A City Reborn

BIRMINGHAM! THE ALL-AMERICAN CITY!... Blacks sitting in at stores and restaurants. "Nigger lover" scrawled on shattered plate-glass windows of merchants suspected of sympathizing with them ...

BIRMINGHAM.' THE MAGIC CITY! . . . Firemen battering black women with high-pressure hoses, snarling police dogs...

BIRMINGHAM! THE FOOTBALL CAPITAL OF THE SOUTH' ... The mangled bodies of little girls in a bombed-out church. Martin Luther King Jr. and Theophilus Eugene ("Bull") Connor--the irresistible black force meeting the immovable white object--confronting each other amid the flames...

BIRMINGHAM?

A postbellum parvenu, forged on steelmaking and railroads rather than magnolias and gentility, Birmingham dug in against the black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. Bull Connor, who really ran the city as public safety commissioner, personified entrenched white supremacy. In Birmingham's embattled spring of 1963, Connor coldly ordered his police and firemen to cut off black marches on downtown with fire hoses, police dogs and clubs. A series of bombings culminated one September morning in a blast that ripped open a black church, killing four small girls in Sunday-school class learning "the love that forgives."

Bull Connor has since died --and so has Birmingham's bitterness. It is significant in the contemporary South that Alabama's largest city (pop. 295,686) has become a model of Southern race relations. Legally, everything is integrated; blacks, who make up 40% of the population, work and shop and dine freely downtown. The only trace of the old "colored" fountains is scars on the walls where they were removed. No serious racial incident has occurred since the First Baptist Church voted six years ago not to admit two blacks as members. Even then, the pastor and many members marched away in protest and formed their own unsegregated church. Mixed housing and social mingling are advancing more slowly, but, says School Superintendent Wilmer S. Cody: "The voice of segregation is almost nonexistent in Birmingham. Not even in private conversation is it any longer acceptable to say such things."

The revolution was brought about largely because white voters became disgusted with Connor's brutish tactics and heavy political hand. In the midst of the 1963 racial outbreaks, they succeeded in scrapping the archaic and arrogant commission form of government that provided his raw power. The mayor and city council who replaced the three commissioners (including Connor) have been more responsive and progressive. Mayor David J. Vann, 48, is a hearty lawyer and Methodist Sunday-school teacher who won the job last November in a campaign without any racial issues. The nine-member city council includes three blacks.

Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the black vote has increased from 15% to 40% of the total. Lawyer Arthur D. Shores, whose home was twice bombed, became the first black councilman in 1968; he and two other blacks were elected or re-elected with the help of many white votes. Blacks sit on most Birmingham city boards and the metro boards that the city has set up with surrounding Jefferson County. City departments are also integrated. The police force, once the epicenter of black hatred, has 34 black officers and two black sergeants in a force of 616. The total might be higher but blacks can find higher-paying jobs in private industry.

Under a federal court order, Birmingham's school system (94 schools, 47,000 pupils) is integrating smoothly, without busing. In 1970 a rezoning brought black and white kids together in some school districts. This year, neighboring black and white schools have been paired, and alternate or "magnet" schools with special curriculums have been set up for both races on a 50%50% enrollment basis. The main problem now is a white movement out of the city to surrounding bedroom towns --"because of affluence, not confrontation," insists Superintendent Cody --which has unbalanced school population from 50%-50% to 70%-30% black in six years.

Birmingham employers, hiring more black workers, are also finding it easier now to attract whites from other areas. Meanwhile, the outmigration of young blacks and whites has been reversed. Birmingham also shifted from blue collar to white collar, as its longtime economic base changed from heavy industry to nonmanufacturing enterprises like finance and merchandising. Steel companies closed old furnaces, built new ones that need fewer hands. The University of Alabama is now the city's principal employer, with 7,000 faculty and staff; 15,000 students are enrolled on an expanding campus that so far covers 60 blocks close to downtown. White collars demand more culture than blue: a $60 million civic center nearing completion includes a 2,900-seat symphony hall and 1,000-seat theater, as well as a coliseum and exhibition hall.

Probably the greatest catalyst in Birmingham's reformation has been a bi-racial Community Affairs Committee of more than 80 leaders from every segment of the community that was first organized to discuss racial problems. The group was formed in 1969 at the urging of Birmingham News Editor Vincent Townsend, now retired but still active in civic affairs at 75. Townsend, who had the ear of Birmingham's business leaders, persuaded them to meet with the city's black leaders for what he called "self-preservation." The C.A.C. still meets every Monday for breakfast, always off the record so that anyone can speak freely about any civil ill. Says one memberW. Cecil Bauer, president of South Central Bell: "The pangs and problems of deprivation--for black and white alike --are no longer merely statistics."

Birmingham, of course, has not been totally transformed. "We don't make any claim that we've licked racism," says Mayor Vann, "but we've learned to face the problem candidly and not play games." City Councilman Richard Arrington complains that much of what has been done so far in Birmingham is "still very much tokenism." Arrington protests, for instance, that blacks "still have difficulty cracking the suburbs." Mayor Vann worries about white flight from the city; black leaders complain that Birmingham may not be able to provide jobs to match new expectations, and that housing integration is limited to the poor. Adds N.A.A.C.P. Official W.C. Patton: "This is no Utopia, but we're moving in the right direction." Patton likes the new Birmingham well enough to remain--for eternity. He recently bought eight plots in Elmwood Cemetery. Like everything else of value in Birmingham's bad old days, the graves there were once restricted to whites only.

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