Toulminville

Toulminville

Toulminville is a district in Mobile, Alabama. It began a small settlement on the property of Theopilus Toulmin, who served as Sheriff of Mobile County in the 1830s. In remained a largely rural settlement until after the Civil War, when it slowly took on the character of a suburb to Mobile. It remained largely exurban in character until the 20th century, when growth within the city of Mobile spilled over into Toulminville. Part of Toulminville was annexed into the city of Mobile in the 1920s and the whole of Toulminville was annexed into the city of Mobile in 1956 in the annexation which tripled the size of Mobile's corporate limits. In WWII, Toulminville became an upper-middle class suburb, with many affluent neighborhoods built along Stanton and Summerville Streets. In the 1960s, white flight issues caused by desegregation and an upsurge of crime on Mobile's northside (highlighted by an incident in 1966 in which a white nun was raped by a black man at Catholic Cemetery on Davis Avenue,now Martin Luther King Avenue) caused the district which was majority white in 1960 to become nearly 80% black by 1975, and Toulminville was the bedrock of the district which elected John LeFlore, a Mobile NAACP leader who became the first black elected to the legislature in Mobile County.

The final holdout against white flight were neigborhoods along Stanton and Summerville Street which finally became nearly all black in the 1980s, though they remained affluent areas.

While Stanton and Summerville are middle-class areas, most of Toulminville is lower-class and during most of the 1980s and 1990s had a serious crime problem, though that trend has reversed due to a concerted effort by the Mobile Police Department and community leaders in Toulminville.

Toulminville was the birth place of General William Crawford Gorgas who takes on the status of Toulminville Community Hero, as several streets and an elementary school were named after him, (Figures Park, named for Senator Micheal Figures, an influential black politician, was originally named Gorgas Park, in honor of General Gorgas). It also is the neighborhood in which baseball legend Hank Aaron lived in during his adolescent years.

LeFlore High School (originally Toulminville High School) is a performing arts magnet school named in honor of John LeFlore. As Toulminville High School, is was an all-white school during segregation times, and remained majority white until the 1970s, and in 1979 was renamed in honor of LeFlore. In the 1980s, it was converted into a magnet school, which under Mobile County Public School policy, is ideally to have a 50/50 black white mix. This has not been the case as most whites have the negative image of Toulminville, which was developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and which is closed tied to its promiximity to Trinity Gardens, an impoverished black neighborhood bordering the northwestern reaches of Toulminville, as well its proximity to the Southeastern side of Prichard.