This is an opinion column.

People keep telling me they didn’t know Giles Perkins.

“Yeah you did,” I say. “You just don’t know it.”

There used to be a strip of deserted industrial land just south of the railroad tracks in downtown Birmingham, where on any given day you might see a down-on-their-luck couple making the best of things in the scraggly bushes.

Perkins saw something else in that desolate place. He saw possibilities others did not. That strip of land, because of him, is now called Railroad Park. It changed the character of downtown and spurred growth. But it did way more than that.

Somehow, someway, it changed the expectations of a city. It changed the way Birmingham saw itself and gave that town permission to dream bigger.

That was Giles Perkins.

People know what happened in Alabama last year, too. They know Doug Jones did the impossible to become a U.S. senator. Jones fitted a stone in his sling and put it between the eyes of GOP Goliath Roy Moore. When the world was watching.

That was Giles Perkins too. He didn’t just help run the unlikely Jones campaign. He saw it in the beginning when others could not. He – along with Doug Turner – helped Jones buy into the vision, persuading him to run and convincing him he could win.

People in Alabama knew Giles Perkins. They just don’t know.

Perkins, a lawyer and strategist and former Democratic Party executive who left a mark far beyond politics, died this week at the age of 51.

He had struggled for years with pancreatic cancer, making his political swansong – the Jones campaign -- all the more remarkable. He received treatments for his brutal cancer during the campaign, and knew his illness was a death sentence. But he had strength to push campaign workers, and to remind Jones to “stay in his lane,” to remain “authentic.” A win, he believed, would be a win for a fairer, more accepting world.

It was important to him. If you don’t count his marriage or the birth of his children, “It probably meant more to him than anything in the world,” Sen. Jones said.

Because Perkins, a Texas native who married into Alabama, saw something in the South others didn’t always see. The world looked on Alabama and the rest of this region like Birmingham looked on that strip of railroad track. It saw hate and blight and whatever might be going on the bushes.

Perkins saw a different South. And he wanted Jones to help tell its story.

“He believed the South can be a place of healing for this country,” Jones said. “There are new voices in the South that are changing the world. They are young, more diverse, more tolerant and respectful. We are on the cutting edge.”

That’s what Perkins believed. Until the end.

“At the end of the day Giles believed in the best of people,” Jones said.

I believe that.

Perkins was involved in much of the politics of the last two decades. He worked on campaigns for Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. and Gov. Don Siegelman, not to mention local races in Birmingham. He made a run for attorney general in 2010, but was better behind the scenes than in front of them.

I admit I did not always see Perkins’ vision when he had it, whether it was Railroad Park or reshaping the Birmingham Zoo. I did not always agree with him, or him me. But he dreamed of a better, more equitable Alabama.

Not just for the state, but for all its people.

You may never have known Giles Perkins. Someday, though, I hope you see his vision.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.