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Published: February 9th 2012
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Minister's monumentMinister's monumentMinister's monument

Monument on the spot where Bull Connor arrested three praying ministers leading a march to free Martin Luther King.

Bombingham





I woke up today near Birmingham, Alabama.

This city was the place the civil rights movement exploded.

The movement was born as a formal force in Montgomery, but it reached critical mass in Birmingham.

I studied the history earlier (see By My Works Ye Shall Know Me) but that can’t compare to being here.

For long months in 1963, the city was a vision of horror as Public Safety Commissioner Bull Conner and the Ku Klux Klan waged war against Martin Luther King and other civil rights organizers.

Today, I explore that painful legacy.





I started in Kelley Ingram Park.

This park is the actual location where marchers were met with fire hoses and snarling police dogs.

On one level, it’s hard to imagine that type of violence, because the current park is pretty and peaceful.

On another level, it’s all too easy.

To commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the events, the city commissioned a series of sculptures.

Most of them are frightening.

One consists of two black blocks close together; to walk through, one must squeeze pass models of flying dogs with teeth bared.

Another sculpture is children cowering in
FirehosesFirehosesFirehoses

The frightening firehose sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park, commemorating the civil rights campaign of 1963
front of two firehose mounts that look like machine guns.

Yet another sculpture is two figures in a jail cell.

A fourth is three black clergymen kneeling in prayer.

After Martin Luther King was jailed John Thomas Porter, Nelson Smith, and A.D. King organized a protest march on Palm Sunday.

They were confronted by police at this very spot, at which point they kneeled down and prayed.

The cops arrested them anyway.


Sixteenth Street Baptist Church




The park is next to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

This church was large and centrally located, so it became a focus of civil rights organizing.

Martin Luther King organized the marches by high school students from this spot.

The church became famous when it was bombed by three KKK members, killing four teenagers who were preparing for Sunday service: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.

There is a memorial to them on the street corner.





The church is still active, and its members have an uneasy relationship to their fame.

While they are very proud of the congregation’s role in civil rights history, they
Police DogsPolice DogsPolice Dogs

The equally frightening police dog sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park.
don’t want to ONLY be defined by this legacy.

Sixteenth Street Baptist was one of many churches that organized civil rights protests, and they were far from the only one to get bombed (practically every church in the city was bombed at least once).

The church became famous thanks to the particularly tragic results of that bomb.





Tours of the church are given by members.

The most important site is the main room.

It was restored after the bombing, and now looks very similar to how it did in 1963.

The pulpit is front and center.

A remarkable number of leaders, not just Martin Luther King, have preached from that pulpit, and the tour guides talk about some of them.

A basement room has a small museum dedicated to the civil rights era.

It’s filled with newspaper clippings and pictures.

The most moving part is a memorial to the four girls that died in the bomb.

One news report famously states: “Birmingham is not dying; with this act, Birmingham is already dead.”





The actual location of the bombing no longer
Jail, no bailJail, no bailJail, no bail

Monument to teenagers imprisoned by Bull Conner as part of Birmingham's civil rights protests.
exists.

The bomb was placed underneath an outside staircase at the back of the church.

The staircase was heavily damaged by the bomb so it was torn down afterward and not replaced.





After the church, I needed some lunch.

On advice from someone at the civil rights museum, I went to a local soul food restaurant called Mrs B’s on fourth.

They had chicken practically any way one wants it (fried, barbequed, etc.) great cream of corn, and lots of other classics.

The restaurant is primarily an African American hangout.

Given the city I was in, I couldn’t help but reflect that fifty years ago going here would have been an incredibly political act, and possibly a life-threatening one.

These days, it was just a good lunch.


Birmingham Civil Rights Center




After lunch, I explored the Birmingham Civil Rights Center.

This museum is primarily a monument to the work of one man, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.

He organized local civil rights activity in Birmingham starting in the late 1950s.

This work eventually caught the eye of Martin Luther King, leading to the summer that made the movement explode.

The
Kelly Ingram ParkKelly Ingram ParkKelly Ingram Park

Peaceful Kelly Ingram Park, where the Civil Rights Campaigns once exploded.
museum explores his work, and its legacy.





Understanding what happened in Birmingham first requires knowing the circumstances that made it such a powder keg.

The first part of the museum explores Birmingham’s early history.

The city is located in the Rogers Valley at the base of Red Mountain.

The mountain really is red, from iron deposits.

The mountains on the other side of the valley hold high quality coal deposits.

The valley floor is covered in a layer of limestone.

This unusual geological pairing meant that the Jones Valley had the raw materials to become a steel and iron center to rival Pittsburgh, if only the industry could be organized.

