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. 

Extracts from Adisa Basic’s coverage of the ‘Writers in Motion’ tour

for the weekly magazine “Slobodna Bosna”  (Sarajevo, Bosna-Herzegovina),

dated  04/07/2011

WAR TOURISM: A BLOODY PAST CONVERTED INTO BUSINESS

[…]  

The first stop is the surreal town of Gettysburg, the place where the biggest battle of the Civil War took place a century and a half ago, and which today lives comfortably off its past. A million visitors annually visit its National War Monument, the former battlefields teeming with tourists having themselves be photographed in historical uniforms, as well as communicating with the spirits of the dead warriors.

[…]

In the stream of visitors coming through Gettysburg there are virtually no black faces. The reason is, apparently, that the majority of the visitors here come to gaze with nostalgia at the suffering of the heroic Southern troops, ignoring the fact that it was the Southerners who put in place the slavery upon which their economy was based. Peter Carmichael, professor of history at the local university tells me: “This place has always provoked lively controversies; people interpret history according to their own ideas, they romanticize the past, and they tell stories the way it suits them. Mostly people imagine gentlemanly battles of volunteers giving lives for their ideals.  The fratricidal slaughter, in which men gauged out each other’s eyes fighting face to face, or how they starved —that does not get talked about. Precious sources of facts from that period are the letters the soldiers wrote, and which show not the heroic but the tragic side of war. “

According to the Civil War specialist Carmichael, many people appear to still accept the Southern ideology: “I really have heard much here about how this is really a celebration of the Southern troops... take the monument to General Lee, the commander of the enemy Southern army—it's ten times more visited, not to mention grander, than the monuments for the fallen Northern soldiers. I often hear people commenting Lee's greatest defeat by saying:  “If only he would have done this or that, gotten here earlier, played the situation differently or estimated things differently.... “  And I ask myself whether they are conscious of what it is they are saying, whether they truly realize this means wishing that the South would have won and that we would today be living in two different American countries.  I'm not sure they understand the consequences of what they are saying....” says Prof. Carmichael with slow resignation.

He and his colleagues are indeed involved in ongoing debates about the war even today, hundred and fifty years later. For them this dialogue is an indispensible part of the American identity, even if the participants’ opinions about these fundamental questions can never reach a point of agreement.  At the same time there is the problem of the diverging interpretations of recent history—a problem that daily provokes bitter arguments in Bosna-Herzegovina.  Comments professor Kent Gramm, the author of a recent book the about major traumata of US history: “We live in a post-modern era but a whole generation of students is now raised within this postmodern perspective, in which history is simply a narrative shaped by whoever is (re)telling it.  The final consequence of such an approach is a complete relativization of everything from the past-- yet there were actual people who made a heroic effort so that our life today is what it is.  People fought here, as president Lincoln says in the Gettysburg address, for a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  When it’s necessary to confirm an undeniable historical fact, all we are left with are facts and historical data, nothing more.”

POST-CAPITALIST TOURIST TOURS    

The town of Gettysburg together with its National War Memorial complex may seem as a precarious place of militaristic pilgrimages, where assorted militant  inclinations come to the fore.  Yet it is interesting to see how, in being overtaken by consumerist kitsch, its martial air has gradually lightened.  There is barely a house which is not in one way or another tied to the Civil war. T-shirts with pictures of generals, uniforms of both warring sides, dress-up photo-stands, wax museums, the model of the most decisive battle of American history enacted by 120.000 miniature figurines….   In answer to my question whether it doesn’t seem tasteless to be merchandising trauma in this way and whether such war tourism (sometimes known as black tourism)  oughtn’t be avoided so as to retain a sense of piety,  the American writer Hugh Ferrer says:  “I  understand that this may seem strange to an outsider, but the economic aspect of war's heritage is in fact fundamentally American. The fate of the entire town rests on it, it lets people make a decent living-- and such entrepreneurial spirit is fundamentally in keeping  with the American culture and way of life.“

Indeed, Americans trade on trauma in this way even when it comes to much more recent events.  9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, too, are occasions for souvenirs, themes for movies and TV series;  both New York and NO offer special programs on the spots where catastrophes occurred:  “Soon after Katrina a bus tour operator started offering  visits through the hardest hit places.  There certainly were people who were upset and raised objections, but in the last analysis, and taking into account the economic aspect, perhaps a tour of such places can be both informative and sobering,  one of those life-altering experiences that mark us forever,“ says an American commentator.

From the Bosnian perspective such questions and perspectives may seem unusual, to say the least.  Though there now are groups of tourists who visit out country in search of Sniper Alley, “Sarajevo Rose,” the debris of The Tunnel or similar  places, the idea still strikes us as dark, morbid and somewhat offensive.  Yet it's interesting to see not only the different manner in which other cultures tackle their painful experiences but also how disagreement around large-scale historical questions is a more universal phenomenon than we may have thought.

[….]
Translated from the Croatian (nd)

On Civil Wars & Civil Rights, the Exotic & the Banal

In Gettysburg we ask the students what they think about the Civil War. It is asking a lot. They would have to go back 150 years. They would have to care. They answer honestly: they don’t think much of it.

In Birmingham, Alabama we ask the students what they think of Civil Rights. This history is closer and more contentious. A discomfort enters the group of students. I feel uncomfortable too. Maybe they worry that whatever they say will be thought 'politically incorrect'. Maybe a few feel they might offend me. They are careful with their words. But their answer seems to be the same as it was in Gettysburg: they don’t think much of it.

