White people have always had it hard in Birmingham.
That was true even before there was a Birmingham. The vision of a great industrial metropolis rising from the floor of sparsely populated Jones Valley was conceived in the spring of 1858. It was then that John T. Milner, a wealthy and well-connected engineer from Montgomery, did the surveying for a railroad that was intended to run from Montgomery to Decatur, through the heart of the comparative wilderness of Jefferson County, with its rich and virtually untapped deposits of iron ore and coal.
Milner recognized immediately the profit-making potential in the creation of a new kind of Southern city, where mining, heavy manufacturing, and rail transportation formed the foundation of the economy. By 1860, despite strong opposition from large Black Belt landowners and other economic and political interests who had no desire to compete with a brand-new population center, Milner had convinced the Alabama Legislature to allocate $2.8 million (about $62 million in today’s dollars) to build an interlocked network of rail lines to span the southeast.
As Milner envisioned it, the network would link not only Montgomery and Decatur, but also Jackson, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. The hub of this vast enterprise, the crossroads of all of those vital lines, would be Elyton, the tiny hamlet that was the seat of Jefferson County government.
Construction of the Montgomery-to-Decatur line began almost immediately. It ceased just about as quickly, however, due to the intervening contingencies of Alabama’s secession from the United States and the subsequent dustup known as the Civil War.
Speaking of contingencies, the war did nothing to dampen John Milner’s enthusiasm for his vision of a new city. It did, however, put a cramp in his ability to pursue that vision, especially in its outcome, which robbed from him the most essential element of his plans to build an iron-and-railroad empire.
That essential element — the fatal flaw in Milner’s original conception — was, of course, free labor, also known as slaves. Milner was a brilliant man, a true visionary of the Industrial Age — a “great man,” in many accepted senses of the term. But having grown up as the scion of a Georgia plantation, he was sympathetic to the Confederate cause and believed fervently in both the institution of slavery and the God-given supremacy of the white race.
After the war and Reconstruction, Milner became a spokesman for the Bourbon oligarchy that claimed to have “redeemed” Alabama from the evils of postbellum Yankee oppression (in 1890, he authored a widely circulated pamphlet titled White Men of Alabama, Stand Together). He viewed “the negro” as “a peculiar being,” whom whites would “always look upon and treat…as an inferior,” and believed that blacks were fit only for servile occupations. In the meticulous 1859 report that laid out his plan for a regional rail network, Milner noted that he had “long since learned that negro slave labor is more reliable and cheaper for any business connected with construction of a railroad than white.”
In other words, when you don’t have to pay even poverty wages and can keep the costs of food and shelter and healthcare for your “employees” to an absolute minimum, you stand a chance of making yourself a tidy little profit on your increasingly in-demand product. This part wasn’t exactly genius, but along the war came and blew a gaping hole in Milner’s plan. Damn Yankees, indeed.
Being of hardy white stock, though, Milner and his associates were not deterred for long. They got the city of Birmingham founded in 1871, and benefitted from a massive influx of labor that, if not free, was kept cheap by the near-constant glut of jobseekers that persisted as the young city began to boom in the late 1880s. Plus, you could pay black workers somewhere around half of what you paid white ones, because — well, because that’s just the way things were, and who wants to monkey around with tradition?
Somewhere along about the same time, some enterprising individual hit upon an even better idea for lightening for Birmingham’s mine and mill and railroad owners the burden of labor costs. Instead of paying the princely wages accorded the average worker, they began to fill many manual jobs with convicts — both black and white, but very disproportionately the former — “leased” for pennies a day from county jails and the state’s prison system (actually, the practice dated to the 1840s, but it was perfected right here in the Magic City).
This went on until 1928, when Alabama became the last state in the Union to outlaw convict leasing. More unconscionable government intrusion into the perpetuation of such quaint local customs as the legalized exploitation of human beings and the use of vigilante groups as a check on voices of protest and reform. Another kick in the teeth for white folks.
Well, for some rich white folks anyway. Which was all that mattered, because one thing at which the economic powers-that-were in Birmingham excelled was in keeping the wedge of racial fear lodged firmly between their white labor force and their black one.
That dynamic took hold, and it prevailed for a long time — in the Jim Crow laws and upsurge of KKK presence and influence in local affairs during the 1920s, in the post-World War II institutionalization of segregation, and in the “white flight” of people and businesses to the suburbs that began during the Civil Rights Movement, accelerated during the 1970s, and continued apace after the citizens of Birmingham elected their first black mayor in 1979. In fact, the white exodus picked up steam again in the 1990s and persisted through the following decade.
Why did the white folks keep moving out? For many years, it was mostly so that their children would not be required to attend schools with black children. But there were other, overarching reasons, as well, not least the increasing erosion of white political power and the widespread (and mistaken) conviction that suburbs could thrive indefinitely in the absence of a strong urban core. There was a sense, too, that Birmingham’s “Magic City” days were behind it for good.
To be absolutely fair to the white folks here — and Lord knows that doesn’t happen often enough around here — it should be noted that from the late 1980s through, roughly, the present, the exodus from Birmingham has included most of what once was the city’s black middle class. It is, I believe, impossible to overstate the cultural irony in the fact that the overwhelming contributor to black flight from Birmingham has been parents seeking better schools — in academics, in extracurricular options, in student safety — for their kids.
That phenomenon, and the extent to which its prevailing assumptions are holding true, are topics for another day. The real upshot here — in consideration of both white and black flight — is that the poverty rate in the city of Birmingham is over 31 percent, which should be appalling to anyone who claims to care about the community in which they live. In the Birmingham City Schools, more than 90 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price meal program. Of the 99 neighborhoods that comprise the city, how many receive even adequate attention and resources from city government?
It is true that poverty knows no color. But it is just as true that poverty in Birmingham is today, as it always has been, disproportionately prevalent in what, with our endless talent for euphemism, we refer to as “the black community.” That’s just the way it is. If you want to get an idea of the magnitude of that problem, and its potential impacts on the duration and depth of Birmingham’s current and undeniable buzz, then consider that our poverty rate — which, again, is rising — makes us look more like a Rust Belt city than one in the heart of the Sun Belt.
None of which means that people who love Birmingham — or who are learning to love it — aren’t fortunate to be here at a time when unprecedented possibilities for growth and progress seem open to our community. Our city has developed an energy that, unfocused though it remains, is like none seen in the lifetime of any citizen currently extant. If ever there was a time for civic consensus to take hold in Birmingham, we are living in it.
We’re also in danger of, for lack of a term that seems more apt — and/or is less than profane — screwing it up. Which brings me to the ultimate point of this (mostly) good-natured prodding and picking I’ve been doing: Civic consensus is not civic unanimity, of thought or of deed.
It is possible, for instance, both to love Birmingham and to poke well-intentioned fun at its foibles. It is possible to pursue whatever makes one happy and content as an individual, and to see one’s progress and accomplishments as contributing to the progress of the community on a larger scale. It is possible to proceed with the knowledge that we don’t all have to take it upon ourselves to exhort the community to do and be better, to point out the instances and reasons that our community sometimes falls short — and, occasionally, to make light of those shortcomings.
Indeed, somebody had sure better do those things, or else we’re kidding ourselves about the level of our civic maturity. Otherwise, we’re going to bog ourselves down in the minutia of narrow interest and manufactured conflict, and our progress is going, once again, to stop short. And, as our history shows, Birmingham has had enough of that to kill a town with less native resilience — or, if you prefer, stubbornness.
What if we make it different this time? How far, at long last, can Birmingham go?