Birmingham Today

Cassandra Uretz

March 20, 2004

Birmingham is a tough former steel town that looms over visitors. Every building seems self-conscious about the past, with a tribute to Justice carved over its front door and too many potted palms in the lobby. The Southern sun is bright, a merry little trolley circles downtown every few minutes to whisk tourists into the city's shopping districts, but the streets feel empty on this warm spring weekend.

It's been forty years since Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement came to Birmingham and struck segregation a fatal blow. Non-violent demonstrations for civil rights brought out the physical brutality of racists in power at the time, and clashes between city police and Dr. King's marchers marked Birmingham as a villain in America's eyes. The city has rebuilt, but it seems to have residual shell shock, like a war veteran who cannot stop reliving old battles.

Living side by side with memories of the 1960s, Birmingham residents exude a strong sense of personal responsibility, as if each has thought, what would I have done back then, what can I do differently today. Each person seems to have shouldered a small part of the town's history to help the whole move forward, and to build a penitent future where segregation fell.

Because Birmingham, like much of the South, has a strong religious tradition, this sense of social responsibility makes its way into devotional practice. At Temple Emanu-El, a 122-year-old synagogue in the upscale University of Alabama area, for example, Rabbi Jonathan Miller exhorts his Friday night Sabbath flock to face their prejudice and tear it down.

"With globalization, the world is reorganizing itself, and borders don't mean much anymore. People put up fake walls, we think we are right, but maybe God can speak to our neighbors in a language we appreciate but don't understand," Miller cries out, a little carried away. "We are meant to be a light to the nations. Do not exclude the light of other peoples. We must break down walls."

Eighty well-pressed, middle-aged Jewish worshipers shout back. "Oh, yeah!" "That's right!" "Shalom!" Even for a Reform congregation, with its more liberal interpretation of Judaism, this is forward. They nod approval. Yes, they will come to the synagogue's Easter interfaith meeting to discuss The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's new movie, with local Baptists and Presbyterians. Then they settle down as Jessica Roskin, their young blonde cantor, sings. Prayers are recited, the Rabbi reads announcements, and the group speaks a Kaddish prayer for members who have passed away.

The weekly Sabbath service is one of the Jewish community's strongest affirmations, renewing their collective obedience to cultural laws that God handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai, according to the Old Testament. While Christianity emphasizes personal identification with the suffering of Jesus on the cross, the spiritual essence of Judaism, and the sense of belonging it extends to believers, comes from submission to this law.

After the service, Miller says civil rights are on his mind when he interprets the law to his congregation.

"Birmingham is a historical city, and civil rights was one of its darkest periods. What people do here matters. You can't live in this city without thinking about race or talking about oppression," Miller says.

"The Rabbi should always be a little ahead of the congregation. All religions are treated with great respect in the South, and people take their religious lives more seriously."

At the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a former Civil Rights headquarters where Dr. King preached in 1963, a tour guide gives another sermon to a roomful of black children visiting from a Mississippi church.

"This Church is 130 years old, and houses 2,000 people. Many churches were open to the Civil Rights movement, and many were bombed. But this is the only one where people died," the tour guide says.

On Sept. 15, 1963, four members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group whose violent tactics earned their city the nickname "Bombingham," blew up the Church basement and killed four girls attending Sunday school. The girls' funeral drew 8,000 mourners, and further disgraced the segregationist cause.

The sun streams through the Church windows to its velveted wood pews, where the children blink politely and shush each other. "People think this happened a long time ago, but it's only been forty years," the guide says. "It happened in my lifetime. I saw Dr. King speak in this church." The children look at her, trying to imagine her as a little girl seated where they are today.

Outside the church, carpets of pink, orange, and white flowers bloom in Kelly Ingram Park, where on May 2, 1963 Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered police to attack one thousand black demonstrators, most of them children, with dogs and fire hoses. Images of children blasted with 100 lbs. of water and hauled off to jail, their legs bleeding from bite wounds, were broadcast live on national television.

