Victoria Bates’ hair salon in downtown Marion is usually a happening spot for her small, Black Belt town. Now that it is shut down, she would like to shift to online consultation with her regular clients who are trying to figure out how to maintain their styles.

“It would focus on hair,” she said. “What (is) your hair texture? What products work best for you?"

But Bates can’t get online to do the videos. She has internet at home, but it is not reliable, and her sixth-grade son uses her salon computer for online school.

“I would prefer him to do it versus me,” she said.

Most of the people who live in Bates’ county have no source of reliable internet, according to 2017 census information showing four counties in Alabama, including Perry, where a majority of households are not able to go online.

Marion is in the heart of the Black Belt in Perry County, where the murder of a young civil rights activist, Jimmy Lee Jackson, sparked the march to Selma over 55 years ago. Central to cotton production during the era of slavery, in recent decades the region has held the state’s highest poverty levels. Today its population is shrinking more than any other part of Alabama.

Stores in downtown Marion

For residents, the digital divide only makes the area more remote, a situation made far more apparent by the pandemic.

Just south from Bates’s salon, in Uniontown, Jessica Gamble and her two young children are trying to participate in online school without good internet during the coronavirus shutdown.

Gamble’s 9-year-old daughter is in a gifted program, but she isn’t able to be in her class some days when the internet connection fails.

“It’s been kind of tough,” she said. “She actually hates it. She would love to attend all of them,” she said of her daughter’s webinars.

Gamble’s 5-year-old son is in online preschool, learning to read letters and numbers, and she is studying for a psychology degree online. She says they are somewhat keeping up.

Great Equalizer

Internet access in this area is not a new problem.

“(Poor) internet is really limiting the knowledge of the general public,” said County Commissioner Cedric Hudson.

The revenue office is still paper-only, the garbage bill and car tag renewals cannot be paid online. Students at the local colleges drive long distances for entertainment and food, which means lost revenue.

When Hudson moved back to Marion from Huntsville in 2002, there were still two grocery stores in town. Now there are none. Fred’s, Hardee’s, and Piggly Wiggly recently closed.

“Cities are extremely stagnant, they seem to be going backward,” he said.

Perry County Commissioner Cedric Hudson

Pandemic or not, Hudson would like to see small business owners like Bates, the salon owner, or like the man who sells handmade belts out of a storefront in Uniontown, move online and grow.

“One of the ways you improve the area is to take these people who (have) a lot of these side businesses (and) teach them how to structure that business, how to grow their business, and how to be self-sufficient,” he said.

The first challenge, Hudson says, is the county’s lack of a digital infrastructure or the funds to create one.

It’s one of the reasons Sen. Clay Scofield, R-Guntersville, has spent years pushing for the state to expand its broadband network.

“It means survival or death,” he said. "The area’s just being completely left behind.”

Without opportunities, he said, young people leave.

In total, 25 percent of Alabama households are without internet, according to 2017 census data. Alabama’s efforts to expand internet statewide have started and stopped. In March, Gov. Kay Ivey announced $9.5 million in broadband expansion grants.

Ads for internet service line rural roads in the Black Belt

Sen. Scofield helped create legislation to fund a program to offer matching grants to providers to cover up front expenses to expand internet in the state. He likens it to how the state once incentivized rural electricity. He believes the internet will bring remarkable changes.

“I do think it is a great equalizer,” he said. “I think in the future, you’re going to be able to have someone, a young person, that loves Perry County, that was raised in Perry County, (and) could work for a fashion designer or a law firm in New York City, but live in Eutaw."

He says that infrastructure will take years to build.

A Fatal Problem

A few miles south of Marion, in Demopolis, the lack of internet during the coronavirus shutdown creates a deeper fault line for rural doctors serving Black Belt residents.

“I love my patients, and they spoil me,” said family medicine Dr. Judy Travis.

She says about half of her patients are too scared to come into the office right now, and if that continues into the fall, she may have to close shop.

“The problem is these people aren’t coming in for their diabetes and their high blood pressure, and that’s what winds up killing them if they do get the virus,” she said, especially if their diabetes and blood pressure are “out of control.”

“It's awful, it's terrible. You know, the lack of an education should not be a fatal problem.”

Dr. Judy Travis with her patient Eva Patterson. Patterson has no computer, internet or cell phone.

Although insurers have temporarily expanded telemedicine coverage for the coronavirus, many of her patients don’t have access to computers, iPhones, or the internet to do online visits.

Travis has invested in equipment to be able to do telemedicine, but says it doesn’t make sense financially, especially since most of her clients can’t take advantage of the service.

“It's not a benign thing to learn how to do. So if I do it, I start doing it, I'm going to spend all my time learning how to do it. And then after June, I won't be paid for it. So I won't be doing it anymore. I can't afford to,” she said.

She makes telemedicine available to patients, but she says she’s been doing many consultations over the phone instead for free.

“Forget the digital divide,” said Eric Wallace, UAB physician and director of the hospital’s telehealth program, talking about the aftermath of COVID-19.

“You'll still have a divide, and it'll be a medical divide, because the healthcare resources will go down,” he said of rural areas losing providers. He added that rural hospitals, on the other hand, might increase their telehealth services because of coronavirus.

Wallace says the divide in Alabama is not just about differences in internet access but also technological literacy.

Unlike in Demopolis, UAB’s telemedicine program has boomed from about 20 evisits a week to 1,000 visits on a single day.

“You name it, it's being done telehealth,” said Wallace. “So we have oncology visits, transplant visits, OBGYN is doing follow ups of pregnant patients.”

A Broader Reach

Tamara Kennie says she spent her childhood in a library, but the times have changed.

“Kids these days, they have a limited view,” she said. “ When I was born, ‘Okay, you want to be, you know, a doctor or a lawyer or, you know, a scientist or something like that?’”

Kennie, now the chief administrator for the Perry County Commission, says internet access would give kids in the Black Belt a broader reach.

“If you want to be a politician, I'm saying you can get on C-SPAN, you can get on other types of things and see how the legislature works.”

Tamara Kennie would like to see expanded broadband infrastructure in Perry County

Commissioner Hudson says it might cost the City of Marion $30 or $40 million alone to lay infrastructure. He says the county could put together a co-op, make a plan, and apply for grants, but so far, he says, he doesn’t see a lot of interest from other local officials.

“They don’t really understand the benefit of doing it,” he said, adding that a lot of residents are older and are accustomed to life offline.

Hudson says there is an election this November, and he could see some things changing.

“We can be a productive community,” he said. “In order to be a productive community, you have to have people there who want to be there.”

*Some of the events and reporting in this story occurred prior to the coronavirus pandemic.