Long past heyday, oldest black Ala. city in peril

HOBSON CITY, Ala. — The cafes, the school and the roller rink are long gone from Alabama's oldest black city. Empty homes and businesses line the narrow streets.

Hobson City has no police or fire department, and weeds have overgrown the oldest part of the cemetery and a park.

But this small town once thrived as a place where black people were in charge in the midst of the Jim Crow South.

Now, with the town on the verge of dying, preservationists have put the east Alabama landmark on the critical list. The Alabama Historical Commission this month included the town of 878 people on its annual inventory of "Places in Peril."

The commission's list typically includes historic structures, such as old homes and abandoned theaters. Hobson City is an exception: an entire town that in recent decades has seen its foundation collapse.

Incorporated in 1899, Hobson City was formed 12 years after Eatonville, Fla., which calls itself the nation's oldest black city.

In the decades after the Civil War, blacks formed scores of colonies and communities as they migrated to Kansas and Oklahoma and sought independence in locales around the South. Some, like Eatonville and Hobson City, formally incorporated.

"There was a lot of dissatisfaction and alienation among blacks by the 1890s because of the refusal of whites in the South to allow them any real role in civic life," said University of Tennessee history professor Robert J. Norrell, who has written extensively on race relations.

Blacks also were subject to discrimination and abuse by law enforcement. "Together, these created a desire for separate municipalities," Norrell said.

Hobson City's residents created "a thriving municipality, which people at the time said couldn't be done because blacks couldn't govern," said Dorothy Walker, public outreach coordinator with the Alabama Historical Commission. "If it is someday absorbed into another city, it will lose that historic identity."

Roderick Boyd, a handyman and Hobson City resident, worries about his hometown's survival.

"I fear it's gone too far," said Boyd, 49.

A two-mile-long sliver about 60 miles east of Birmingham, Hobson City is as narrow as a few hundred yards in places. Wedged between two predominantly white cities, Oxford and Anniston, it has a few white residents.

During the 1800s, Walker said, it was an all-black section of Oxford called Mooree Quarter, a possible reference to old slave quarters in the area. Residents were allowed to vote, but whites maintained control.

The racial relationship shifted in the 1890s when the people of Mooree Quarter swayed an election, Walker said. The state had not yet disenfranchised blacks — that wouldn't happen until 1901. So, Walker said, whites petitioned state leaders to de-annex Mooree Quarter.