Lights Out In Birmingham After The Civil Rights Movement

Of all the places we visited on tour, my mind still dwells most in Birmingham, our next to last stop. But not the Birmingham we saw but its black and white images from the 60s of the Civil Rights movement - the hoses, the dogs, the riots and marching crowds. Flying in from Louisiana, we had been moving in a somewhat clockwise geographical motion. But in Birmingham the clock hands quickly swiveled in anti-clockwise fashion.

Birmingham we were to discover is yet to recover from an infamous past; there is an old clock in the famous 16^th Street Baptist Church, after the building was bombed by white supremacists at the height of the Civil Rights movement, which has arrested time. Its hands stand still stopped by the blast that killed 4 young girls, to record the incident for all time. T.R German, a veteran of those confrontations and our guide at the 16th Street Baptist Church, told us that the federal government had requested the community to turn the church into a museum but its administration felt that the church needed to keep the 60s memories alive in succeeding congregations. Keeping the church open to the community, the church felt, was the best way to do this. And indeed, inside its walls on the Monday we visited, like being on the streets of downtown Birmingham, one felt the church did not need an official declaration to become a museum. Such was the strength of that 60s Birmingham in collective memory, and even along the pews that virtual Birmingham overcame all.

Unlike Baltimore or New Orleans, where those cities’ maps were outlined for us by an urban developer and writer respectively, it was fitting that we saw Birmingham through the eyes of a historian, Pam King. Walking through the Kelly Ingram Park, statues peered at us from beautiful empty lawns. We passed through the American Civil Rights Institute, a modern museum that reenacts speeches, music and old film from the time and beyond in its dark corridors. And back in the bright sunlight it was hard to come back into the present. Maybe, because there were such few people in downtown Birmingham– one could jaywalk in the middle of the street without fear of being run over – one felt little life beyond images of the 60s. 

Before the Civil Rights movement, pig iron ore and an industrial economy had ruled, now the town’s new economy was the University of Alabama. Like many an American University, UAB attracts students from all over the world, is an international center of ideas. In its new diversity, a different universe in a space that has one of the poorest self-images in America, haunted by its images of yester-year’s brutality. The University library turned out to be the busiest place in Birmingham. There were more people crossing the University’s streets than in what was once a huge industrial hub. The next busiest place was Green Acres, a small fried chicken eatery where one could sample some of the best fried chicken in America. A few people, mostly black, hung out on the street. They watched our group with interest. One of them told a writer in our group that he was interested in what we were doing but could not get in touch to follow our work because he did not know how to use e-mail. Some local students at the University had told us that they felt too discomforted by its racial history to address it in their writing and had fallen back on personal memoir. And so those in Birmingham with the ability to challenge outside disapproval beyond black and white wouldn't do it, and those who possibly would with new narratives just can't.     

I’d asked T.R German, our guide at the famous 16^th Street Church, how big the present congregation was. Such was my need for a present that I could see and touch. He’d answered in a cryptic parable that somewhat underscored that the multitude of disapproving followers of Birmingham’s history had overcome the City’s present and the contemporary congregation at the 16^th Street Baptist Church. There was more life in the old photos and statues there. Like in the City, the lights had gone out in the 1960s. And though the city's new administration is black, even an old motel frequented by black people and owned by the city's only black millionaire back then remains shut after it was bombed.

 

I now hope that notorious segregationist, Mayor Bill O’Connor, stirs in his grave, possibly in belated recognition that he killed a city that he thought he was fighting for. Gettysburg, which we’d started with on the tour,  prospers from the revisionism of the American Civil War within popular culture with its delicately spun yarns of martyr hood and pride. Birmingham’s past even plagues the larger Alabama in contemporary America consciousness. Our taxi driver, a local, told us that he liked Alabama but Birmingham still discomforted him. He did not offer an explanation. T.R German was lost for words when he went back in time,  saying that relations between whites and blacks-- other than the ‘official’ --were interactive back in the 60s. Crazy, crazy, crazy he said, shaking his head, to think that black women cleaned white homes and children, that races shared desks at work, and in all other spaces other than a constructed segregated public space, races interacted normally. Even years later, he didn’t get it. Even more so because at the height of the bombings, white and black in Birmingham went on with their daily rituals behind the public maelstrom. 

