Pat Duggins

NORTH COURTLAND, Ala. (AP) — Students at a north Alabama high school are campaigning to change traffic laws after a teenager died in a wreck at what they say is a dangerous intersection. Students at R.A. Hubbard High School in North Courtland want to lower the speed limit at an intersection where Hatton High School junior Caitlyn Martin was killed in April. Hubbard students are writing letters to legislators to lower the 65 mph speed limit at the intersection of Alabama 157 and Highway 101. Math teacher Karen Posey tells The Decatur Daily that traffic goes too fast at the intersection.

Alabama Public Radio continues its collaboration on a new television program about business. It’s called Alabama, Inc. and it airs Sunday’s on WVUA-TV. So far this season, APR news director Pat Duggins has interviewed entrepreneurs who build shopping malls, design high-end fashions, and clean up toxic waste. This Sunday, the topic is a “sweet” family business based in Birmingham. Tricia Wallwork hears the stories from customers all the time. “Sometimes you’re in a rush, and you don’t want to tell people where you work,” says Wallwork. “People take pride in it, they take ownership in it.

Birmingham area disc jockey Shelley the Playboy may have signaled the start of the children’s march in 1963, but he didn’t organize it. The credit goes to a lieutenant of Dr. Martin Luther King, the reverend James Bevel. One of the teenagers he inspired was James Stewart… “He wore one of the blue jeans suits, and had badges from everybody, and pins all over, and he was baldheaded and wore this skull cap,” Stewart remembered, “And he’s the one who was the kids’ ‘pied piper,’ he talked to us about getting involved.

“Let me know at the start of this conversation that I have never been a civil rights activist of any kind,” says former Birmingham radio disc jockey Shelley Stewart. “I want to make that perfectly clear.” The teenagers who took part in the 1963 children’s march see it differently They say they relied on signals and code words from Stewart’s radio show to know when the protest would begin. And even Shelley admits he knew firsthand what school kids, both black and white, could do in the race of racism. When he wasn’t on the air, Shelley the playboy played records at dance parties.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Relatives of four black girls killed when Ku Klux Klan members bombed an Alabama church are split over how to mark the crime 50 years later. Sisters of two victims said Friday they favor a proposed congressional medal honoring the girls and aren't interested in financial compensation. Their opinions differ from those of the bombing's lone survivor and the brother of another victim. They told The Associated Press earlier this week they want money and call the medal an unneeded token.