Memorial To An Uncivil Era : A Personal Journey to Alabama’s new Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, dedicated to remembering what was once ‘the most segregated city in America’

April and May mark the 30th anniversary of the massive civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in this city, once known as “the most segregated city in America.” It can be argued that these demonstrations and the fierce resistance they provoked changed white attitudes toward civil rights, and ultimately led to the most comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation in American history.

The new Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which opened Nov. 15, was built to serve as a monument to--and a resource about--the thousands of people who were dedicated to the philosophy of nonviolence and risked their lives in struggles and confrontations all over the South.

It was with a mixture of emotions that I visited the institute this year on Dr. King’s birthday, Jan. 15. I was born in Birmingham and grew up there during the civil rights era, a white child in the nearby all-white suburb of Mountain Brook. I left 20 years ago and moved north. But back in 1963 I was a 9-year-old elementary school student, and even though I did not participate in the demonstrations, they have indelibly marked my life.

My first conscious awareness of segregation came when I was about 6. My father, a lawyer, had some work to do on a Saturday morning and had asked his secretary to come in to the office. After I promised I wouldn’t bother him, he agreed to let me accompany him. We drove downtown to the Brown Marx Building on 20th Street, downtown Birmingham’s main thoroughfare, and took the elevator up to the fourth floor. In my father’s office, I amused myself for a while drawing pictures and then asked his secretary where the bathroom was. She handed me a key, directed me down the hall, and asked if she should accompany me. “No,” I assured her, not wanting to be thought a burden.

Following her instructions, I found myself standing before two identical doors with frosted glass panels. On one panel, the letters said “White Ladies,” the other, “Colored Women.” The iron skeleton key weighed heavily in my palm as I stood there, puzzling over the signs. I know the difference between White and Colored, I thought, but what is the difference between Ladies and Women? Aren’t they the same? I couldn’t figure it out.

I opened the door that said “White Ladies.” To the left were two stalls and to the right a sink with a mirror over it that was so high that I could just barely glimpse the top of my head. I used one of the stalls, wondering what was behind the other door, the one marked “Colored Women.” Was the bathroom the same, or was it dirtier, or not as well equipped? Would my key open that door, too? I was curious to try, but afraid that someone might see me breaking the rules and get angry at me. Slowly I retraced my steps back to my father’s office. I wanted to ask my father or his secretary about the difference between Ladies and Women, but I couldn’t. I sensed that if I asked the question, I might be accused of stirring up trouble, and I probably wouldn’t be given the answer.

I mention this incident because the memory of it returned to me inside the institute, when, after the short video about Birmingham’s history, the curtain rose dramatically revealing, at the entrance to the Barriers Gallery, two water fountains marked “White” and “Colored.” As I examined the exhibits in this gallery, which describe life under segregation, I thought about how segregation poisoned white minds as it damaged black lives.

In his magisterial “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written 30 years ago today, Dr. King eloquently described the latter process: “You will understand why we find it difficult to wait . . . (when you) see tears welling up in (your daughter’s) little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people . . . “

In effect, segregation forbade discussion and debate about many aspects of human relations, race and culture. As I read Birmingham’s elaborate segregation ordinances listed in the Barriers Gallery (“It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room . . . “; “It shall be unlawful for a Negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, baseball, softball, football, or basketball.”), I thought of how isolating segregation was, for whites as well as for blacks.

It is perhaps hard for people born since the civil rights era to grasp how terribly difficult it was to change people’s hearts and minds and how very much courage it required. The exhibits in the institute’s galleries illustrate how intractable official segregationist policy once was. Those who dedicated themselves to changing this policy were willing to die for their beliefs, and too many of them did.

The institute, located on 16th Street North and 6th Avenue, is the centerpiece of Birmingham’s new Civil Rights District, a four-block area on the border of the downtown business and commer cial district. In the 1920s and ‘30s, 4th Avenue, two blocks from the institute, was the heartbeat of the black community. The $9-million cost of the institute’s land and building was funded by the City of Birmingham and Jefferson County, the $4 million for the exhibits by private and corporate donations.