Unfortunately, the valley lacks the navigable rivers that were so important to transportation in the years before the Civil War, so it never happened.

Northerners should consider themselves fortunate that it didn’t; the war may have gone differently if the Confederacy had access to a reliable supply of steel.





In the 1870s, a railroad finally reached the valley, and Birmingham was born.

The city was planned and developed by a group of investors, lead by
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Sixteeth Street Baptist Church across from Kelly Ingram Park. Four teenagers were killed in the back by a KKK bomb in 1963.
railroad executive Josiah Morris, specifically for iron making.

They planned the town to control their workforce as much as possible.

Workers had to live in company owned housing near the mines and mills, and had to buy supplies in company owned stores, to which they were perpetually in debt.

To keep workers happy and productive, the companies also ran social clubs, theaters, and even churches.

Nearly every aspect of people’s lives was under company control.





They went much further than that, however.

The investors were good white southerners, and they ensured their company town would be completely segregated.

Everything in town from housing to schools to social clubs was duplicated; one for whites and one for everyone else.

All jobs were strictly segregated, with whites getting the higher paid skilled positions and blacks getting poorly paid laborers jobs.

In older southern cities like Charlotte (see The New South) people from different ethnic backgrounds mixed on occasion because they had to; in Birmingham it was impossible.

Civic leaders went so far as to ban white fans from Negro League baseball games after they discovered some had crossed the color
Four girls memorialFour girls memorialFour girls memorial

The memorial to the four girls killed by a bomb at the Sixteeth Street Baptist Church
line.

All of this meant that Birmingham was the most segregated city in the entire south, and its leaders were proud of it.





The brutal working conditions in the mines and mills also paved the way for later violence.

The company owners were very quick to root out troublemakers.

For blacks in particular, they would be convicted of trumped up offenses on a moment’s notice.

Looking a white person in the eye was usually enough to be sent to jail.

Once there, they were assigned to convict gangs working in the coal mines.

This system lasted until the 1920s.





In return for laboring under these conditions, workers earned a wage that was the lowest in the industry.

It was only a matter of time before people tried to unionize.

The United Steel Workers called for a general strike in 1908.

The owners quickly brought in the National Guard, and broke the strike even more brutally than the textile workers strike in Charlotte.

The legacy of this era was a tradition of using violence and threats of violence as a means of social control.

Reverend ShuttlesworthReverend ShuttlesworthReverend Shuttlesworth

Statue of civil rights pioneer Reverend Shuttlesworth, outside the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.




The next part of the exhibit is a display on life in Birmingham in the 1950s.

It has the separate drinking fountains, which by this point in my trip are almost a cliché.

It has side by side models of white and black classrooms (the white classroom has all the latest amenities, while the black classroom is ready to fall apart).

It has a lunch counter, with a sculpture of a white football player courting his cheerleader girlfriend, while a black teenager looks glumly through the window.

The most chilling items are a collection of literature and figurines showing popular stereotypes of blacks.

All of them show black characters as either primitive savages or buffoons with huge red lips.





The next part of the museum discusses the campaigns.

The displays are different to those in the National Civil Rights Museum in that they are focused on Birmingham in particular.

After the Montgomery bus boycott, the Alabama legislature banned the NAACP from the state.

Reverend Shuttlesworth responded by setting up his own organization.

His actions attracted the attention of the KKK, who bombed his
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Vulcan statue on Red Mountain. The long perspective reduces the apparent size.
church and burned down his home.

He kept pushing, however, and eventually attracted the attention of Martin Luther King.

Birmingham, with its strict segregation and violent police force, was the perfect stage to get the nation’s attention.





The 1963 campaign forms the center of this section.

The display opens with a bombed Greyhound bus, shattered glass, and a burned concrete wall with the message: “Birmingham, the nation is watching”.

Monitors show the chilling TV footage from those days, with teenagers attacked by police dogs and men mowed down by fire hoses.

Other footage shows entire busses of people being brought into jail.

One monitor shows a rare TV program of an interview with Bull Conner:

“Every farmer knows that when you mix your black chickens and white chickens, they become violent.

Separation of the races is good for chickens and it’s good for us.”

The exhibit has the actual jail cell that Bull Conner used to imprison Martin Luther King.

The best part for me was the video interviews with participants in the protests; for the most part, they knew what they were getting into and went anyway.




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Vulcan on top of his pedistal. Compare it with the tree to see the size of this statue.









Protest footage. Yes, its violent.





This section leads into the National March on Washington.

I liked the display much better than the one in the National Civil Rights Museum.

Reverend Shuttlesworth was one of the primary organizers, and the display focuses on his role.

