By David Sher
Editor’s note: Much of this article draws on research by Walker Beauchamp from his time as a student at Samford’s Cumberland School of Law.*
In 1872, iron master Abram Hewitt predicted Alabama would become “the manufacturing center of the habitable globe.”
In 1906, speculator John Gates said Birmingham would become “the largest American city not on navigable waters.”
In 1919, industrialist Henry Clay Frick predicted Birmingham would surpass Pittsburgh by 1940.
None of it happened.
By 1937, when journalist George Leighton visited and profiled Birmingham for Harper’s Magazine, he cataloged these disappointed prophecies and described Birmingham as a ‘city of perpetual promise’ — forever arriving, never quite here.
At the time, the city ranked last among large American cities in per capita public spending, placed near the bottom in education and health, and had recently earned the grim title of ‘Murder Capital of the World.”
Leighton mainly blamed what he described as “absentee landlords”: Northern companies owned the mines and mills and organized civic life around whatever was cheapest for them.
Leighton also wrote about racial tensions, but depicted it more as unfortunate custom or atmosphere. What he missed was the formal legal architecture dividing the races, such as an ordinance the city had passed eleven years before his visit, in 1926, that divided Birmingham’s residential land by race.
The Ordinance Turns 100 This Year
Drafted by planning consultant Morris Knowles, the ordinance looked like routine housekeeping. But Sections 1604 and 1605 designated certain districts for white occupancy only, others for Black.
Because the Supreme Court had barred race-based ownership rules in 1917, the ordinance restricted occupancy instead: you could own property in a district zoned for another race, you simply could not live there.
Confined by Law
Under the ordinance, Black residents, never below roughly 40 percent of Birmingham’s population, were confined to just 16 percent of the city’s residential land. Densities there averaged 150 people per acre, ten times white neighborhoods.
Of the land allotted to Black residents, only 3.5 percent was owner-occupied single-family housing, against 61.5 percent for whites. Black Birmingham did not get a smaller version of white Birmingham’s housing but a fundamentally different, inferior one: rental, blighted, industrial-adjacent, and fully occupied in both sections zoned for Black families.
Between 1926 and 1935, the zoning board received 360 applications to convert properties from white to Black occupancy and denied every one, while retaining authority to revoke permits for Black housing built near white neighborhoods.
The ordinance’s bite was initially limited, since most Black residents lived in company-owned mining and mill towns outside the scheme. That changed during the Depression, as corporations closed company housing and pushed thousands into a market with no legal room for them.
Wartime growth brought a 30 percent increase in Birmingham’s Black population between 1940 and 1950, while the county condemned and cleared more than 1,200 Black dwelling units for sanitation reasons. For some residents, violating the zoning law became practically the only way to avoid homelessness.
When the Law Failed, the Klan Enforced It
Eugene “Bull” Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety from 1937 to 1963, kept the ordinance alive by rezoning disputed properties whenever a court case threatened it, mooting each case before it could be decided.
When that failed, there was the Klan, once 14,000 strong locally, which reemerged in 1947 against the Black community’s renewed legal campaign. Between 1947 and 1965, roughly 50 dynamite blasts hit homes of Black families who had moved into white-zoned neighborhoods, and no one was ever arrested.
Attorney Arthur Shores pressed legal challenges through the 1940s, had his cases mooted by rezonings, and eventually won a ruling from federal judge Clarence Mullins in 1949 that survived appeal. His client, Mary Means Monk, was permitted to occupy her new home; the following evening, it was bombed, one of a series that gave the area its name: Dynamite Hill.
Built Things Persist
Connor eventually lost his job, and Birmingham elected Richard Arrington, its first Black mayor, in 1979. But a city physically shaped for segregation doesn’t reorganize itself just because the legal barriers are removed.
