A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in
Birmingham, Alabama “As Birmingham goes, so goes the
nation,” Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin
Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of
1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long
aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls
murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for
the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil
Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about
this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like
Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and
family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and
injustice. When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to
care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her
mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator,
Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for
a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond
what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common
distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and
four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a
dream.’” Seeking to better understand a more complex local
history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and
resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked
on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see
what she would find. Beginning at the center, with her family’s
1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within
earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong
works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of
her white working-class family, classmates, and others not
traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history,
including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges
connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a
nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old
plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary
lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways,
beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and
under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan. In her search for
truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of
place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy
narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she
finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to
recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past
and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the
Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from
Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural
oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity
are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from
multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.
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