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