For me, this made the event much easier to comprehend.

He made quite an effort to include northerners and whites, for example, to show that the issue was not just one that affected southern blacks.

The display also only plays the video of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, rather than the entire event like the National Civil Rights Museum does.

The speech is still stirring after all these years.



Watch it! The most famous part is at the end.







Unlike the National Civil Rights Museum, which ends with King’s death, this museum has a final section showing the changes that ultimately happened in Birmingham.

They started with the elimination of Bull Conner.

Voters (who were still mostly white) passed a charter change in 1964 to replace the commissioners
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Memorabilia from Vulcan's appearance at the St. Louis World's Fair
with department heads who reported to the City Council.

Bull Conner treated the vote as illegitimate, the product of outside agitators, and refused to give up his job.

The city sued, and the Alabama Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Bull Conner had to leave.





Once he did, the city council opened a dialogue with black leaders, including Revered Shuttlesworth.

The result was a document called the Fifteen Point Plan, which was released in 1971.

Its first item: “Recruit black police officers”.

The city elected its first African American mayor Richard Arrington eight years later, who spent the next sixteen years promoting racial inclusion.

Significantly, he also pushed to bring new industries to town to reduce the dependence on the steel market.

Birmingham today is far from utopia, but it’s very different from the hell it once was.





The final part of the museum is on the lessons of Birmingham’s experience, and how they can be applied elsewhere.

It tries to make the point that civil rights campaigns are still happening worldwide, such as the struggles of indigenous groups in South America, and most of
Vulcan gives vertigoVulcan gives vertigoVulcan gives vertigo

The infamous picture of the base of the Vulcan statue, shot THROUGH the wire mesh walkway at the top.
them have learned from Birmingham’s experience.

It also has an area for self-reflection, on how one is treated and what should be done if rights are violated.

I found it all rather mushy.

The Courage exhibit at the Museum of the New South makes many of the same points and does it much better.


Vulcan Park



After the Civil Rights Museum, I saw a sight of a different sort, Vulcan Park.

In 1903, city leaders had the audacious idea of creating a huge cast iron sculpture to represent the city at the World’s Fair in St Louis.

The statue would be the largest in the world made of cast iron.

The found an Italian artist, Guiseppe Moretti, willing to do the work in only nine months, and cast the statue in Birmingham from locally made pig iron.

It became such a hit locally that after the fair was over, they built a tall pedestal on an outcropping of Red Mountain, and put the statue on top.

A century later, it’s still there.

The statue is now the centerpiece of Vulcan Park.





As the name hopefully implies,
Downtown BirminghamDowntown BirminghamDowntown Birmingham

Downtown Birmingham, shot from the Vulcan walkway with maximum zoom.
the statue is of the Roman god of the forge.

He holds a hammer in one hand lying on an anvil, and holds a just finished spear point in the other.

He holds the latter above his head, to symbolize the city moving into the future.

My personal reaction on first seeing it was to compare it to the huge statues of a saluting Lenin that used to populate the USSR.





The base holds a small museum of Birmingham history.

It focuses much more on the iron industry and making the statue than the civil rights era.

What took up an entire museum at the Civil Rights center here gets a single wall.

The museum has the initial models of the statue, and discussed how it was cast.

It was done in pieces and then welded together.

The initial design did not account for the pedestal, so large parts were filled with concrete to stabilize it.

The concrete later cracked from wear and had to be replaced.





After the museum, I climbed the pedestal.

It has a viewing platform near the top with incredible views.

One can reach
Birmingham industrial districtBirmingham industrial districtBirmingham industrial district

The remains of the Birmingham insustrial district, the location of the major iron smelters. The rusty towers in the distance are Sloss Furnace.
it either by climbing many sets of stairs or taking an elevator.

I took the elevator up and the stairs down.

Anyone with any fear of heights or vertigo should stay far away from this viewing area.

The platform is made of wire mesh, so it’s possible to look straight down at the ground far below.

Don’t even think about what happens when it’s windy out.

The platform has an incredible three hundred and sixty degree view of metropolitan Birmingham.

Every major building downtown is visible, along with the mountains beyond stretching in every direction.

Even though it was perfectly clear out, I could not see this view without thinking of the black cloud of destruction that swept across its northern edge only a week earlier.


Additional photos below
Photos: 18, Displayed: 18


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Protestors monumentProtestors monument
Protestors monument

Civil rights protestor confronts the police in Kelly Ingram Park
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Vulcan and model

Well known forced perspective photo of the model of Vulcan outside the visitor's center and the real thing.
Minerals that built a cityMinerals that built a city
Minerals that built a city

Coal, limestone, and iron ore, the raw ingredients of steel.


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