Remembering and Honoring the Life of Professor Bobby M. Wilson

Abstract

Remembering and Honoring the Life of Professor Bobby M. Wilson Gerald R. Webster (bio) I want to thank Alex Andre Moulton and Derek H. Alderman for organizing the 2021 session to honor Bobby M. Wilson, a friend and former colleague, at the annual SEDAAG conference in Florence, Alabama. Also, thanks to Selima Sultana and Paul Knapp, editors of Southeastern Geographer, for their support to have the session’s commentaries published. Though very accomplished, Bobby was also quite humble and I suspect he would be both surprised and touched by these efforts to honor his life and legacy. I first became aware of Bobby in the early 1980s when I started my Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky, joined SEDAAG, and began receiving Southeastern Geographer. Bobby was a regular contributor having published six articles in the journal including a contribution to a special issue on the “Political Geography of the South” which I guest edited in 2007. Topically, Bobby focused on issues of race, politics, capitalist development, and planning, most particularly as they pertain to Birmingham, Alabama and the South generally. Given our overlapping interests I made an effort to regularly read his publications. As a junior academic I interacted with Bobby at both SEDAAG and AAG meetings in the 1980s. That interaction greatly increased when I took a job at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1989, with Bobby only 60 miles up the freeway at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The move to Tuscaloosa led my work to increasingly focus on southern electoral politics with a particular emphasis on Alabama, making Bobby’s work evermore relevant to my own interests. A couple years after I arrived in Tuscaloosa I came across Bobby’s 1992 article in Antipode entitled “Structural Imperatives Behind Racial Change in Birmingham, Alabama.” I found the article fascinating, thoughtfully structured, and tightly argued. As a result, I began attending sessions at professional meetings specifically because Bobby was a presenter. In 2001, I became departmental chair at Alabama and decided to lobby my dean to consider hiring Bobby for a position in Tuscaloosa. While such a move would clearly be of personal benefit to me, I also believed that Bobby would greatly add to the department’s limited social science and planning expertise. I purchased Bobby’s two recently published books on Birmingham to share them with my dean who reacted very enthusiastically. As a result, we were able to entice Bobby to move his office from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa in the fall of 2002. It was great having Bobby in Tuscaloosa given our overlapping interests and his ability to contribute to the department’s programs. Bobby had great breadth and depth in his [End Page 207] knowledge of the diverse literature relevant to his work, as a perusal of some of his article bibliographies will underscore. A majority of Bobby’s work focused on Birmingham, but not only due to his position at UAB. When the city of Birmingham was incorporated in 1871, its African American population was minuscule, but grew dramatically as Black folks moved from the state’s agricultural areas to take jobs in developing industries including steel. As a result, Bobby’s focus on Birmingham allowed him to study how race, racial relations, and changing employment relationships between Blacks and Whites were initially structured and how they were modified through time due to structural economic changes. While chair at Alabama I made a point of having impromptu drop-by visits with faculty members in their offices on a regular basis to keep abreast of their needs and projects. Most of these visits were only ten to fifteen minutes given faculty workloads and schedules. After Bobby joined the department I quickly learned to drop in on him last because our chats typically went on an hour or more on a long list of topics including the history and development of geography as a discipline, the role of race in southern politics, residential segregation, and the transformation of electoral politics in the South including the rise of the GOP, among other topics. At the time he was working on a new book focused on the role of economic change in the structural...