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Descendants of the Alabama steamship owner responsible for illegally bringing 110 African captives to America aboard the last U.S. slave ship have ended generations of public silence, calling his actions more than 160 years ago "evil and unforgivable." In a statement released to NBC News, members of Timothy Meaher's family — which is still prominent around Mobile, Alabama — said that what Meaher did on the eve of the Civil War "had consequences that have impacted generations of people." "Our family has been silent for too long on this mat...
FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. (AP) — William Wellema has been living under a bridge for four days, waiting to get to Fort Myers Beach on Florida's Estero Island to see if his vacation home survived Hurricane Ian. On Friday, he was beyond frustrated as he continued to await permission to drive across. "They're saying it's because of the rescue and recovery efforts," Wellema said of the closure. He drove down from Little Falls, New Jersey, with a pass he got at the beginning of hurricane season that was supposed to allow him onto the island after a s...
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Even after three months of captivity that included execution threats, physical torture, solitary confinement and food deprivation, it was the ride to freedom that nearly broke Alex Drueke, a U.S. military veteran released last week with nine other prisoners who went to help Ukraine fight off Russian invaders. His hands were bound. His head was covered by a plastic bag, and the packing tape holding it in place was secured so tightly it it caused welts on his forehead. Drueke said he and fellow American prisoner Andy Huynh...
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Millions of letters and packages sent to U.S. troops had accumulated in warehouses in Europe by the time Allied troops were pushing toward the heart of Hitler's Germany near the end of World War II. This wasn't junk mail — it was the main link between home and the front in a time long before video chats, texting or even routine long-distance phone calls. The job of clearing out the massive backlog in a military that was still segregated by race fell upon the largest all-Black, all-female group to serve in the war, the...
VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. (AP) — The third victim of a church shooting in Alabama has died, police said Friday. The 84-year-old woman died at a hospital a day after a gunman opened fire with a handgun Thursday at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills, the police department said in a Facebook post. They did not release her identity. The suspect, a 71-year-old man, also fatally shot two other elderly people during a potluck dinner at the church where he occasionally attended services, police said Friday at a news c...
The getaway vehicle used by a man wanted for murder in Alabama and the jail official suspected of helping him escape after a "jailhouse romance" was found in an impound lot in Tennessee, where it sat for nearly a week before authorities realized they had it, officials said Friday. Sheriff Rick Singleton of Lauderdale County, Alabama, told a news conference the Ford Edge with distinctive burnt orange paint was found on a roadside and towed the same day that Casey White, charged with murder, and former assistant corrections director Vicky White...
Like religious congregants all over, the people of historic Brown Chapel AME Church turned off the lights and locked the doors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic because it wasn't safe to gather for worship with a deadly virus circulating. For a time, the landmark church that launched a national voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, was off limits. What members found when they returned was heartbreaking: Termites had eaten so much wood that parts of the structure weren't stable anymore, said member Juanda Maxwell, and water leaks...
OXFORD, Ala. (AP) — Native Americans whose ancestors were forced out of the Southeast almost 200 years ago are back for a festival with a name that sums up its purpose: "We have come back." Dozens of Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizens have traveled from their homes in Oklahoma and elsewhere for a celebration this weekend in the east Alabama city of Oxford. It was once part of a Muscogee community dating back 12,000 years. But its residents were part of an estimated 23,000 Muscogee people forced to move to Oklahoma in the 1830s to make way for w...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — The Justice Department's decision to close its investigation of Emmett Till's slaying all but ended the possibility of new charges in the teen's death 66 years ago, yet agents are still probing as many as 20 other civil rights cold cases, including the police killings of 13 Black men in three Southern states decades ago. The department is reviewing the killings of six men shot by police during a racial rebellion in Augusta, Georgia, in 1970, according to the agency's latest report to Congress. The city best known for h...
POINTE-AUX-CHENES, La. (AP) — Nicholas weakened to a tropical depression as it crawled from Texas into southern Louisiana on Wednesday, unleashing heavy rain across a landscape where Hurricane Ida destroyed thousands of rooftops now covered with flimsy tarps. Forecasters said Nicholas would slow to a stall over central Louisiana through Thursday, with plenty of water still to dump east of its center, drenching the Gulf Coast as far as the western Florida Panhandle. Southeast Louisiana faced the biggest flooding threat, and Gov. John Bel E...
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hurricane Ida blasted ashore Sunday as one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S., rushing from the Louisiana coast toward New Orleans and one of the nation's most important industrial corridors. The Category 4 storm with winds of 150 mph (230 kph) hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years earlier, coming ashore about 45 miles (72 kilometers) west of where Category 3 Katrina first struck land. The rising ocean swamped the barrier island of Grand Isle as landfall came just to t...
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana communities battered by Hurricane Ida faced a new danger as they began the massive task of clearing debris and repairing damage from the storm: the possibility of weeks without power in the stifling, late-summer heat. Ida ravaged the region's power grid, leaving the entire city of New Orleans and hundreds of thousands of other Louisiana residents in the dark with no clear timeline on when power would return. Some areas outside New Orleans also suffered major flooding and structure damage. "There are certainly m...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Officials offered new hope for the safety of U.S. schoolchildren threatened by COVID-19 on Friday as Gulf Coast hospitals already full of unvaccinated patients braced for the nightmare scenario of a major hurricane causing a wave of fractures, cuts and heart attacks without enough staff to treat the injured. The Biden administration said half of U.S. adolescents ages 12-17 had gotten at least their first COVID-19 vaccine, and the inoculation rate among teens is growing faster than any other age group. "We have now hit a m...
