Condoleeza Rice. Tim Cook. Martin Luther King. Fred Shuttlesworth. Charles Morgan.

The list goes on.

Helen Keller. E.O. Wilson. Ralph David Abernathy.

You have them in your city. Probably in your family. People who lived in Alabama. People who left.

People of wisdom or courage or exceptional gift. People who found their audience or their calling outside the state, who were recognized for their worth only beyond the bounds of this place they called home.

I was struck by it this week while talking to Alabama's pre-eminent historian, Wayne Flynt. He has written definitive histories of the state and sees it in a two-century totality of beauty and possibility and disappointment and deceit. He can, like few people I've known, talk with authority about the origin of our issues, and the consequences yet to come.

But when he spoke of people like these noteworthy Alabamians - and thousands like them we might not immediately recognize - he quoted someone else. He spoke the words of a Jewish immigrant named Harry Golden, a newspaper publisher and activist during the Civil Rights Movement.

"No state will long progress which exiles its prophets and exalts its fools," Golden wrote.

Wow.

That speaks to Alabama with a voice both loud and disturbing. Because it's more than brain drain. More than lost talent we come to expect. It's a statement of who we are and a self-fulfilling prophecy of what we are destined to become if we do what we've always done.

Flynt put it best, as Flynt does.

"Alabama sent more prophets out of this state who if they had stayed would have changed it in such profound ways," he said. "And it has exalted more fools than maybe any southern state."

It is truth.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc., is an Auburn grad who still has fondness for Alabama. But Alabama has made its feelings clear. It doesn't like gay people and is so put out by the notion of gay marriage that it's seemingly willing to put Roy Moore - Alabama's anti-gay cowboy -- in the U.S. Senate.

Clockwise from top: Charles Morgan, Fred Shuttlesworth, Rosa Parks and Tim Cook.

E.O. Wilson is an immense figure in the study of nature and biodiversity and a compelling voice for preserving the earth, both for its beauty and ... survival. He has fans among Alabama's Forever Wild crowd, to be sure, but if he spent too much time back home he too would be vilified as a tree-hugging whacko standing in the way of "jobs, jobs, jobs."

Fred Shuttlesworth was a powerful civil rights leader, a man who stood against racism in Birmingham until he was beaten almost to death, until he was rocked out of bed by a Christmas Day bomb, until his church and home were battered time and time again. He moved to Cincinnati to continue his work.

Charles Morgan was a regular guy, a lawyer in Birmingham who saw the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as a reflection of a white community that looked the other way. He said that in a speech to the Young Men's Business Club a day after the bombing killed four little girls. He was driven out of town by the outrage.

The prophets are everywhere. Big and small, known and unknown. They push to make things better and are met with disdain. They are told - over and over - to love it or leave it.

They are pushed away, to leave Alabama to those who like it exactly the way it is. Struggling. Stagnating. Unequal. They are told there is only one way.

But that is the wrong way.

It is the way of fools.