Birmingham peaked at 340,000 people in 1960; today it stands below 200,000, now the state’s third-largest city, behind Huntsville and Mobile. The metro area has grown past a million, but those people live mostly on the other side of Red Mountain, outside a city still carrying more than its share of the region’s poverty.
There is no villainy in this, of course. Families go where the schools are well-funded and the public services are a matter of course rather than a matter of luck. The success of a Mountain Brook or a Vestavia Hills is not a conspiracy but the logical result of people choosing security or convenience over uncertainty, the instinct that built the suburbs in the first place.
Still, the centennial of the 1926 ordinance makes one thing hard to ignore: our metro’s geography does not just reflect a million individual choices. It was informed in part by a century-old legal architecture of separation that concentrated disadvantage within Birmingham.
No one alive designed that arrangement, but a metro area that already shares an economy, a workforce, and a skyline might reasonably ask whether it should share more of a stake in its urban center. A region locked in proximity without mutual obligation has agreed, however politely, to keep the promise perpetual.
That stake is worth taking, because the city is already coming back in pockets. And the infrastructure—the streets, parks, and bones of the neighborhoods—was built for a city that once accommodated seventy percent more residents than its current count. That is often described as decline. It might equally be described as capacity.
George Leighton came here in 1937 and found the promise genuine and the perpetuity suspicious. He was right on both counts. A hundred years is a long time for a bad law to shape a city, and a long time for a city trying to outrun it. Birmingham is still doing both.
*Walker Beauchamp, “The Legacy of Racial Zoning in Birmingham, Alabama,” Vol. 48, Cumberland Law Review (2017–2018)
David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).
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Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. dsher@comebacktown.com
David – Is this the pitch for an integrated County or MSA regional structure? I 100% agree with you on that approach but, as you have said in another recent article, we don’t seem ready for that discussion yet.
David, this is not a pitch for an integrated County. This is a pitch for our broad metropolitan area to be less self-focused and to find ways to work together for the benefit of all our residents. This will result in all of us being more prosperous. As you likely know, I’m not adverse to a more integrated county, I just don’t think its realistic that this is accomplishable during my lifetime.
When you say “we” are you referring to the suburbs? Is the power structure of the Cityof Birmingham ready to share that “power”?
I once asked a Birmingham developer who had projects in Chattanooga why that city had boomed and Birmingham had not. His answer was, the last 3 mayors of Chattanooga had been real estate developers who knew how to get things done. I found it right on point.
How true, Aubrey. As Kyle Whitmire once succinctly said “Birmingham needs a mayor with influence, not an influencer mayor”.
Anyone know if Patrick Cooper is still around?
I once had someone in mind and even asked him if he would consider moving into Birmingham and running. He declined but I always called him Mayor after that. LOL
?? Did we even read the same article? You reduced Birmingham’s slower growth to real estate development? The point was that Birmingham has 100 year old structural deficits once codified in laws around race that still handicap this city to this day. These are deficits that Chattanooga or even Nashville and Charlotte do not have to contend with even close to the level seen and experienced historically and presently in this city. As he said, it is not some magical coincidence of a million personal choices that the poverty rate in the city is over 25% and has produced a city that was even called a “Murder Capital” in the 1930s, while people living across a mountain have had a very different reality for decades. Do you really think this is just about needing a good real estate developer? We can’t address the challenges of this city and region if we continue to even look at it honestly, like this article is trying to do.
Birmingham is about to lose Regions Bank to a Wells Fargo acquisition which will basically mean that downtown Birmingham’s fate relies solely on UAB.
I for one am tired of constantly being told something great is just around the corner for Birmingham and not to believe my lying eyes. For instance, Birmingham lost 2 sports franchises just this year – the Squadron and the Stallions – because the public didn’t care enough to go to games.
I’ve tried selling my Black anesthesiologist friend who works in the NYC metro on Birmingham and touting the changes in the city over the last 20 years, and her response was – and I quote her verbatim – “When I think of Birmingham, I think of MLK’s letter from a Birmingham jail, the 16th street church bombing, and segregation. I realize that’s your hometown and I don’t mean to be insulting, but can’t see any reason I’d want to visit that place.”
