Ledell Dulaney has a birthday next week on June 8- his 71st– and he’s glad to be alive and in Selma. He’s a regular and enthusiastic participant in the Brown YMCA senior program.

Dulaney’s a retired truck driver who has lived his whole life in Alabama, and has been

in Selma since 2002, where he has family. He was born and grew up in Grady, in the southern part of Montgomery County.

Dulaney is proud of his roots. They run deeply in the soil of West Central Alabama and beyond that to Ireland and Africa.

He has few possessions these days but cherishes deeply the ones he has:

a few precious books,

letters, documents, copied articles that trace those roots. He handles them with care and takes pride in showing the names of ancestors and pictures. He holds them lovingly, almost reverentially.

Dulaney has

a nephew who is a doctor who has done a lot of genealogical work. Dulaney says that the nephew is now seeking to find the family’s African name.

There’s quite a Dulaney clan in Wilcox County

and

a while back 13 members gathered at the Dulaney

AME Church and cemetery, located about seven miles east of Camden, just off Highway 10. Some of the graves date back to the 1830s, according to an article from the Wilcox Voice among Dulaney’s family papers.

According to another article in Dulaney’s papers the church was organized in March 1914 under a brush arbor. One Sunday a white man named William Clarence Jones came along and was captivated by the vision of a church building for those worshiping under the brush held up by poles.

Jones gave the congregation an old Masonic hall in which to worship and the land on which to place the building. They worshiped in the building for a while, then tore it down and built another. They gave the church the family name. Not until 1983 did the church have electricity. The descendants of Jones, who still live in the area, continued to support the church financially after his death. Also, additional land was given by the family, according to the article.

“We went to church, had a picnic, visited the cemetery (earlier this year). We’re hoping to have another this summer, and maybe a relative of California can come,” he said.

In an interview Dulaney talked about growing up poor as a member of a tenant farmer family growing corn, cotton and peanuts around Grady, and how resourceful parents put together the money, finally, to buy some land which, he said proudly, is still in the family. He has siblings still living on it.

Dulaney talked about going to school in a one-room school house in Grady, with five classes and one teacher. He finished eighth grade and then worked for his parents for a time on the farm until he was 17 or 18.

Dulaney started driving a truck for a living in 1959 for a firm located in Montgomery, and ended up driving for 16 years.

Dulaney, who is a man of few words, said, “I’ve seen a lot of cities.”

In 1979, he and another driver were driving through Odessa, Texas, on a long haul, and Dulaney was asleep. The truck was involved in a terrible accident and the driver was killed.

“It was horrible,” Dulaney said. “I was thrown out of the truck. I am lucky to be alive.”

Dulaney’s injuries were so severe that he has been disabled since 1979.

Unable to work, he spent some time in the institute for the deaf and blind in Montgomery. He is legally blind, yet is able to make his way around – carefully.

In Dulaney’s own words, “I never had no trouble making a home for myself. Anywhere you live you might as well like it. I have no intention of moving. Selma will be my home.”