Story By John Mann
ly coming up this weekend the Guntersville Museum and Cultural Center is getting ready to unveil their next special exhibit for the summer, which will be entirely dedicated to the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The First Amendment famously puts forward the American concept of free speech and free press as well as the right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition the government.
“It’s rights that we all have and should cherish,” Museum Director Sara Phillips said. “Everyone that has talked to me since I started collecting these materials has said ‘well that’s just speech’ but it’s more that speech. It’s expression and assembly, petition and religion, it’s so many of the basic rights that make us human and make us American and you need to know that you have them and can exercise them.”
The exhibit is broken up into five sections that each highlight a facet of the First Amendment and how it directly ties into Guntersville and Marshall county.
The first is about the press, focusing on the Harver family and the many newspapers that have operated in the area over the years. Porter Harvey, who passed away in 1995, was a newspaper founder and editor in Guntersville and his typewriter is displayed next to a list of publications that have covered Marshall County. The speech section has some artwork on display, some of which has been considered controversial in the past, as well as some books by local authors like Dr. John Allen Wyeth and Virginia Barton.
The next section features more artwork and is centered around religion, including a depiction of The Last Supper by Alabama artist Howard Finster.
“His work is very fun, a little wacky and very 1960s and 70s,” Phillips said. “It’s all religious pieces and obviously his message was to spread the Gospel.”
The last two sections of the exhibit focus on assembly and petition, and include photographs from recent demonstrations and protests that have taken place in Marshall county. These include a Black Lives Matter demonstration, a pro-Confederate monument rally in Albertville and the No King’s protest which took place just last month in Guntersville.
The petition display has a big focus on The Local Option, a 1984 push to change the way voting worked in Alabama that eventually led to Guntersville becoming wet independently of the rest of Marshall county.
“It’s not something you think about a lot but one of the most notable and historically relevant petitions to happen to our town was The Local Option,” Phillips said. “That was when Guntersville went wet and they actually changed the code of the state of Alabama to allow us to have the vote as a municipality as opposed to a county as a whole. Previously the county had voted dry but Guntersville voted wet and that sort of changed the course of history and made us even more of a destination.”
For members of the Guntersville Museum there will be a special opening event for the exhibit on Thursday, July 3 from 5-7 pm. The exhibit will be open next week to the public and can be visited in the museum’s Woodall Gallery through the month of August. More information about the Guntersville Museum can be found on their website at guntersvillemuseum.org. The museum is located at 1215 Rayburn Avenue in Guntersville.
