Come experience Civil Rights history and so much more in nearby Alabama
The older white woman on the video has a whimsical, remorseful tone as she asks: Why don’t the Negroes sing and whistle cheerfully as they pass down the streets of Birmingham, like they used to? She is nicely dressed, well put together, ensconced in a bower of affluence, obviously.
The Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham continuously plays that brief video as a strong reminder that white people’s clueless complacency—added onto virulent, violent racism—was a thousand-ton weight of inertia on black people’s political and social progress.
The Institute draws you in with facts: an informative booklet of civil rights court cases; photographs of fire hoses and police dogs being used on peaceful juvenile protestors in the 1963 Birmingham “Children’s Crusade”; news headlines of protests and reprisals, both famous and lesser-known events.
And also artifacts: the front of a bus, symbolic of the Freedom Riders and bus boycotters who defied segregation on public transit; the shameful white and “colored” water fountains; actual authentic KKK robes, which provoked in me an unexpectedly visceral revulsion.
The fourth of four galleries at the institute, the Human Rights Gallery, expands its vision to the worldwide struggle for freedom and dignity in many modern times and places, adding an important follow-on to the earlier exhibits focused on the southern United States.
The relevance to today is unmistakable in the display of Bull Connor’s actual “tank,” perhaps the first militarized vehicle used by police against peaceful protestors. But not the last.
Outside the institute, history surrounds you in the streets of Birmingham. The CRI is located directly across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed in a 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing as they prepared for Sunday School.
A poignant sculpture of the girls at play stands in a park on the adjacent corner. The institute definitely merits an afternoon in Birmingham in its own right, to remind the old and instruct the young how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.
When you leave, you’ll be hungry for food as well as righteousness. A great place to eat some soul food is just two blocks down 16th Street North at “Mrs. B’s on Fourth,” unpretentious and filling—fried chicken and fish with the kind of sides and vegetables that Southerners like, warm and mushy, and that visitors from elsewhere can learn to appreciate.
Continuing to 16th Street South, the visitor is rewarded with another venue for remembrance of the not-forgotten, nor-lamented days of segregation: the Birmingham Negro Southern League Museum.
You’ve gotta love a place that immortalizes guys nicknamed Candy Jim, Heavy, Cannonball, and “The Ghost.” Naturally, it has bats, uniforms, photographs, original contracts, memorabilia, and even sets of grandstand seats from Southern League stadiums, where the black teams sometimes played on “off” days from the white teams’ schedule—including old Engel Stadium from Chattanooga!
For a finishing touch on a day trip to Birmingham, visit the Peanut Place at 2016 Morris Avenue, a storefront shop where several delicious flavors of nuts can be sampled and purchased, all prepared using original, antique roasting vessels and methods.
This historic street is paved with old-timey cobblestones, and when I visited, the store windows had been redecorated for a movie set depicting a Canadian city from a century ago.
History, in all its many guises, lies always just below the surface of the present in Birmingham.
Ward Raymond has been writing for The Pulse for several years now, covering everything from southern literature to classical music to traveling all around the Southeast and beyond.