Dr. Danny Avula, the head of Virginia's COVID-19 vaccination effort, suspected he might have a problem getting pastors to publicly advocate for the shots when some members of his own church referred to them as "the mark of the beast," a biblical reference to allegiance to the devil, and the minister wasn't sure how to respond. "A lot of pastors, based on where their congregations are at, are pretty hesitant to do so because this is so charged, and it immediately invites criticism and furor by the segment of your community that's not on board...
DETROIT (AP) — When President Donald Trump refused to outright condemn white nationalists in this week's presidential debate and urged his supporters to monitor polling sites, Portia Roberson was reminded of earlier eras when Black Americans were intimidated at the polls to deter them from voting. Roberson, a 51-year-old Black woman who lives in Detroit, found the comments chilling — but also felt a renewed resolve to vote. For many Black Americans and other people of color, Trump's comments in his debate with Democratic challenger Joe Bid...
LOXLEY, Ala. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people were still without power Friday along the Alabama coast and the Florida Panhandle in the aftermath of Hurricane Sally as officials assessed millions of dollars in damage that included a broken bridge in Pensacola and ships thrown onto dry land. While the cleanup pressed on, the record-shattering hurricane season notched another milestone: Forecasters ran out of traditional names for storms after three new systems formed in about six hours. That forced them to begin using the Greek alphabet f...
NAVARRE BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Heavy rain, pounding surf and flash floods hit parts of the Florida Panhandle and the Alabama coast on Tuesday as Hurricane Sally lumbered toward land at a painfully slow pace, threatening as much as 30 inches of rain and dangerous, historic flooding. The storm's center churned offshore 70 miles (115 kilometers) south of Mobile, Alabama, as Sally crept northward toward an expected Wednesday landfall at 2 mph (3 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center. Hurricane force winds extended 40 miles (65 k...
SELMA, Ala. (AP) — Life can be tough even on a good day in the Black Belt, where some of the poorest people in America are, as usual, depending on each other to survive. Their struggle has become even more difficult with unemployment intensifying and coronavirus infections raging. Both the need and the relief have been on display in the historic civil rights city of Selma, where volunteers distributed free food to scores of people, many of whom shared rides from isolated communities just to get to the school where boxes of fruit and v...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — For people who lost homes to the deadly tornadoes that rampaged across the South, there are no comforting hugs from volunteers or handshakes from politicians. For homeless families, there are no Red Cross shelters, only hotel rooms. These and other changes reflect how disaster response has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic: Workers are still trying to provide all the comfort they can, but from a distance. Within hours of the tornado onslaught, which began Sunday and killed more than 30 people, church groups w...
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — As each day brings the United States closer to peak severe weather season, Tornado Alley residents are facing a difficult question: Is it better to take on a twister outside a community shelter or to face the possibility of contracting the new coronavirus inside one? So far, sheltering from deadly weather appears to be taking precedent over staying away from a potentially deadly disease, but not for everyone. In north Alabama, where powerful tornadoes killed dozens in recent years, a little more than 700 people showed u...
ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter was recovering Tuesday following surgery to relieve pressure on his brain from bleeding linked to recent falls. A statement from his spokeswoman said there were no complications from the procedure, performed at Emory University Hospital for a subdural hematoma, blood trapped on the brain's surface. Carter, 95, will remain in the hospital for observation, said Deanna Congileo, his spokeswoman at the Carter Center. The statement said the Carters thank everyone for the many well-wishes they have receive... Full story
PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter taught a Bible lesson on life after death Sunday less than two weeks after breaking his pelvis in a fall. Using a walker, the 95-year-old Democrat slowly entered the crowded sanctuary at Maranatha Baptist Church in the southwest Georgia town of Plains. "Morning, everybody," he said cheerfully. With help, Carter sat on a motorized lift chair at the front of the room to teach a 45-minute lesson based on the Old Testament book of Job. Referring to a cancer diagnosis that resulted in the removal o...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Weeks of dry, hot weather have plunged the Deep South further into a drought that's affecting more than 11 million people and threatening crops across the region, a new assessment showed Thursday. The latest report from U.S. Drought Monitor showed arid conditions worsening across a five-state area from Louisiana to South Carolina . Conditions are particularly bad in Alabama and Georgia, where nearly the entire state is too dry. Areas around the suburbs of Birmingham and Atlanta are particularly hard hit. The National W...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Forecasters are warning about days of scorching, dangerous heat gripping a wide swath of the U.S. South and Midwest, where the heat index on Monday eclipsed 120 degrees (48.9 Celsius) in one town and climbed nearly that high in others. With temperatures around 100 degrees (37 Celsius) at midday and "feels like" temperatures soaring even higher, parts of 13 states were under heat advisories, from Texas, Louisiana and Florida in the South to Missouri and Illinois in the Midwest, the National Weather Service reported. "...
ATLANTA (AP) — Storms were blamed for two deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people without power across the southern United States, forecasters said. Fallen trees ripped down power lines and crashed into buildings along a line from Texas to Alabama overnight and into Thursday morning, the national Storm Prediction Center reported. Similar damage continued later in the day in parts of Georgia, the Carolinas and southeast Virginia. Straight-line winds of up to 85 mph (137 kph) damaged roofs Wednesday in the northeast Texas city of G...
