MARION, Ala. - The sign going on the front door at the Perry County courthouse reads: "Closed for the Obama Holiday."
The rural, mostly black county has proclaimed Monday as an official holiday celebrating the election of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama. It's one of Alabama's poorest counties, but it's sparing little during five days of festivities.
County employees, as well as city workers in Marion and Uniontown, will get a paid holiday Monday as government offices close, culminating a series of events including an old-fashioned civil rights rally and march, a golf tournament, a weekend carnival and a parade Monday through Marion.
"I feel great about the holiday," said county maintenance worker Leon Brown. "It's history. It's the first time ever we've had a black president. I hope it's not the last time ever."
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Located in the heart of the economically depressed Black Belt region named for its rich soil, Perry County is sparsely populated, with a little over 11,000 residents, and an unemployment rate of more than 18 percent, one of the highest in the state.
County Commissioner Brett Harrison, who cast the lone "no" vote when the commission voted 4-1 to set up the holiday, questions adding a paid day off in such a poor county. He said the county already had 14 paid holidays and it didn't seem like the right time for such an ambitious event in the middle of a recession.
"The timing didn't make any sense," Harrison said, pointing out that many private businesses will be open Monday, including his full-service gas station.
The Obama holiday was proposed by Commissioner Albert Turner Jr., whose father was one of the marchers beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" voting rights march in Selma. Many of the marchers were voting rights activists from Marion upset about the shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson during an earlier demonstration in the town.