This is a story about a museum in a city many of whose streets are named for men and women who once were chased from those streets with firehoses, police dogs and clubs; a city whose name became, for many of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a symbol for some of the worst excesses of racist resistance to ending segregation.
And the news was often dire, especially in the key year of 1963, when the news was full of images of young Black people being swept with water cannon, attacked by police dogs and clubbed in the streets. And when it seemed that nothing could get worse there, four young girls were killed in the racist bombing of a church in the heart of the city.
But, both in the 1950s with a bus boycott that followed the successful Montgomery boycott of segregated buses, led by Rosa Parks and in the 1960s with the marches and struggles of 1963, there was also a sense of hope and change, driven by heroic acts of ordinary people, and which inspired many of us into activism, elsewhere if not in Birmingham.
If the stories of Birmingham’s 1955 bus boycott and 1963 struggles for civil rights seem long-ago and vague, as events become in the rear-view mirror, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, located on the spot where many of the struggles happened, is a sharp corrective to that, detailing the day-to-day lives of ordinary people who moved extraordinary events, and placing them in the context of Birmingham’s history.
The story told by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is the story of the city and its people, Black and white; its separate institutions and its oppression, and how the community built by African-Americans was able to marshal its strength into a movement.
Birmingham’s whole history begins in a different place from most Southern history; no cotton-trading, no tobacco-farming, no growth from a small rural place. Birmingham was invented in 1871, after the Civil War, as the South’s first purposely-industrial city. Even its location was conscious: where two railroads crossed, and on top of coal and iron ore deposits.
But while both Black and white workers were employed in the mines and the steel mills and other industries, they were not really living or working together. The most menial and dangerous jobs, at lowest pay, were for Black workers, city services and facilities were segregated, and there was even an official zoning map of neighborhoods that were assigned to Black families.
Often, especially before World War II, both Black and white workers lived in company-owned housing and got their medical care, recreation and other opportunities through their employers—but always separate. Only occasionally, as in union campaigns in steel and mining, was there any exception to the rules that made Black Birmingham a “separate world.”
In that separate world, there were black-owned businesses, including stores, insurance companies, funeral homes, restaurants, hotels and more. And while most Black people in Birmingham worked in or depended on the industries, the businesses, and especially the churches, became anchors of the community, meeting places where good works were planned, socials were held, and eventually campaigns against segregation and racism were planned and carried out.
The churches, especially, played an important role in forming communities, and there were many of them; the picture above does not even represent all of them. Some of the pastors of those churches became leaders of the Civil Rights movement, and some became well-known, including Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, for whom Birmingham’s airport is now named.
But before the struggles of the 1960s came Birmingham’s first big Civil Rights moment, a bus boycott starting in 1956 after the success of the 1955 boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses, starting with the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing as sometimes depicted: It was a planned and conscious start to a campaign that went on for a year before succeeding, and made household names of both Rosa Parks and the young Martin Luther King who became the leader of the campaign.
Both boycotts were sustained by the community itself and allies who organized carpools, often using church-owned station wagons that shuttled members of the community between homes and jobs, using local businesses as ‘bus stops’ for the boycott, despite constant police and city harassment.
The Civil Rights Institute preserves the cell where King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” after being arrested during the boycott and demonstrations.
The museum is quite clear on the point that winning victories in court or in the streets did not end the racism that segregation rested on. There continued to be lynchings and school segregation and the city gained the name Bombingham, for obvious reasons.
In this gallery, visitors stand among holographic representations of Birminghamers, while words collected from an oral history project are projected on the wall and heard through speakers. The words are sometimes harsh and use language that does not bear repeating: It is a reminder that some still use it today.
In the early 1960s, Birmingham returned to center stage. Sit-ins and other demonstrations against segregation spread from city to city. After a 1961 Federal ruling that interstate transportation could no longer be segregated, groups of ‘Freedom Riders’ tested it out with integrated Greyhound rides that were meant to end in Montgomery, Alabama.
One bus was burned in Anniston, Alabama, and when the other arrived in Birmingham, police, under Commissioner Bull Connor, gave KKK members fifteen minutes to beat the riders before moving in. The bus is in the museum.
If Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth and Rosa Parks became icons of the Civil Rights movement, Bull Connor became the icon of the fight against it, using police, firefighters and armored personnel carriers against demonstrators.
Starting in the summer of 1962, organizing started against Birmingham’s segregated institutions. Among the early tactics were calls for Black families to avoid shopping in downtown stores and turning their business to stores in their own communities; students at local colleges were active in distributing flyers for the campaign.
In 1963, the campaign continued, including organized marches through the streets and into downtown despite court injunctions banning them. Kelly Ingram Park, across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, was the starting point for many marches, involving hundreds of youth as well as adults. The Civil Rights Institute now stands along one edge of the park.
After several months, white business leaders called for an agreement to end the demonstrations and to begin a process of desegregation, including removal of Whites Only and Blacks Only signs on fountains and restrooms and a plan to desegregate lunch counters, and other provisions. Despite disagreement among leaders of the demonstrations, the ‘Birmingham Truce Agreement’ was signed on May 10, 1963.
While the business leaders signed off on the agreement, they clearly did not have the agreement of the more violent racists; the same night a bomb was set off near the motel where King was staying. Four months later, and barely two weeks after the huge March on Washington, four Klan members bombed the 16th Street Church, killing four young girls.
But the Civil Rights Institute’s story doesn’t end there. It chronicles, if briefly, the story of Birmingham’s growing political role for members of the Black community, including Richard Arrington, who was the first elected Black member of the City Council in 1971, and then became mayor from 1979 to 1999.
And, at the end, it reminds us that while Birmingham is a unique place with a unique story, it is not the only story we need to remember.
