On October 4, 2004, I received the following email out of the blue from Laura Anderson, the Assistant Archivist at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

"I did a Google search of 'Waights Taylor' while researching our collections here in the Archives at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where I've come across the (rather unusual) name. I wonder (1) if you are related to the person I came across in our collections--Waights Taylor, interviewed in B'ham by a Talladega College professor in 1947--and (2) if you'd email back."

The exchanges that followed between Ms. Anderson and myself led me on a journey of discovery about my father and southern history replete with fascinating connections and coincidences. The product of my discovery and research is my book, Our Southern Home, a narrative history of many significant events in Alabama in the twentieth century. The history is told through the lives of three eighteen-year-old teenagers whose lives are forever altered on March 25, 1931, when the infamous Scottsboro Boys tragedy starts in northern Alabama: Clarence Norris, black, one of the Scottsboro Boys; my father Waights Taylor, white, a student at the University of Alabama; and Rosa McCauley (soon to marry Raymond Parks), black, a resident of Pine Level, Alabama. All three will become involved in the Scottsboro events in different ways with profound implications to their lives and the region. Our Southern Home’s main theme is based on the premise that the Scottsboro period in the 1930s represents the low point in Alabama’s segregated history, and was start of the state’s ascent to the civil rights movement and beyond.

The narrative history is intermingled with other famous persons and interesting characters; Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Paul "Bear" Bryant, C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Shakespeare's Puck and Ariel, and Birmingham's infamous "Bull" Connor.

Click here to read the first seven chapters of the book. I would appreciate any comments or questions you have about the first seven chapters. Also, if you are interested in reading the complete book (thirty-one chapters with an Introduction and an Epilogue), please let me know. You can reach me at waights@sonic.net.

In 2008, I published my first book, Alfons Mucha's Slav Epic -- An Artists's History of the Slavic People. Click here to see a few pages from this seventy-nine page book.

Waights Taylor, Jr.     waights@sonic.net