Growing up in Illinois, I remember spending more time studying Dr. King than anyone or anything else that took place after the Civil War. The Civil Rights movement had been central to the lives of some of my older teachers and central to the lives of the parents of my younger ones. I remember understanding Dr. King as many do: as less a man and more to an angel. Slow to anger, quick to forgive. The culmination of this study was, of course, the famed, “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial that he gave during the March on Washington. And yet, there was always so much more time given to studying his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he said, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here” and talked about the Black Community living in a “cage of poverty.” Now he was not talking only about Birmingham. The South, and much of the North, was a less-than-pleasant place for Americans of Color. Many travesties took place in Birmingham. In the letter, he even goes so far as to salute the police of Albany, GA, a place one could call The Deep South of the Deep South, for allowing peaceful protest. Birmingham, by contrast, did not. Birmingham opened fire hoses and sicked attack dogs on peaceful protesters. The City’s public servants perpetrated these actions. Civil rights were violated to extremes. Birmingham would forever represent, to me and many others, a noticeable scar on the history of the United States. After learning all of this, I never thought that I might one day move there.
This past July marked the first time I came to Birmingham. It was not for a history tour, mind you, but a meeting with a potential employer. I found Birmingham to be a place where the man I met with, a man of color, can run one of the most powerful organizations in the state. I was impressed. This was not my expectation. In fact, I am not quite sure what my expectation was, but I guess I just assumed that Birmingham was still in denial. That Birmingham was still trying to keep a “move along, nothing to see here” mentality. Instead, I found the Civil Rights Institute in the center of the city, a revitalized downtown full of Civil Rights Era signage, and a diverse city. But I was only there for one night, and had to continue to my next meeting in South Carolina…
Then in late October, I was offered a job. While many were supportive of my opportunity, I found myself defending my decision to move to Birmingham. A mix of jokes, such as “watch out for attack dogs” and “make sure you don’t use the wrong water fountain” followed. Birmingham served, and still serves for many Americans, as the center of inequality.
Slavery was often far worse – in regard to violence and treatment – in Louisiana and Texas, and Jim Crow laws found no home like Mississippi, but Birmingham is the place where the news cameras recorded horrific violence occur against peaceful protesters. Birmingham, because of that, represents to many across America all of the worst things that have taken place in American history. Nonetheless, I saw potential in Birmingham, and after interviews was further convinced of its potential. I moved here in December.
Today, Birmingham is, for the most part, a normal mid-sized American city, with one striking unique quality. It cannot escape its past. Despite its nickname, “The Magic City” for its rapid growth and development in the early 20th century. Birmingham is centered around the Civil Rights Movement. Fred Shuttlesworth preached here. Dr. King was jailed here. It makes sense, and yet it holds the city back. Being in Birmingham means giving constant and unending consideration of the events that took place here fifty years ago. This is good, to a point. The fight for equality should always remain fresh in America’s collective memory. But a city cannot thrive unless it is able to grow beyond those events.
As for Birmingham today, some interesting issues exist. After failed attempts towards a unified regional government in the 1970s, today the City is nearly three-quarters Black or African-American, with White residents composing less than one-fourth of the population. So I could mention that the City leadership is overwhelmingly people of color, but that would stand to reason anyway; evidence more so of demographics than a power shift. The city is still horribly segregated however, with almost completely Black populations separated from almost completely White populations. Some exceptions exist, however. The downtown area is growing in population and diversity, for example. But this is a situation similar to what exists from New York to Chicago to Houston to Memphis to Philadelphia.
In reality, Birmingham is similar to other cities across America. As a nation, more children of color finish high school, attend college, and have an equitable shot at good jobs than ever before, but equality is far off. People of color are nearly 3x as likely to live in poverty, are 20% less likely to graduate from college once they’ve started, are more than 2x as likely to be a parent before their 20th birthday, and are more than 2x as likely to have a child outside of marriage. People of Color are also faced with overwhelmingly limited resources, included underfunded and deteriorating schools, social programs that have been underfunded time and again, and have they endured a culture of poverty.
By this I do not mean a lack of motivation, but rather a lack of opportunity in many communities mixed with a strong influence from drugs, violence, and gangs. This same culture that many Italian and Irish communities experienced in the early 20th century in Chicago, New York, Providence, and Boston. Breaking out often meant changing your name, disconnecting yourself from friends and family, and moving somewhere where so long as you acted the part, people would eventually excuse your perceived deficiency. The reason was not that these migrants wanted to join country clubs, but more often that they wanted to raise their children and live in a community where education was valued, funded, and expected, and where importance was determined by career rather than by respect from a mafia syndicate. Everybody could not afford to leave the neighborhood, however, and that usually meant that their children had less opportunities. A good parent can change his/her child’s life irreversibly for the better, but cannot dictate the realities of that child’s environment outside of the home.
Dr. King knew that equality on all levels could only be achieved when we recognized the full scale of challenges faced by others. We could not and can not simply hope or dream or even rally for change. Change comes when a person has an opportunity to evaluate another person’s hopes and dreams and goals and aspirations and realizes that these are aligned with his own. This can only happen through integration – not just of children on buses, but of neighborhoods and towns, and of families and organizations. Dr. King knew that integration was the best medicine for inequality.
Dr. King turned 85 on Wednesday, and as we take today in our national memory to remember his contributions, we should remember that his hope was not simply a matter of race. At Selma, he crossed a bridge arm-in-arm with a diversity of religious leaders. He believed in brotherly love. 
He believed that a human being is not defined by his physical characteristics or his interpretation of that which we cannot know. Instead he believe that courage of conviction, action for the betterment of humanity, and reinvestment of our own time and resources to provide greater opportunity for those in our local, state, and national communities could bring us to a world without hate – one that is better for all of the earth’s inhabitants. May 2014 bring us closer to Dr. King’s ideal.
marc dreyfuss 