The turn of the screw is that Birmingham was never part of the old plantation slave- economy of the South. Once known as the Magic City, Birmingham was founded on pig iron ore, and its economy took off after the Civil War to become the largest industrial city in the South. Like the North it had a large concentration of 'robber barons' who built its railroads and factories. It did not have the institutionalized segregationism of slavery but evolved a new one based on a rabid industrial capitalism. Part of me wants to feel that this might possibly be precisely the reason the white supremacists were so vehement about segregation of the races – a scenario in which capitalism became so unfeeling and had the guns and men to back it up, to retain its wealth within fewer hands. And that the hate became institutionalized because there was so much in the earth for an exclusive prosperity. That the then-new economy turned the Ku Klux Klan more poisonous than ever, that a semblance of modernity made them go crazy in the hills at the thought of a shared wealth. That it is not a coincidence that the ‘toughest’ town in the 60’s South was the one that was also the most prosperous. That the violence came from America’s economic culture – a capitalism and greed that goes back beyond the recent collapse of Wall Street.

But this economic aspect to all of it is, I suspect, a needy projection, a misdirected rationalism. I clutch at it as cushion to explain the madness that happened forty years ago. Hate need not be rational. Today, the only recovery in Birmingham is the one that keeps the Civil Rights memories alive,  the Christian love in Baptist, Methodist and Episcopalian churches that forgives the old hate. But that old booming economy is gone. Unfortunately one feels a connection between that and the city’s relative, uneasy, calm. 

Ruins Of The River City Always In The ‘Future’ – A Narrative of Transcendence

Sometime during the tour I caught a late night stand-up comedian rant against the naming of American hurricanes and tornados. For laughs he blamed the 'cute' name Katrina for the disaster that became New Orleans in 2008 because people refused to take all forecasts seriously.  The city however has a general long history of ignoring what it considers a different universe, America. It remains unbothered with the scramble into America’s popular post-industrial culture of the other big cities we’ve visited and economy-cultures of new technologies, coffee franchises, giant hospitals and universities. It is a large unending street of seafood, dance and jazz. The experiential outstrips the advertised and the mediated.

New York for the outsider always lives up to its hype, at least as a physical spectacle, a developer’s ego gone deliciously mad with concrete and steel towers with the world’s biggest set of tribal villages stacked below like overlapping dominoes in supplicant worship. New Orleans remains out of the reach of the new urban mega-planner who works in standard neon, strip-mall and freeway. It retains Frenchmen and Bourbon as street names, balconies that are a fingertip touch away across its streets, a street-car that crawls with charm, where the ancient art of walking is still a pleasure within its inner recesses. Row upon row of shotgun houses ignore the lemming call of the American suburb. Boiled crawfish rules over the cheeseburger.

It is a city that lies in thrall to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River-Gods who created it with deposits of land sediments for centuries. Then, the tide turned and it is now being eaten up by the Atlantic, cutely-named hurricanes, the oil and gas industry and Louisiana State negligence if not corruption. If New Orelans remains incomprehensible to America’s macro-economic psyche, oil and gas are still major facts. And maybe the reason that the federal government had the port running three days after Katrina as its citizens swam on its streets and huddled under its Convention Center.

Creator of ‘The Wire’, David Simon, told our group when we visited 'Treme' 's set (otherwise known as Frenchmen's Street) that New Orleans is still somewhat one of the places beyond the reach of American Capital and its crushing of labor and blue-collar traditions. And 'Treme',  his poetic post-script after Baltimore, underscores New Orleans as a place that defies plot, where a major city-based show can be pitched on something as abstract as culture and become more concrete than TV’s hospital ERs or police departments. It is artistic refuge from the obvious T.V network hooks helped along by the elements of weather if not fiction. If The Wire is Simon’s Baltimore serial-novel, 'Treme', Writer John Biguenet says, is a fitting poem of a New Orleans and Katrina that has been completely misunderstood by America. For his own work on a city where he has lived for most of his life, Biguenet could only find reciprocity for the city’s new narratives and realities in Murakami’s post-earthquake Kobe, Günter Grass’s post-war Dresden and a Russia after Chernobyl. 