I feel for these students. I understand the shrugs, this I-can’t-be-bothered attitude. They are resisting our limited and limiting imaginations. On this trip, we have come with our own agendas – a way of reading cities through specific lenses. We are 'focused'. But every focus contains its own myopia. The danger is that in looking for one thing, we are less able to see the actual lives that are being lived. Disaster does this – it exotifies a landscape; it becomes the easy way that outsiders read and understand it. The people within that landscape, however, inevitably return to another life, to their own banalities. What occupies their minds are decisions like: to jog or not to jog this morning? Wholewheat bread or multigrain? McDonalds or Kentucky for lunch? And should I download that new Bruno Mars song?

Professor Pam King (no relation to Martin Luther) takes us on a short tour through the city and points to important buildings that the mayor has left to rot. Not just any mayor. A black mayor. You would think, she complains, that a black mayor and a black council would have been better stewards of this history - this history that affects all of America, but them most profoundly. The motel where Martin Luther King stayed is earmarked for a more permanent destruction than the Klan's bomb had done to it. In all likelihood, it will be torn down soon and turned into something else. You see, Birmingham itself seems to shrug off its history, as despondently as its college students do, or the students at Gettysburg. Birmingham itself resists our limiting imagination - the colonizing way of disaster. Why shouldn't it? And perhaps this too is a form of recovery.

Executing History

When I went to Cambodia for the first time last year, my father was going to go with me to Tuol Sleng, the death prison that used to be an old primary school. In Tuol Sleng faces stare at you from the walls, photographs of prisoners before execution. Not just men, but women with babies, children. Some of the faces have blood noses, others have an eyeball almost beaten out of socket, all are still alive but know they are going to die.

We never went in, never even came close to seeing the prison. Halfway there, and entirely unrelated to our visit, I vomited in my uncle’s car. I was just dehydrated, unaccustomed to the climate. The chauffeur drove us straight back to the air-conditioned comfort of my uncle’s bank, where my auntie sighed and said, “see, you shouldn’t visit such bad places. The bad spirits have gotten to you.” They took me instead to the Royal Palace with its floor of silver tiles, to Angkor Wat with its apsaras flying all over the columns, and to their private beach at Sihanouk hotel. They wanted me to see recovery, not annihilation.

Yet how do I know about what is in Tuol Sleng prison? How can I describe the photographs, the bloodstains on the floor, the hairs stuck to the iron railings of the torture beds? These images are readily available to anyone – even a seven year old – if you entered in the right google terms. What makes the eyeballs of us writers more legitimate? The fact that we are more articulate? What makes historical suffering more ‘real’ than historical ‘joy’? I really liked Kei’s tongue-in-cheek line, “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit reality.” Why do we get to define reality for the poor and oppressed, to interpret their desire for lives of material comfort?

What if all my genocide-surviving father wants to do is invest in a string of properties back home and confine himself in a leady cul-de-sac suburb, happily believing that the worst thing that could happen to me as a writer is a paper cut, grateful I was brought up in a country where I would have a wealth of words to bend and mould into innocuous nice-sounding sentences?

But let me think about a different kind of writing (one in which I can never do for my lack of life experience); where each word is carefully mustered by a prod to the small of its back, assembled with precision, not artistry; and pushed into the firing line. A tree is simply a tree, though a gun might be something else. The kind of writing that comes from a writer living in the immediate midst of everything we are studying. One of our writers has been in prison, so I suppose secretly I am glad we’re not going to visit Birmingham jail. For some of us, this trip is visceral, for others it’s spiritual and others still, we see places that make your insides feel like they’ve been scooped out with a spoon.

I felt this way in Gettysburg, standing on the battlefields, in a way I had not felt in any other place before on this trip. Almost exactly a year ago, I was standing in another empty field, this time in Cambodia. This field had red dust and yellow sand, not green grass; and it was the field where my father buried the dead starvation bodies under the Khmer Rouge, when the floods came. There were no markers, no bones, just dust. “Human fertiliser,” my father said, “is probably the best in the world, because the following year after we buried the bodies, when the rice grew, it grew twice as high.” Yes, they planted rice on the same field. A human life was compost, and before it was compost it was a slave of the revolution.

I have loved reading the other blog entries of my fellow travellers. This blog was inspired by the last three entries of my friends and fellow writers, ‘Life Goes on or rather’, ‘On the Realness of Places’, and ‘Thoughts from Gettysburg.’ I may post again later from my current location, Lafayette, Louisiana. But these are my morning thoughts, after a full week of travel.

Too Important

I know this isn’t a travel log, or that it isn’t supposed to be. But anything you write as you travel becomes just that --a kind of fragmented diary of the places you visit and the people you meet. Thinking comes later. Reflection comes later. Now you just travel while trying to keep your eyes open and your step firm and your coffee warmer than your clichés. You go to the battlefields of Gettysburg, and everything there --the trees, the monuments, the crowds of tourists, the t-shirt shops and ghost tours-- makes you feel like a cynic. You’ve been there before. Perhaps in a high-school field trip. Perhaps with your parents. Perhaps through history books. You’ve already seen those fields and monuments. You’ve already heard the stories of Lee, and Meade, and Pickett’s charge. But now, suddenly, through the smoke and noise of a theme park, you sense it. There it is. You can’t yet name it, but you know it’s there, and you decide to hide it away somewhere so you won’t have to sense it too much, or talk about it, or even think about it, and you drive down to Baltimore. You also know about Baltimore. You’ve been to Baltimore before. You start walking through the streets of west Baltimore. You see all the boarded-up houses: blocks and blocks of abandoned houses. You take a few snapshots. There’s no one there. You think of dead bodies decomposing. And there it is again. Unavoidable. Unmistakable. Now you have to see it. You have to write it down in your travel log. You have no choice. It’s too large, too ominous, too important.

Eduardo Halfon

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