• Replace 1920's bridge that has 2 lanes/2 sidewalks between Avenue F Bridge and Avenue W in Ensley with 12 inter mediate concrete support piers with a new concrete bridge with no intermediate support piers with 2 lanes/2 sidewalks. The concrete support piers have caused 80 years of flooding between Avenue F and Avenue W where approximately 135 homes and one church have been removed by FEMA funds ten years ago.

           Cost: $1.5 Million

• Construct Gabion Walls on both sides of Village Creek between Avenue F and Avenue W bridges (3,400 feet) to eliminate bank erosion, stream-line the creek to stabilize flow and provide a permanent feature with landscaping for a Learning Recreation park of approximately 75 acres.

           Cost: $2.0 Million

• Relocate 3ft. diameter Sewer Pipe, now 5ft. above Creek at Avenue F to under the Creek. Jefferson County has plans ready for bidding.

           Cost: $4.8 Million

Raised by strict yet motivating, loving parents, Mable excelled in academics and graduated from high school at age 15. Mable went on to attend college at Tuskegee Institute. When it came time to apply for graduate school, Mable was granted acceptance to Michigan State University. Mable, the only black female in the graduate school, earned her master's degree from Michigan State and went on to earn her doctorate degree in developmental psychology from Pennsylvania State University. Mable launched what would become her lifelong career teaching developmental psychology at Penn State, and then establishing master's degree programs at universities throughout the United States.


As Mable's parents began to age, she traveled back to Birmingham monthly to check on them, and eventually, she moved there to care for them. During that time, the Village Creek/Ensley area where her parents lived flooded several times. Some Birmingham residents appealed to Mable to help them organize a plan to deal with the flooding. Mable attended a Corps of Engineers meeting and discovered there were plans in place to move Village Creek residents out of their neighborhoods. Mable mobilized residents into a coalition and was able to prevent the displacement of the residents. However, the flooding was yet to be dealt with.


Mable's parents passed away, and she vowed to honor them by helping her community combat the flooding of Village Creek. Mable formed a second coalition and traveled to Washington, D.C. to pursue assistance from the Department of the Interior. Using her psychology training and innate ability to never accept defeat, Mable secured a $5 million Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant, which enabled the city of Birmingham to relocate residents to 135 homes outside of the flood zone.


Today, this Second-Half Champion is the founder and Pro Bona Executive Director of the Village Creek Human and Environmental Justice Society (VCS). The organization is working to re-engineer and restore the flood-prone areas of Village Creek and has repurposed part of that property as a learning and recreation area for high school students. Mable's major focus now is to raise funding for construction to eliminate bank erosion and stabilize the flow of Village Creek, and to at long last solve the flooding problem in the area. her Dream is to make a 75-acre learning and recreation park at the site where families once endured the flooding of their homes. Says Dr. Anderson, "We have two ages: our chronological age and our activity age. We have to keep going and keep doing."


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In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery. Her arrest paved the way for a movement that would change the world.

Fifty years have passed since the Montgomery bus boycott. The movement brought many changes to public transportation. Today, not only are African Americans employed as bus drivers, many of them hold top administrative positions in public transportation.

Sadly, 50 years after the bus boycott, the state of Alabama still doesn't provide funding for public transportation. Alabama is one of five states and the only state east of the Mississippi river that doesn't invest in public transit.
As a result, Alabama leads the nation in the percentage of people who commute alone - about 1.6 million, or 85.4 percent of workers in the state.

Unfortunately, public officials in Alabama are not taking the lead in making funding for public transportation a top priority. Since the mid-1990s, advocates for public transit have proposed a variety of plans for dedicating a portion of the stat's has taxes and vehicle license fees for public transit. Their efforts failed as the Alabama Department of Transportation joined with roadbuilders to oppose efforts to give the people of this state a vote on a constitutional amendment that would allow gas tax revenues to be used for public transportation.

Public transit is an economic issue. communities around Alabama must meet the challenges that connect people to their places of employment as well as to retail services, health care and education opportunities.

Public transit also is a health and safety issue. Nearly half of the residents in Alabama live in areas with unhealthy air pollution levels. Our dependence on our own vehicles not only creates air pollution and other hazards, it also adds to the high volume of traffic, which increases the war and tear on roads and bridges. That, in turn, increases the risk of highway accidents.

Finally, public transit is a social justice issue. For many years, public policy in Alabama has placed more emphasis on highway development than public transportation, which contributes to white flight from inner cities to the suburbs. A lot of service industry jobs are in the suburban areas, making it very difficult for people without their own transportation to get to these jobs. 

Alabama must make public transportation a right. Our elected officials, especially state legislators, must give the people a voice on a constitutional amendment that allows the state to fund public transportation. Or, it's business as usual.

Let the people of Alabama decide.