In its setting, the institute building is imposing: a two-story structure of brown bricks, with a stylish rotunda and green gabled roofs. The main entrance leads visitors through a courtyard and up four shallow flights of stairs into the main rotunda at second-floor level. Here, 20,000 square feet of exhibition space are divided into distinct galleries: the Barriers Gallery, which illustrates life under segregation; the Confrontation Gallery, which depicts segregation’s climate of violence and intimidation and documents the actions of such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, and the largest, the Movement Gallery, with 16 separate venues and four mini-theaters, which follows the progress of the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. The Processional Gallery depicts the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery and the Milestones Gallery consists of pedestals commemorating local and national achievements leading to racial justice.

The architects and the exhibit design firm intended the steps in the courtyard, as well as the upward incline through the exhibition galleries, to physically symbolize the uphill struggle for civil rights. As I carried my 6-month-old daughter through the museum, I felt the ascent as an extra exertion, as the designers intended.

To dramatize civil rights history, the galleries employ a multimedia approach, with sets, replicas, photographs, texts, timelines, film and sound. Scattered throughout are life-sized plaster of Paris sculptures of blacks and whites. Cast from actual people, the figures populate the sets and help emphasize the human dimensions of the civil rights drama.

Rather than simply stating the economic and social disparities between blacks and whites under segregation, the exhibits use stacks of blue and white shirts to illustrate the relative proportions of blue- and white-collar workers among blacks and whites in Birmingham in 1950: 73% of blacks were laborers versus 33% of whites. Piles of books show the pupil-to-teacher ratios in black and white schools: In 1944 there were 42.8 students per teacher in black schools and 24.3 students per teacher in white schools.

The heart and soul of the institute, however, is the Movement Gallery. It is the contents of these exhibits, particularly the four mini-theaters, which sear the minds of viewers with their terri-ble images, uplifting oratory and themes of perseverance, bravery and faith.

Here, in the mini-theater titled “Birmingham: The World is Watching,” is a replica of the small jail cell, fitted with the actual bars, where Dr. King was put into solitary confinement after being arrested on Good Friday, 1963. It was here, accompanied by silence and with thin stripes of light filtering in above the door, that he wrote “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” This was his reply to the statement from members of Birmingham’s clergy requesting that he cancel the “untimely” demonstrations and wait for the more moderate city government that had just been elected to take office.

In the exhibit, a tape continuously plays Dr. King’s sonorous voice reading his “Letter,” in which he scathingly criticizes “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,’ who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom . . . “

Across from the cell is a display of vintage television sets where news footage from the Birmingham demonstrations plays simultaneously. Here are the images that shocked the world in April and May of 1963. From the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, just across 6th Avenue from the institute, the demonstrators ventured forth, many of them schoolchildren, walking in unison to Kelly Ingram Park across the street.

Their goal was the desegregation of city facilities and public amenities--dressing rooms in department stores, restrooms, lunch counters and the like. As the demonstrators reached the park, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, Eugene (Bull) Connor, who had been refusing to give up his office during the last weeks of his lame-duck administration, ordered them back. When the demonstrators refused, city firemen aimed high-pressure hoses on them, using special monitor guns that channel water from two hoses through a single nozzle. The force was capable of knocking bricks loose from mortar. On the television sets are pictures of the demonstrators, young and old, in their thin cotton clothes, being hurled by gusts of water through the air and slammed against the sides of buildings. There are other images of chaos and cruelty--demonstrators being attacked by German shepherd police dogs and being beaten by policemen with nightsticks.

Accompanying my baby daughter and me that day at the institute was a girlfriend from my high school days. During the early 1960s, Robin was living in the small town of Demopolis, Ala., and in the first galleries we found ourselves recalling memories and drawing comparisons from our childhoods in Demopolis and Birmingham. When we reached the Movement Gallery, however, the exhibits there stunned us into silence.

