Dr. Bobby Wilson and Southeastern Geographer Brian Williams (bio) Professor Bobby Wilson’s enduring and paradigm-shifting influence on the geographical study of race and the United States South is evident in his longstanding engagement with the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers, and his extensive contributions to this journal. The lifetime of scholarship that he leaves behind is a testament to his unwavering commitment to critically understanding and situating racism, resistance, and Black experience historically, and geographically. His scholarship is remarkable in its attention to both the everyday dimensions of racism, and the multiscalar political-economic relations that shape and reconstitute place and region. Dr. Wilson took a job at the University of Alabama-Birmingham in 1974, and published six articles in Southeastern Geographer over the next three decades (Wilson 1977, Wilson 1985, Wilson 1989, Wilson 1995, Wilson 2002a, Wilson 2007). As Dr. Wilson recounted in a 2019 interview, when he first moved to Birmingham, he frequented the public library downtown for his research. There, on a wall in the southern history section, he noticed a racial zoning map: They didn’t try to hide it…for a number of years it stayed up there. And that was a pivotal moment in my research. I finally figured out what I needed to do. And that’s where it all began. Birmingham. The industrial city of the South. Also one of the most significant places in the civil rights struggle. The dogs. The water hoses turned loose on kids remains a vivid issue in our heads today…I started from that point, I started from that particular point (Wilson 2019). His scholarly commitment to geographies of justice in the South started with place — in a library, in Birmingham, with racial zoning maps and the brazenly displayed injustice of institutionalized inequity — and tirelessly worked to situate, to reveal, to explain, and to denaturalize oppression. This anti-essentialist attention to tracing, contextualizing, and situating the geographies of racism and injustice animated his subsequent work. His project of “critically understanding race-connected practices” (Wilson 2002b, 32), as he would later term it, represented a lifetime of scholarship that transformed and enlivened both Southeastern Geographer and the discipline of geography more broadly. His first article in Southeastern Geographer looked at segregation patterns and the role of multifamily housing units and single family housing in housing opportunities for Black families in Birmingham (Wilson 1977). This article exhibited Dr. Wilson’s meticulous attention to the ways that racism takes place and shapes space. Though written in [End Page 192] the language of spatial science that dominated urban geographical scholarship in the pages of this journal at that time, this article exemplified his keen attention to the deep historical dynamics that shape racially uneven outcomes. Though in one sense modest in its scope and claims, this intervention represented a radical challenge to the work that dominated the pages of Southeastern Geographer at the time. In fact, readers of that issue of Southeastern Geographer would have first encountered Merle Prunty’s 1976 presidential address to SEDAAG, a sweeping discourse on southern industrialization, modernization, and culture, which universalizes the perspective of white southern men as the view of “the southerner” (Prunty 1977). Dr. Wilson published his second article in Southeastern Geographer at the height of the Reagan era, focusing on the history and reality of racial segregation in Birmingham, and its implications for Black residents of Birmingham (Wilson 1985). A crucial part of this history was the Medical Center Expansion Urban Renewal Project, which displaced almost 1,000 Black families to make way for the UAB medical center. Dr. Wilson only briefly mentions this fact in his article, but the brief implication of his employing institution must have represented a conscious decision, one borne of conviction and a scholarly dedication to justice. Although these first articles were couched in the conventional language of spatial science, they were strategic and important interventions, guided by his enduring commitment to people and place in Birmingham. They were also radical departures from the standard fare of Southeastern Geographer. From 1977 to 1985, the years of his first and second articles in Southeastern Geographer, there were only eight articles that focused on...
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Dec 30, 2022
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