Dear Shaded Viewers,
I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, because I wanted to honor, by paying a visit, the city that was the Bloodiest Battlefield of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King asked the people of Birmingham to make their city the stage for demonstrations, because Birmingham, he said, was the most segregated city in the South.
I went there in the month of May, the same month that the Freedom Riders had traveled to Birmingham in 1961, when their Trailways bus was met by an angry mob of white men, Klan members, who beat the riders with lead pipes while the police stood by.
In May it is hot, but still springtime, and the magnolias and roses and hydrangeas are in bloom. You can’t help but love a city that smells of flowers.
It was in also in month of May, in 1963, that the man in charge of Birmingham’s police, the infamous “Bull” Connor, ordered the fire department to direct water hoses on the demonstrators: high-pressured water shot from a tripod-mounted water cannon.
The demonstrators had been “children” — and this part of the story is called the Children’s Crusade. They were teenagers. A thousand young volunteers from churches all over the city, trained in the tactics of non violence advocated by Gandhi. They assembled in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which faced the site of the main demonstrations, Kelly Ingram Park. After the water cannon was used, “Bull” Connor brought in dogs.
All through the summer of 1963, there were demonstrations. Some took the form of prayer, when African-American men and women kneeled on the steps of the prominent white churches and there were sit-ins at the downtown stores and restaurants. All over town police arrested group after group, and filled the already-crowded-with-teenagers jails.
But the worst thing possible happened in September. A bomb was placed under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and when it exploded on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, four young women were killed only aged fourteen.
Today, Kelly Ingram Park and the buildings around it are a monument to what happened on during the 1963 Summer. Freedom Walk is sculpture garden with audio stops to document what happened there. The Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church, at the edge of the park, is the real star since it played such a huge part in Civil Rights history. There is also a Civil Rights Museum located on the park, a sacred place, it seems, since no photos are permitted. A few blocks away, on 4th Avenue North, is the site of the old Black Business District of Birmingham with the Carver Theater and Jazz Hall of Fame and The Alabama Theater. Nowhere beats Birmingham for barber shops; due to the current rage for trimmed beards, the streets are lined with them.
To get to Birmingham, I took a train called “The Crescent” that travels daily from New York to New Orleans. I thought it best to travel close to the land, to see America via this old route. We stopped in Washington to change engines, adding diesel to carry us the rest of our trip. It felt like the days of stage coaches, as if we were changing horses. There, I was able to go into Union Station to have a look around. During the night, we stopped to take on water, food, and to drop off garbage and the passengers could walk along the platform and stretch our legs. In the morning, outside my window were small towns, miles of trees, fields, and pastures bright green in springtime.
Like the sign carved in stone in Kelly Ingram Park: Revolution and Reconciliation, Birmingham has made a marriage of races or at least a successful coexistence. The mayor of the city is African American, so are the owners of most of the restaurants and hotels, I was told. And that is the way it appeared to me. Visually, this played out at the Birmingham Museum of Art where there is an exceptional collection of English Wedgwood Pottery and also a collection of African pottery, 406 pieces from Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and Mail, which, they point out, is the largest collection of African ceramics in the U.S.
To some, Birmingham means music. It is the home of The Temptations — who are honored by a small park. In Birmingham, vinyl is still popular, and there are still quite a few record shops.
I stayed at the Hotel Highland in the district called Five Points, and had lunch at chef Frank Stitt’s lovely, many-starred restaurant, Bottega Cafe. But on the day I left town, on Memorial Day weekend, the the town seemed to be closed down. Then I saw a sign for home-made ice cream on a door near the Amtrak station. Inside they were serving smothered chicken, turnip greens, sweet potatoes, lemonade, and bean pie. I’d found Z’s.
Best,
Nancy Stout
