FAIRHOPE, Ala. - Wayne Flynt, former chairman of the Auburn University history department and author of 11 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites,” spoke last Thursday at the Fairhope Unitarian Fellowship.

“There are more references to the poor in the Bible than any other subject except idolatry,” said Flynt, who is also a Southern Baptist preacher, during a lecture that wove together stories, facts, and an appeal to join the Alabama Possible campaign.

That program was launched in 2009 by the Alabama Poverty Project, a nonprofit group Flynt helped found in 1993.

“I got really tired of people talking about the problem (of poverty) without information but tons of opinions,” he said, as one of the reasons the Alabama Possible campaign was started. “I told them maybe you better check your sources,” said Flynt, who added that people can now get information on the subject at www.alabamapossible.org.

A wealth of information about the poor in Alabama can be found at the group’s website, which recently released a fact sheet of 2010 data organized by county.

Some of that information is summarized as follows:

• More than one in six Alabamians live in poverty;

• The gap between Alabama’s richest and poorest families is the second largest in the nation;

• Alabama ranks 42nd in the nation in per capita income and nearly 60 percent of the state’s income gap with the nation can be attributed to the high school dropout rate, which was 41.4 percent in 2007;

• Alabama is the second most obese state in the country and has the fourth highest rate of diabetes among adults;

• The state is ranked 39th in food security, with 13.3 percent of Alabamians lacking “food security” with 5.4 percent having very low food security.

Flynt spoke to an audience of some 75 people and answered several questions after his lecture.

He said there is a common mythology about who the poor in America are and what the sources of the problems are, and that it is the mission of the Alabama Possible campaign to bring some factual information to the issue and debate.

“We are often told you can’t solve what’s wrong with education by throwing money at the problem,” he said. “How would we know? We’ve never tried.”