Birmingham
I was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up there. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was writing his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” I was four years old, playing on the linoleum floor of our old ramshackle house, or out under the pecan trees. We lived maybe two miles from the jail. Of course, at that age I had no idea that my city was the focal point of massive political and cultural changes, but what interests me, as I think back on my childhood, is how little that changed in the coming years. I was in college before I began to realize that I and my family had lived through something profoundly historic.
I was in sixth grade, I think, when the Birmingham schools were integrated — by court order, of course — and attending Elyton School, in the oldest part of the city. The neighborhood was already transitioning from white to black, and before integration the school was a kind of white island. I was used to that, since the same could be said of my neighborhood, a collection of twenty or so houses wedged between the interstate and a huge gravel pit, and facing (just across Arkadelphia Road) one of the largest all-black neighborhoods in Birmingham. But even so, integration struck me as pretty insignificant. I mean, I saw black people all the time, every day, so it wasn’t a big deal to have them in my classes.
For my mother there were, I suppose, more anxieties. From fifth through seventh grade I attended an “Enrichment Class,” as they called it, for smart kids, which is why I went to Elyton, which wasn’t my neighborhood school. In eighth grade, when that program was abolished, I was zoned to a school that (so I was told) would have had about seven hundred black kids and the five or six white kids from my tiny neighborhood. We ended up moving to an equally ramshackle house in another part of town where the schools had more white people than black, so I never had the experience of being very much in the minority at school.
But none of these events had much of an impact on me. Strangely, though I remember the Huntley-Brinkley Report being on TV each evening while my grandmother was cooking dinner, I never saw Dr. King, never saw the protestors or firehoses, never heard the name Bull Connor. I learned about all this in college. How and why my family managed the silence I’m not quite sure; but then, we were the sort of family who remained silent about almost everything. This particular silence strikes me as especially impressive and interesting, though. And perhaps, among those living through stressful times, not uncommon.
When you speak of the schools being “segregated-by court order” you really mean “integrated,” right?
— TW Andrews · Jan 21, 05:27 PM · #
Yes! – thanks, it’s fixed now.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 21, 05:29 PM · #
I recently taught King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to my 10th grade English class (though I fear that I did not do Dr. King justice—several students slept), so I was excited to see you post on the topic. Was the silence on the matter unique to your family, or do you think this approach was endemic in white families at the time? Here I am thinking about Southern gentility, an idea at which I can only gesture, having never lived in the South.
— David Michael · Jan 21, 08:57 PM · #
No family could possibly be less genteel than mine, David. I think silence on significant issues (personal, political, whatever) was just our primary family neurosis. I wish I knew how the miseries of Birmingham in the ’60’s were dealt with in families comparable to mine, but I don’t.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 21, 09:18 PM · #
It wasn’t at all uncommon. I grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Birmingham four years behind Alan. I never knew anything about the turmoils of the times until long after the major disturbances had passed. Bull Connor’s two grandsons were in my Scout troop, but I didn’t recognize his name and only heard that he used to be a bigwig in town. There were black teachers in my school in first grade, though no black students, as my neighborhood was all white and busing had not yet begun. The “Enrichment Class” didn’t go away, but it did move to a school across town from Elyton, where I entered it in 1972. The class was integrated, as was the school, and I don’t recall experiencing that as anything particularly unusual. Certainly my parents didn’t suggest that it was. This silence, if you want to call it that, wasn’t limited to racial issues. We didn’t talk about Vietnam either, and that was a much larger issue by the time I became aware of the larger world.
— J. G. Pair · Jan 23, 03:10 AM · #
Thanks very much for the correction/clarification/corroboration, J. G. . . . Wait. I know a guy named Pair, who has the initial G. Dude! What are you up to?
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 23, 03:19 PM · #
You may be interested in a book by Birmingham native Sena Jeter Nashlund; Four Spirits is a look at the civil rights movement through the eyes of a young white college girl. I thought it was enlightening, especially for me, who grew up in the rural south long after King’s death.
My parents were in college during the 60’s, and I think their parents were mostly silent on the matter as well. Though my granddad was one the school board when the Montgomery City schools integrated, it wasn’t something he talked about, but at least he allowed his kids to continue at the integrated schools.
I went to college at BSC, a few blocks from where you grew up. Those neighborhoods are now mostly elderly (I delivered many Meals on Wheels there), though the Woodrow Wilson Elementary school has been revitalized over the last 10 years due to outstanding staff and volunteer efforts and some younger people are moving into the area.
(As an aside, a friend, Randall Goodgame wrote a song called “Laundromat” that begins with the lines “There’s a laundromat on Arkadelphia Road…” which you also might enjoy.)
— A. Redd · Jan 23, 10:43 PM · #