The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
Has there ever been a place more thoroughly defined by dichotomy than Birmingham?
To put that question another way, is there another place in America where the lines of difference — the boundaries between being and becoming — are etched as deeply into the civic psyche? Where the word and is precluded so conclusively by the word or?
Black or white? Rich or poor? City or suburb? Downtown or “Over-the-Mountain”? Labor or management? Booster or critic? In Birmingham, you must pick one or the other, or else be ever on the lookout for those rare and fleeting moments when the twain do meet and actual progress occurs.
I say “actual” progress to distinguish the genuine article from things that can be dressed up to bear superficial resemblances to it. The distinction, the dichotomy, is especially important in Birmingham, where such facsimiles have been — and continue to be — deployed regularly and successfully to distract public attention and energy from the deep and interlacing fault lines that underlie our civic landscape, undermining our best efforts to become more than we are and better than we have been.
It has been a real problem for Birmingham from Day One, the native resistance to the hard work of transformation, and the native willingness to treat nominal progress as the real thing. This stubbornness, this essential conservatism, this collective embrace of economic and civil structures that serve very few in anything like an equitable manner — this has been, to date, our city’s defining civic characteristic.
To repeat for probably the five hundredth time something the former Mayor Richard Arrington said to me in an interview 10 years ago — and reiterated in this space earlier this year — Birmingham is, at bottom, a status quo town. Beyond his reluctant-but-firm reaffirmation that the essential character of the city he ran for two decades “[hasn’t] changed very much,” Arrington offered a comment that gets at the real heart of what I’m talking about here.
“I think the average citizen in Birmingham is just holding their own,” Arrington said. “I don’t think we’ve moved backward. But our movement forward remains very slow.”
For those among us who might dispute the diagnosis of the former mayor, several questions come to mind, including the following: Why does the rate of poverty in Birmingham and numerous surrounding communities continue to rise? Why does a community that is known globally as a center for healthcare and research have some of the most appalling public health statistics in the United States?
Why aren’t we doing more at the local and state level to address inequities in funding for public education? Why don’t we have a mass transit system that meets the needs of the citizens who need it most?
Why does Birmingham remain so segregated?
That’s a loaded word in these parts. Let me be quick, then, to remind the reader that I use it here not just in racial terms, but in all of the other terms that I enumerated at the outset of this little exercise in the expression of my long-standing and ongoing frustration with the city I have loved for so long (and, I am sure, in spite of both its shortcomings and my own). I mean the segregation of access — to resources, to opportunity, to the things that signify upward mobility on both individual and collective bases.
I mean our segregation from one another. I mean our division into narrow interests and our acceptance of supposed measures of progress that are inadequate to the larger purpose of creating a community that works for the vast majority of its citizens.
That tendency, of course, is firmly embedded in our civic DNA. Go all the way back to the origin — and the originator — of Birmingham’s most enduring nickname. It was James R. Powell, one of the city’s founders, who first made reference to “this magic little city of ours” during its initial surge of growth from a few scattered settlers to a population of more than 4,000 (it was also Powell’s idea to name the new city after England’s iron-making metropolis).
While Birmingham’s early growth was, and remains, a remarkable feat, it also bears remembering that Powell himself was, among other things, a first-class gilder of lilies. To help ensure the outcome of the 1873 referendum that made the new city the seat of Jefferson County, Powell dispatched trains into the far reaches of the county to bring black voters to the polls.
As they disembarked, these voters saw a distinguished-looking man on horseback, brandishing a sword in heroic manner. They were told that it was U.S. Grant, hero of the Civil War and, at that time, President of the United States, who had come to urge them to vote in favor of the new county seat.
It was, of course, Powell. In retrospect, that might have been the high point for the man who had come to be known as the “Duke of Birmingham.” Not long afterward, the city was gut-punched by the combination of a national financial panic and a deadly cholera epidemic. The population dwindled, and Powell returned to the plantation in Mississippi from whence he had come to join with other financiers and speculators to start a brand-new experiment in postbellum capitalism. He died in 1883, shot outside a rural tavern by a younger man, for reasons that were never made public.
I’ve always found Powell’s tale to be especially poignant. Perhaps conversely, it has come to seem even more so in light of Birmingham’s recent spurt of growth. What’s happening in our community today is, in many ways, unprecedented — even if a disproportionate share of it does fall into the category of the superficial.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as pleased as anyone about many of the things going on around us. Nor do I mean to say that “superficial” things cannot be indicators of actual progress. In fact, they often are — but the fact remains that these things should not be taken as ends within themselves, or their presence as anything other than mile markers on the path to greater opportunity, and a destiny that is more magical than anything Birmingham has yet achieved.
Will we arrive at that destiny? Will we overcome our dichotomies and move forward in ways that, for the first time, makes the promise of Birmingham available to all of its people? Or will that promise remain, as it has to date, perpetual?
From my view, the answers to those questions are, as someone once said, blowing in the wind. I do believe that the period of our history in which we now are living — the next three to five years, say — represents Birmingham’s best — and, perhaps, last — chance to claim its birthright, and to become a city that is a place of opportunity for all of its citizens.
That would be magical, indeed.