If New Orleans refused to leave with the coming of the high water, winds and unrelenting heat, it might have also been in instinctual defiance of the larger idea of American mobility. And so one also feels an existentialism rather than America’s perpetual optimism. Many an American city has been destroyed by Hollywood’s meteors, aliens, giant insects and giant gorillas – New Orleans after Katrina remains an apocalyptic reality of human error through faulty Army Corps engineering. It is also American farce. All of America’s helicopters were in Iraq and unavailable for rescue when one of the largest disasters in urban America took place. New Orleans is no stranger to death. It has ‘died’ before many times – Spanish influenza almost wiped it out in 18^th Century. Yellow Fever, cholera, fire and of course floods have taken their stab at it. And all those who passed on, ‘live’ in the present buried above ground in the city’s cemeteries floating above the low water table with the living.

New Orleans resists America’s addiction to rebuilding, its perpetual myth of a ‘New World’. Miss Sparrows, an old slave exchange establishment in New Orleans, is now a coffee shop that the City’s 10 million tourists pass through every year. It retains Spanish and French influences before Jefferson bought it as of the Louisiana Purchase. And thereafter refused to become part of the plantation South even if it began as a slave port. Biguenet described how the Civil War ended its growth even as industrial America came of age in the cities of the American South. Today, New Orleans retains one of the worst education and health systems in America. It is where Bush’s ironic mantra of ‘less government’ really meant 'no government'  during Katrina. And where long-held ideas of the ‘individual’ and ‘family’ as key social institutions were put to the sword. Conspiracy theory suggests that its loyalty to the Democratic Party in a then largely Republican world ultimately led to federal indifference.

Charlie Duff, our guide in Baltimore, described New Orleans as a city of one million where two million people lived. But it was also where before Katrina that a happiness index was highest in urban America even as the poverty index remained lower than the national average. Greg Guillard, Cajun writer, among many other things, describes Cajun life philosophy as life as an exercise in ‘fun’ rather than the pursuit of the material. Realities in New Orleans however are now a kind of slow death by a thousand economic cuts. Big Insurance refuses to pay up for Katrina’s destruction and the middle-classes take to drinking and despair. The poor are largely unable to return after Katrina.

In contrast to America's 'open' mythical landscape, New Orleans is surrounded by an increasingly tragic and complex hinterland of swamps, bayous, estuaries, wetland and submerged cypress forests. And they ultimately further create a singularity and transcendence to the city - and all the above become somewhat fitting narratives to the city. Elsewhere they would stupify. New Orleans tests the very idea and definition of recovery in America and to what ends the city after Katrina will strive for. The old New Orleans, Biguenet tells us, has fallen and the city will never be the same. Some might call this is recovery. One can’t help feeling that what happened in New Orleans beyond Katrina might have been a payment of dues for its exceptionality in a larger American psyche. But at the same time that the fall of New Orleans shows them up for what they are. Myths. That New Orleans transcends.    

