This is an opinion column.
There’s been a lot of talk about the moment, lately. The moment we’re in. The moments we face.
In a matter of days we’ve seen an assassination attempt, a sitting president drop out of the race, and unprecedented questions about the future. Add technological uncertainties, economic angst, global strife and …
Whoa.
It’s too much, so I think smaller. Many of us have never lived through the kind of chaos we see today. My city has, though. It has things to teach, and things still to learn.
I moved to Birmingham decades ago, before 6th grade. I knew nothing of it, except it was a steel town where the Iron Bowl was played, that it was home to Birmingham-Southern College – my dad’s alma mater.
None of those things are true, now. It’s sad. But there is more to the story.
It took a while for me to learn the history of my town, its legends and lore. How Birmingham almost died on the vine in the great cholera epidemic of 1873.
There were only a few thousand people in town then, and dozens were dying. The reputable people fled, according to legend, leaving the sick to fend for themselves. It would have been the end if Lou Wooster, a madam at a downtown brothel, had not stayed to care for the ill.
It’s almost Biblical. The rich and the pious passed by on the other side, and a madam stayed to save a city. It’s a parable. It might even be true.
Birmingham grew so quickly they called it magic. It gained 100,000 people from immigration and annexation between 1900 and 1910. It was another moment.
But it was a wild place, this Birmingham, a murderous place. The homicide rate in 1910 topped anything we’ve seen in decades, and 1913 was worse. One person in every thousand was murdered.
It has always been a tough town.
So many moments changed the direction of this community. Annexations and elections, court rulings and business deals.
The U.S. Supreme Court in the ‘40s ruled racial discrimination in housing unconstitutional, and Birmingham blew up. The notion that different races could live as a community was too much to take. We failed that moment.
Birmingham was a city of 326,000 in 1950, a smidgen smaller than Atlanta, with its 331,000. The Birmingham metro had 557,000 people then. More even than Atlanta metro’s 513,000.
They were essentially the same size.
Atlanta business types famously got together and sold itself as “the city too busy to hate.” I use this line too much, but Birmingham wasn’t that busy. It forged its future in dynamite. And division.
So between the ‘40s and the ‘60s dozens of bombs were placed in Birmingham, which made us fixtures on the nightly news. Not a single one would be solved, for decades.
Jim Baggett, the now-retired archivist from the Birmingham Public Library, points to the 1957 election that put Eugene “Bull” Connor into power in Birmingham as a critical moment. If Connor had lost that election the 1960s, the future would have looked very different.
Instead, Birmingham jailed Martin Luther King. Klansmen beat Fred Shuttlesworth and bombed his home and church. They twice bombed the home of civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores.
People remember when four young ladies were killed at a downtown church on a September Sunday morning in 1963. The world noticed. Even Birmingham itself noticed.
The day after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing a lawyer named Chuck Morgan spoke to a civic club. He ached from the sorrow, the guilt, the silence. In that speech he pondered who was responsible. It all poured out.
The “who” is every individual who spreads the seeds of hate to his neighbor and his son.
The “who” is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator.
It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren’t really like they are.
It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.
It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions.
We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say.
We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.
What’s it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States.
Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.
It was a moment that forced Birmingham to look at itself. A moment that still rings all too familiar, in Birmingham and beyond.
I don’t believe Birmingham is dead. In truth its past mistakes taught Birmingham lessons other cities have yet to learn. I do think people have tried to kill this town. From the writers of the constitution to the state legislature to those who see its problems as a spectator sport.
I think we’ve done a lot to hurt ourselves.
Birmingham has lost 43% of its population since I was born, most of it to its suburbs. Efforts at regional government failed decades ago by small numbers, mostly driven by race, so we have dozens of municipalities. Birmingham is now the third largest city in Alabama.
It is frustrating, because losing population, clout and status as Alabama’s largest city ought to be a moment for Birmingham. It ought to nudge what is still by far the state’s biggest metro to drum up a modicum of civic pride. It ought to help us see that we could be more if only we liked each other.
If only for a moment. If only for the moment.
Sometimes things seem grim, at home and far away. There’s nothing unprecedented about that.
Things were dire when Wooster risked cholera to help people, when Shuttlesworth risked death to give people voice, when Shores risked his family to protect the rights of others, when Morgan spoke so honestly of our sins that he was made to move.
It strikes me that we never know when such moments will arise, as people, or cities, or nations.
So our only course is to choose carefully every day, and especially in these chaotic ones. What we do, and what we fail to do, will define us. These aren’t just moments. They are legacies.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.