A statue of Dr. King stands at the park entrance, over the words, "Place of Revolution and Reconciliation." From here, a walkway circles the park, past statues that recreate the children's experience. The path leads through a jail cell and a snarling metal dog pack that blocks the way. On either side of the path, crowds of visiting children snap group photos.

Across from the park is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. From its spotless white rotunda lined with paintings, computers and a screening room, visitors enter a dark, claustrophobic exhibit. Again, it is laid out along a narrow path, so that visitors are forced to walk alone.

The story of life under segregation is told with lifesize objects: A tub of iron ore that black workers mined; a bare school room for blacks only; a shabby boardinghouse bedroom that white companies gave underpaid employees as a sop to quell labor unions. Black society flourished separately from whites, with its own schools, restaurants, churches, burial societies, bars, Masonic lodges, and baseball teams like the Black Barons. Birmingham was hot on the jazz "chitlin circuit," and black musicians made sure to play there on tours.

Then the trail leads past a courtroom where the Brown v. Board of Education decision has declared segregation unconstitutional. The floor turns into a road with a white stripe. It passes a bombed bus where racist mobs attacked black riders and their white supporters. Leaflets call for a bus boycott. Old-time television sets broadcast news footage of beaten, bloody demonstrators lying in hospital beds, whispering that segregation must end.

A white Ku Klux Klan robe hangs in a glass case. White visitors hurry past it. Its snaps are shiny, the cloth has a mass-produced sheen. This robe was not stitched together in a backroom, it is a professional uniform for a standing army.

The road becomes peopled by lifesized glass demonstrators calling for voting rights, and the visitor walks between them. On more televisions, Southern police tell Northern journalists to go home. There is the door to Dr. King's Birmingham jail cell, still locked. His "I Have a Dream" speech from the 1963 March on Washington is projected on a screen, near an original stained glass window from the church across the street where a Klan bomb killed four girls.

Finally, there is a room devoted to international human rights. Visitors can stand side by side and press interactive television screens to learn about civil rights violations around the world. A sign tells visitors, this is all part of the same struggle.

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth shared his anecdotes from the civil rights movement with the Covering Religion class at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Photo: Anne Lilburn

Meanwhile, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth has flown in from Cincinnati to speak to visitors today. Rev. Shuttlesworth was the pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church when he invited Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement to the city in 1963. He was a fiery anti-segregationist preacher, known today as one of the Civil Rights "Big Three" with Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy, a fellow organizer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in 1956, and was chain whipped by a mob when he tried to enroll his children in a white school. Now he is a city hero, with his own statue outside the Institute.

"Birmingham couldn't kill me, so it started to honor me," he says.

Rev. Shuttlesworth's steel gray suit is stern, his gray-peppered moustache is neat and smoothed, and he folds his hands on the table like an elder diplomat lecturing recruits. Beneath the table, however, he props his feet on his back heels and wiggles his shiny leather shoes. He leaps up at times to act out a scene, like the night the Klan bombed his house, and his 6-year-old daughter turned to him and said, "They can't kill us, can they, Daddy?"

Photo: Anne Lilburn

At 82, Rev. Shuttlesworth has more ideas inside him than his body can keep pace with, and he strives to pack fifty years of story into one presentation. He doesn't have patience with this situation, and his audience clicks into "Receive" mode, taking in his raw energy now while preparing to sort later.

In words as in body, his message is about spirit. "Birmingham was a dead city. It epitomized segregation, unchanging, inflexible. But light shines in darkness, and darkness can't stop it. I've always believed in an awesome, benevolent Being who is concerned with us. I never thought we wouldn't win. God means what He says, right overcomes wrong."

Rev. Shuttlesworth says the Civil Rights movement brought out strengths he didn't know he had, because he found dignity in the struggle to speak up, and joy in embarrassing segregationists, especially his nemesis Bull Connor. Civil rights gave him a discipline, he says, that reminded him of who he was and what he believed in, and taught him how to love. He says God allows us to choose who we want to be, through a grace that can overcome destiny.

"You see our history, how we lived. A man's actions are his theology, and no one can take your faith if you've got it. As long as you live, you have a chance to change."

"Now let's go get some soul food."

(Updated April 18, 2004)