Instead of trying to move past that horrible time in history, Birmingham has instead made that time its central identity and continually seeks to perpetuate it – giving the world the impression that we are still backwards, racist hillbillies. We can remember history without making racism and the 1960’s the first thing people think about when Birmingham is mentioned. Google searches certainly do nothing to help our reputation either.
Until Birmingham has a real leader who empowers and unites all residents, sends the message loud and clear that it’s not the same place it was in 1963, and that we aren’t going to be defined by things that happened long before most of us were born, we will continue to face depressing headlines, harsh realities, and continued cynicism from the OTM crowd.
I disagree. The history of this city should be promoted and centered as a point of pride, not because of the horrible racist actors but because of the Fight. The people of this city took to the streets in the service of racial justice and dignity and literally changed the world. It was the scenes on tv of our protesting citizens, our children being attacked by dogs and water hoses that motivated President Kennedy to center the Civil Rights Act that Dr. King had been promoting for years. Those laws became the template for subsequent laws for women’s rights like Title IX, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Gay Rights laws. Other countries copied these laws. This all began in BIRMINGHAM and would not have been possible, or certainly would have been delayed, without the heroism and courage of our citizens who decided to Fight. I feel we don’t talk about this enough or celebrate it enough, instead choosing to center racists like the Klan and Bull Connor in our story. This is the real problem. The story to promote is that Birmingham changed the world once and we can do it again, by being a equitable center for tech that pulls people in, a center for Arts in the South with our film festival and food scene that includes all, as a place that addresses injustice by funneling resources into communities that still suffer as a result of these past laws, by providing these communities with the best school resources and teachers, providing good public transit and opportunities for living wages. Please let’s change the narrative of this city not by running away from our history but finding and embracing the beauty and power in it.
Excellent post. Do we really think the black power structure that runs Birmingham really wants to share that power with the predominantly white (white the exception of Hoover which is very diverse, just look at the demographics of the 2 high schools) suburbs? I think not.
Very brave and impressive article. Well done.
Many years ago, I visited Charlotte’s Museum of the New South in downtown Charlotte. It was basically a civil rights museum, but at the end were displays showing the “new Charlotte” and how it was moving forward.
Huntsville celebrates the German rocket team locating there in 1950 and the NASA moon landing in 1969, but most of what I hear about Huntsville today is Eli Lilly, Space Command, the FBI center, Facebook, Blue Origin, Hudson-Alpha, Toyota-Mazda, etc.
When a city spends more time looking backward than looking forward, its future is limited.
Unfortunately, that’s what this blog and so many people want to do is keep the focus firmly on the events in the 1960’s instead of what’s happening in Birmingham now and in the future.
The entire Birmingham airport is essentially a monument to that time, from the murals to the gift shops and they’ve even opened up a short film booth that basically advertises Birmingham’s problems from the 1960s. That and that combined with the poor service and surly workforce, gives visitors a terrible first impression of the city. Not to mention the airport located in a really bad part of town.
If we had a mayor that tried to unite us instead of divide us, we would overhaul the airport and fix the surrounding areas, but instead his focus is on past grievances against a generation that has mostly passed away.
They’ve run off over 100,000 residents over the last 40 years but still refuse to listen to reason or join the 21st century.
What did the mayors before them do for all of the citizens of Birmingham. There was no talk about uniting citizens then either.
David, these are two great articles, particularily as many of us arrived later and it is wonderful to hear how it was before. As I have said beforeon your site, we are behind Mobile in education due to soo many private schools there, and behind Huntsville do to people who work there. In order to catch up we must do a better job educating our young people and provide place for them to work when done with the education. I personally blame the State Board of Education and Jefferson County Board of Education for sorry education our students are confronted with.