Birmingham: A City, But Not A Community?

USA - Birmingham, Alabama

“We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.” Robert F. Kennedy, 5 April 1968.

“Take me to a bar,” said the Englishman.
“Which bar?” replied the taxi driver.
“Any bar. Just a regular American bar.”

The evening in Birmingham, Alabama, did not start with those exact words, and the astute amongst you will notice the paraphrasing from the film ‘Love Actually’, but in reality the experience for Dean and I was not too unlike the hapless Colin in Richard Curtis’s Christmastime treat. We had driven a long way from Memphis, Tennessee, towards Alabama, a southern state so deeply ingrained in the national consciousness for its role in the civil rights struggle that we felt it only right to pay a visit to its largest city. Birmingham may not be grand or even that big, but it has real significance in the story of America. It would have been easier to set a course straight down the line of longitude towards Mississippi or Louisiana, but how often do two travelling Brits find themselves in the Deep South of America with a little time to kill? To comprehend the modern United States requires a detour off the beaten tourist track. At the frontline of a conflict that still resonates in America today, even with Barack Obama in the White House, Birmingham, Alabama, crystallises both the history and social lessons into one conurbation. With that in mind, our first night in the city came as something of a surprise.

In hindsight, we should have remembered it was a Friday night, but when you have been travelling around like Dean and I the days of the week become fairly irrelevant. A Friday night in Birmingham, in particular the Five Points South district of the city, is a big deal amongst the town’s student population at the University of Alabama. Our guide book told us that Five Points South was a decent area for restaurants and bars, so we set off in that direction with the aim of finding some food, a quick drink, and a reasonably early night after a long drive and a busy weekend ahead. What we discovered was a small street corner with three bars and no food outlets at all. On empty stomachs, we joined a queue for a bar called Inisfree (incidentally, it was not free in any way) simply because the girls in the line looked particularly attractive. These Southern Belles were out to party their way in to the weekend, and who were we to stop them? Ignoring the hunger pangs, and even resisting the temptation to watch too much of David Beckham’s Los Angeles Galaxy side live on the television in the bar itself, we launched into a Vodka-mixer frenzy in an attempt to achieve a state of inebriation that would allow us to walk around unfazed by the jocky guys and undaunted by the lovely ladies.

I can only assume it was the alcohol that helped break the ice, because after about half an hour in Five Points South, Birmingham, Dean and I found ourselves in some frankly bizarre conversations with a wonderful mix of people. It began with our new pal Dave attempting to lick the outdoor patio heater in a show of gallantry for our video camera, before focussing on his friend, Brigham, and the story of how she moved from Texas to Alabama, and why her first name is normally a surname. Before long, our accents were detected by others, and a crowd began lingering near us, perhaps confused as to why two Jewish boys who apparently resemble The Jonas Brothers (three times now we have been asked this) with British accents were holding court in their student bar. Dean began chatting happily with Courtney and Candice about the band Incubus, while Sean (resident acoustic guitar player at the bar) went through a succession of English pop hits, including a rousing rendition of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ that made us feel right at home. I was still locked in conversation with Dave and Brigham when I heard the familiar introductory notes of ‘Pardon Me’, an Incubus song that Dean enjoys to play on his own guitar. I looked up towards Sean, impressed at his repertoire. Except Sean no longer had the guitar. There the imposter stood, Sean’s guitar in his hands, the strap around his shoulder, with a wide stance of confidence and statesmanship, staring out at his audience with a Gallagher-esque intensity, bestriding the stage like a colossus of the music world, master of all he surveyed. The imposter was Dean.

At some stage, somebody must have requested ‘Pardon Me’, and Dean, upon hearing that Sean did not know the guitar part for this track, must have offered his services. Dean played, Sean sung, we enjoyed. Dean was not finished there, however, as he proudly grabbed the microphone away from Sean and declared to the bemused Americans, in his finest Borehamwood accent, “Sean is incredible!” Well, Sean was no doubt delighted with the ringing endorsement, and the girls were certainly impressed with Dean’s musical skill and British tongue. It aided my evening also, as I was able to be a hanger-on and pose for photos with lovely looking Alabaman girls, as well as coax a round of shots out of Dean’s original contacts, Courtney and Candice. I have loved every moment of this trip, and will no doubt take back to London with me many happy memories that will last a lifetime. One slightly more odd memory will be of the double-take I took when Dean appeared on that Inisfree stage for the first time. Undoubtedly a highlight of our trip so far, it helps illustrate the randomness, and also the greatness, of that Friday night.

We spent the rest of the evening chatting away with just about anybody who came near us, while getting to know the lovely Dave and Brigham a little better, so much so that Dave even offered to drive us back to our hotel in the downtown area, after a stop-off for some well-deserved hangover-banishing fast food, where Brigham stole some hummus. A measure of our drunken state is best demonstrated by the fact that Dean and I, locked in conversation, entered the lift in our hotel and forgot to press a floor number for a good ten minutes before realising. Congratulations, University of Alabama. You guys know how to make British boys welcome.

