardworking simple people.

I had an art teacher who's the reason I got there in high school who encouraged me to go to Alabama. That's where she had gone and kept raving over their art department.

Alabama citizens like the vast majority of Americans respect and value the meaning of decency and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama learning the literature on evolution what was known about it biologically just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular scientific view of the world.

Ladies and gentlemen: There can be no greater investment in Alabama's future than an investment in education.

Like all soul singers I grew up singing in church but sometimes I would leave early and sit in the car listening to gospel band The Blind Boys of Alabama. Hearing their lead singer Clarence made me connect the idea of church and show business and see how I could make a career singing music that stirred the soul.