Today we set off to walk around Birmingham, we are staying in the heart of downtown and the city is layed out in a grid system so its relatively easy to navigate around. We started off by walking down to 16th and 17th Streets where Kelly Ingram Park is. This is the park that is just outside the 16th street baptist church. It was the central staging ground for the large scale demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The park now has several sculptures related to the civil rights movement. It starts with a sculpture of the police dogs and later there is one of the water cannons that were turned on the marchers by the Birmingham police as well as a depiction of a couple of children in jail representing the jail not bail movement. There is also a statue to the four girls that died in the bombing of the church. We walked round the statues then looked at the 16th Street Baptist Church which was where the bombing took place. It is a slightly strange looking church built in 1911 by the local black contractor T.C.Windham. The church was actually closed when we went to go in so we went to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, another disturbing museum, it focuses on the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham during the 50s and 60s. A lot of the information we had seen before but it was interesting as it had a lot of newspaper and TV coverage from the time. The segregation in Birmingham was enforced by law. The city required the separation of races, especially in housing as the zoning determined where African Americans could purchase property and a line of demarcation created a virtual wall around the 4th Avenue business district that served the African American community. Violence was frequently used to intimidate those who dared to challenge the segregation. In just over 10 years here were 50 bombings of African American homes, businesses and churches which is why the city got the nickname “Bombingham’. Some of the quotes from the police, city officials and general public (all white) at the time are just astounding, justifying their actions as ‘for the good of the coloureds’ as they are basically savages that these people were helping by keeping them segregated. In addition to the ridiculous statements that were made, at one point the mayor was voted out of office but just refused to accept the result so he and his officials continued to run the town, they even accused the Federal Goverment of ‘whipping up trouble’ as there wasn’t a problem in Birmingham only one that the Northern folks wanted to create! By the time we had finished walking round the museum I was yet again disappointed by our ability to be so cruel to one another. We left the museum and continued walking round the streets of Birmingham. The Alabama Jazz hall of Fame is in the middle of what is now called the historic 4th District. It is in the old Carver Theatre and as well as a number of exhibits they sponsor Jazz performances around the city, we didn’t go in but we did walk past this and the Alabama Theatre which was built in 1927 as a flagship theatre for the southeastern region. It held 2,500 people and the largest theatre in the district, apparently it still has the original Wurlitzer organ. We walked up the road to the Cathedral of St Paul, it had said in the museum that there were 700 churches in Birmingham which doesn’t surprise me as there seems to be one every 20 yards. Next we came to the First Presbyterian Church which was another quite strange looking one but had a great bell tower. Finally we walked down the road to the Museum of Art and after a stop for lunch we went into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. This focuses on Athletes that have a link with the state of Alabama, some had rather tenuous links but on the whole they were people that had made a contribution to sports, mostly American Football and Baseball. The main people we recognised were Carl Lewis, Jesse Owens and Evander Holyfield. After spending time in the Civil Rights Institute it surprised me how many people went on to represent their state and country but had struggled so hard to be accepted as equals. We walked round and looked at a lot of the memorabilia they have on show, marvelling on how the equipment has moved on. After walking round the museum we decided to head back to the hotel for a drink and relax before moving on again tomorrow.