The War Anew In Baltimore

I first travelled to Baltimore through the ‘The Wire’. This was a Baltimore, somewhat of the ‘popular’, safe from afar because of its mediated dangers and shared by hundreds who had never actually visited or will visit the city. It was a Baltimore of certain frames, T.V sets: the gritty docks, boarded-up street exteriors and corners, a canvas that became the larger inner city – universe of ‘The Wire’. So I ‘know’ the Wire’s battle-weary cynical but ever-intense cops, sociopathic well-rounded gang-banger ‘street outdoor’ types, aggressive bureaucrats, and slick-drawl politicians in heavily carpeted ‘jungle’ interiors.
I am lucky but more knowing – I will never see ‘The Wire’ only through the eye of a ‘crime reporter’s with a feeling for sociology' again now that I have been in the city over the last two days. I have walked on, been driven and talked through Baltimore’s other key landscapes beyond the ‘The Wire’s camera lens; the pretty chi-chi brick-paved Fell Point waterfront, the oldest Catholic cathedral in America (an uncanny life-like dove flutters in a ceiling reaching the heavens, the gentrified leafy swathes of brick-front Victorian apartments that retain a feel of a London without its grey and low skies.
About 150 years of Baltimore’s ages interlock; 1960’s modern apartments and State government blocks also stray into my mediated lens from The Wire; a Baltimore that is a much slower movie with less project-browns and concrete grays। Not unlike the D।C and New York’s Harlem and Brooklyn, cities that spilled over with immigrant ethnicities and African-Americans over the last hundred years, it is a History Channel whose drama is one of evident tensional temporalities। The Wire’s gritty pixels and brilliant characterization loses the spread of a wider map, the stretch and context of the City’s history.
Mapped and spread out, Baltimore is also the material manifestation of the tug of hundreds of years of capitalism spiked with white superiority till the Civil Rights movement with all its attendant exclusions and inclusions. There are bonsai exercises in aesthetic aspiration, miniature gardens, small parks, and squares just as there are grand continental squares from the City’s European historical roots. There is a 2-mile highway that leads and comes from nowhere, an ill-advised attempt to build escape routes into the suburbs in the 1950s for a white middle-class, with the promise of freedom from racial integration many years after the end of war that had fought for that same exact goal. The Battle Of Gettysburg is just an hour’s drive away – and the Baltimore suburbs are both its hinterland and also the city’s if for different reasons with connotations within America’s racial history. If blood was spilt for Lincoln’s grander multi-racial vision for America on those grand battlefields that include Gettysburg, the city’s center is partially what it is because of a racial hysteria and fleeing from the center by a white middle class between since the 1940s. The automobile also helped ruin Baltimore’s core just as its slow adaptation to a post-industrial world.
And so I came into Baltimore from Gettysburg where our guide into American Civil history had prepared a thick dossier of military maps that showed strategy, movement, thrust and parry, relative positions of combatant regiments and so on. The dossier also contained letters that have unique individual sketches of those 3 days that were fought there during the American Civil in the month of July 1863. And after I toured the Baltimore I describe, I felt that I required a 3-dimensional map like the Gettysburg military showcase with letters from Baltimore over time that would tell a bit more of the City’s history denoting things like land tenure and property ownership, inter-ethnic migration, micro-economic patterns within the blocks of the city and macro-economics relative to America’s East. This would help explain Linden Avenue, where 1500 houses were destroyed in 1962 to create a colour barrier, a fire-break as described in public record and that now separates Baltimore as a racial and economic divide. One requires that kind of map too to explain Lafayette Avenue, one of the main streets through the city, both kaleidoscope and vertebrae into all these various historical ages and economic present(s).
West Baltimore is ‘Wire’ territory, if not worse in some parts, the main black district thoroughfare and commercial street holds bailbond offices, cheque-cashing stalls and the odd T-shirt outlet with unrecognisable labels. East Baltimore though is on the up and where most of 'The Wire' was shot too and that says it all, mostly. Only that there are definitely more people on sets the ‘Wire’s streets, I saw only solitary figures float by out in West Baltimore. Years ago, a bargain ‘dollar’ sale was held not far from the West, crumbling houses were offered on auction, sold and restored into what is one of Batimore’s finest areas। I attended a neighborhood meeting in up-market residential Baltimore and the minutiae of household/street economies discussed showed glimpses into the process called ‘gentrification’ beyond such emergency interventions. What trashcans to use, how to handle dog-shit was discussed by home-owners amongst other macro-problems. But at the other end, trash is evidently the least of concerns for ‘slum-lords’ who I guess will stall any emergency bargain sales required to save West Baltimore. And so ‘gentrification’ and the slum lord fight over Baltimore in a new separatist war.
—Billy Kahora