Saturday morning was spent in a haze of aching heads and limbs, but we eventually pulled ourselves together enough to brave the streets of Birmingham in search of some brunch. Alabama is famous for its soul food, which includes combining meat or poultry that has been ‘southern fried’ and heavily sauced, along with slow-cooked vegetables like peas and eggplant, with what the Alabamans call ‘candy yams’, and we at home describe as sweet potatoes. Birmingham was known in the 1960’s as ‘Bombingham’ (more later), so we expected to find a run-down city with little amenities. On this bright, sunny Saturday lunchtime, however, Dean and I were pleasantly surprised to find wide avenues and parkland, clean streets with flowers and trees lining the roadsides, and impressive courthouses and other civic centres. We ambled upon a local soul food café, ordered some grub, and ate it on some tables outside. It all sounds very sophisticated and Parisian, but in reality much of Birmingham’s appealing modern aesthetics papers over the cracks.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was shot and killed in April 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (brother of slain President John F. Kennedy) was running for the White House. The day after King’s assassination, Bobby, as he was affectionately known, delivered a powerful speech on what he described as a “mindless menace of violence” stalking America, angrily denouncing those who sought to tear down the walls of society. The speech talked of strangers inhabiting the nation, of people “living in a city, but not a community”. Just a few short weeks after the death of Dr. King, at the Ambassador’s Hotel in Los Angeles, Bobby Kennedy was also shot and killed. His words, of a polarised America lacking direction, moral responsibility, trust and hope, of a nation divided between men and women of different creeds and colours, races and religions, still ring true today. Behind the obvious and encouraging improvement of an increasingly progressive nation, of an African-American inside the Oval Office, of new money being invested into deprived communities, there remains divisions, hatred, misunderstanding and resentment. This is most pronounced on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, a city which was at the heart of the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, which saw prolonged bus boycotts and street riots, which witnessed state troopers denying black Americans access to white schools and shops and restaurants, which saw marches and demonstrations.

Today, the Civil Rights Museum stands just one block away from a church which white supremacists bombed in 1963, killed four little girls. The museum is impressive, featuring a plethora of information and exhibitions, harrowing data and eyewitness accounts of a turbulent time. It is impressively designed, with tricks of light intended to place you, the ticket-holder, in the midst of the action, as if posing the scary question out loud, in your face, in the year 2009: “What do you think?” “Who do you agree with?” We learnt about Birmingham’s rail links, and the slaves who worked the lines, about segregation and how it pushed back the economic, political and social development of an entire people, about municipal and state law that kept a whole community separate, as an underrepresented, underfunded, underappreciated underclass.

If you go to the South today, you could drive through and fool yourself into believing that the civil rights struggle was overhyped. You could deceive yourself into thinking that today, all across America, whites and blacks and Asians and Hispanics and Jews and gentiles and gays and disabled all live together in harmony. No society is perfect, but in this part of the world, just a few decades ago, racism was essentially legally institutionalised. It has since seeped down through generations, from original slaves to their great-grandchildren, from plantation owners to their modern-day descendents. Mistrust and misunderstanding has slowly ebbed its way through to our stormy present, creating a social drift, a political divide, an economic chasm between groups, along with a near-medieval mentality of anger and resentment between them all.

So while the Civil Rights Museum is a must-see, offering so many important lessons to all of us (and goodness knows we in the UK could learn something), the real picture is at street level. For many, the Civil War is not over and the civil rights movement remains. As Dean and I ate our brunch, for example, a black man asked a table of white southerners sitting next to us for some money to buy food. They refused. This is not out of the ordinary. Very few of us randomly hand out cash on the streets of London, and I am the first to put my hand up and say that I am not a massive fan of on-site, on-demand philanthropy. Yet in London we largely ignore each other. In America, people like to talk, and so began an argument between the begging man and the affluent family. It ended with some harsh words. “You don’t know how hard it is for us”, said the Birmingham resident. “Well, we’re all Americans,” countered the father of the family sitting next to us. “Yeah but you all don’t understand how hard it is,” was the reply.

Meanwhile, on our way to the museum, Dean and I were accosted by another gentleman who clearly had nothing going for him. Living on the streets, with no prospects, no job, no qualifications, completely let down by successive governments, and I suppose in some part also by his own attitude, he tried to get our money by becoming an unofficial tour guide. Attempting to be as safe as possible, we obliged with a few dollars and made our way inside, when another man came into the ticket centre to berate us for giving him money, before he then did the exact same thing. The problem, the bitterness, the dissection of the community, runs deep.

It is perhaps wrong to pass judgment, as mere observers from another country, and one at that which has also experienced social upheaval and misapprehensions, and today suffers from a nationalist evil disguising itself as a decent political entity to impressionable down-and-outers. Yet it is also impossible to ignore civil rights in America. It is as much the story and comprehension of this magnificent country as remembering all the good points, the friendliness towards visitors, the helpfulness of its service sector, the awe-inspiring natural beauty of this vast land, the inspirational, aspirational can-do attitude of its founding ideas and ideals, bringing together in a great ethnic melting-pot the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

Like much of life, we take the good with the bad, and pray for progress. In America in the twenty-first century, huge strides have been made, but much needs to be done. It is why President Obama called on the nation to enter into a new era of civic responsibility. It is why the back of a $1 bill contains a picture of an unfinished pyramid, bearing the inscription ‘Annuit Coeptis’ (‘he favours our undertaking’). The real American dream is, and always will remain, unfinished, but like The Great Gatsby himself, stretching his arms out further towards a new, fine morning, the point is to continue to strive for and work for those ideals. The alternative, the disaster, is in what Bobby Kennedy spoke about, and what is sadly crystallised still on the streets of downtown Birmingham, Alabama: cities that are not communities, borne back, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “ceaselessly into the past.”

“We can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfilment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.” Robert. F. Kennedy, 5 April 1968.