Phillip Tutor

26th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: The Bibb Graves quandary at JSU

Bibb Graves was a Klansman, and his name adorns Jacksonville State University’s most prominent building, and there’s no running from that uncomfortable truth. It is what it is. But it’s complicated. Morally, historically, pragmatically.

26th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: Sandra Sudduth’s quest for justice for all in Jacksonville

Jacksonville means the world to Sandra Sudduth, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t love her back. But Jacksonville’s festering issue -- the fate of the Confederate monument towering above the city’s public square — isn’t mere politics to her. Its relocation would say what the city thus far hasn’t.

24th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: Lucy Bryan, a little girl so ‘full of life’

The sun would rise and light would peek through the windowpanes and a squall of blonde hair and attitude would christen the day with all the grace of a bullhorn. Resistance was futile. Lucy Bryan, a 3-year-old force of nature, had places to be and people to see.

26th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: From welder to police chief in Anniston

When he was 23, back before flecks of gray decorated his beard and his yearning to be a cop proved irresistible, Nick Bowles welded doors in a shop in Atlanta. The pay wasn’t bad. Better than the foundry jobs and factory jobs and construction jobs he’d already tried. “Poor Southern jobs,” he calls them.

24th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: Black Annistonians and the City Council

Fifty-one years ago, an Anniston dentist who had tried to become the city’s police commissioner — and failed — gave politics another go. Whether persistent or stubborn, he this time sought a City Council seat. Gordon Rodgers Jr., though, was Black.

24th September 2020

Phillip Tutor: Anniston’s Ward 4 election is over, finally

I live in Anniston’s Ward 4. And I am ashamed.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: The true meaning behind Jacksonville’s monument

A few years before the Confederacy’s birth, a census-taker named W.P. Amorine traveled the backroads of Benton County and counted its people. His total: 20,010. Of those, 4,078 were enslaved.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: The ticking clock on Alabama’s Confederate memorials

The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act was supposed to shield the state’s forest of Confederate monuments from the damnable people who want them excised from public spaces.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: An Anniston man’s quest to feed the needy

Dan Sawyer cooks a mean smoked meatloaf. How do I know? He says it’s good, and I’m not sure there’s a reason to argue with him.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: Why is Partridge speaking out? Because he must

Bill Partridge, the Oxford police chief, has seen the video. Of course he’s seen the video. Everyone’s seen it.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: The pandemic’s pall over Easter Sunday

Come Sunday morning, the Rev. Roland Brown won’t ascend the pulpit or sit in his office or greet people at the door of the sanctuary, the hallowed place to which Christians flock for words of comfort and strength. He won’t even drive to his church.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: RMC patient shows Alabama what’s possible

McKenzee Webster gave us hope. She didn’t walk out of Regional Medical Center last Friday, she didn’t tell us what is possible. She showed us.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: A chaplain’s role during a pandemic

Jim Wilson talks with the slow, pastoral comfort you’d expect from a hospital chaplain. His voice is soothing, like a summer shower. You’re wise to listen when he speaks, and on this he’s adamant: “Our whole community has been disrupted by this.”

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: Compassion vs. public safety at the CDP

And so, it’s done. In an astonishing 24 hours that featured a phone call to President Trump in Air Force One, Anniston went from being a coronavirus patient destination to one of two American cities to emphatically say, “No, they’re not coming here.”

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: Death, funerals and compassion during the pandemic

The cruelty of this global pandemic is so profound, so inhumanely sinister, that its touch isn’t limited to those it kills. It’s even cruel to the families of those who die from something other than COVID-19. Consider how Jon Smith spent Tuesday.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: An Alabama nurse’s unlikely path to New York

Ethan Suttle is a sturdy guy with a bushy beard and a life story decorated with all things Alabama. He’s from St. Clair County. He graduated from the University of Alabama. He ended up in east Alabama years ago because “a woman dragged me up to Gadsden.”

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: A pandemic’s ‘worst-case scenario’ for abuse victims

The victims. They’re always on Susan Shipman’s mind. The victims of sexual assault, of domestic violence. Those who often are voiceless, whose options are few.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: Far from home, waiting for the pandemic to end

Camaron Harry hails from Durban, the South African port city blessed with pristine beaches that sits tight on the Indian Ocean. It’s 9,000 miles from Calhoun County — roughly four times the distance between Los Angeles and New York City. His family is quarantined there during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Harry isn’t.

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: From Anniston to Brooklyn, amid a pandemic

Emily Keys treks across the East River at the end of her 24-hour shifts from Brooklyn to her Manhattan apartment. Rooftop melodies played on a trumpet greet her. “It’s amazing,” she says. “I look forward to it every night.”

16th June 2020

Phillip Tutor: Alive, mending, optimistic in Anniston

Evie Waddell got hit by a falling tree. A huge tree, probably an oak, that sideswiped her head and struck her back and left her dazed in an Anniston mobile home park. Her humor, though, seems intact, which isn’t insignificant. “I have a dent in my head, and my back is broken,” she says.