The steady stream of visitors in the museum that day included several families, black parents who had brought their children to learn about their past. One woman pointed to a picture of Dr. Abraham Woods, the pastor of St. Joseph Baptist Church, at the time a local civil rights leader and now the second vice president of the institute’s board of directors.

“He was my teacher,” I heard her announce to her son in a tone of quiet pride. She smiled at me when she noticed I was listening, and I felt moved by her personal connection to the history here.

“My grandparents marched with King,” a thin little black girl, there with another family, told me softly. She burst into tears before a picture of a beat-up white Freedom Rider, his teeth knocked out, the blood streaming down his face. This mini-theater exhibit in the Movement Gallery illustrates the 1961 attempt by seven blacks and six whites to ride a Greyhound bus together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. Their goal was to confront the policy of segregation on interstate buses in the South. Outside Anniston, Ala., the bus was stopped by a white mob and a firebomb was thrown inside. As the Freedom Riders fled the burning bus, they were beaten.

A large-format video screen in the shape of a bus windshield tells their story. Next to it is a cutaway part of a burned-out bus like the one they rode to Anniston.

The culmination of the Movement Gallery is the exhibit documenting the March on Washington , when 250,000 blacks and whites gathered on the Mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol demanding freedom and jobs. A large video screen plays excerpts from the march and from King’s climactic speech, which was carried live that day by all three networks, the first mass meeting ever to reach the national airwaves. In this speech--one of the great orations in American history--King, moved by the response of the crowd, impulsively departed from his formal prepared text to preach the inspired, unifying message visitors hear in the mini-theater: “I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream . . . . we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

The winding path through the institute’s galleries leads visitors to a room with a large picture window that frames a view, across 6th Avenue, of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Built in 1873, two years after the city’s founding, this handsome red-brick church is the oldest black church in Birmingham. During the demonstrations, it served as a headquarters. It was also in this church that a dynamite bomb exploded on Sept. 15, 1963, killing four girls attending Sunday school classes--Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson--and injuring 19 others. As with the news of President Kennedy’s assassination two months later, I will never forget how I heard of these young girls’ deaths.

I was in Sunday school at Temple Emanu-el, Birmingham’s Reform Jewish temple, and, as my fourth-grade class stood in line in the stairwell on our way to our classroom, a teacher came from the office with the terrible story. I think all of us thought then, “If we were Negro children, it could have been us.” And it did seem that this virulent hatred of blacks could inspire other latent prejudices--against Jews, for example. Several months earlier, an unexploded bomb had been found in Temple Beth-el, the Conservative temple just up the street on Highland Avenue, and the two temples had hired guards around the clock.

With the bombing, the forces of hatred and evil seemed out of control, and even ardent segregationists said that things had gone too far.

Now my friend Robin and I wanted to see the church neither of us had visited while living in Birmingham. The door was locked, but a call from institute personnel gave us access. The church in fact is closely connected to the institute; it has volunteered its 1,500-seat sanctuary for institute events, and the personnel there expect to receive visitors from the institute. The church has recently undergone a massive renovation, and the sanctuary looks handsome indeed.

Above the balcony is the Wales window, the stained-glass image of the martyred Christ given to the church by the people of Wales after the bombing. The lower auditorium awaits renovation; an alcove serves as a moving and modest memorial to the four martyred girls. Here is a scrapbook filled with the telegrams of sympathy and solidarity that poured in from around the world. Here are the girls’ photographed faces, smiling, full of hope and innocence.

One-square-block Kelly Ingram Park was witness to some of the worst scenes of violence during the demonstrations. Now, as the symbolic forecourt of the institute, it has been redesigned to fit its transformed role as “A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation,” in the words of Richard Arrington Jr., Birmingham’s first black mayor, now in his fourth term.

The landscape architects chose diagonal cross-shaped paths intersected by a circular Freedom Walk to suggest the paths of the marchers. In the center of the park are four brimming basins shaped like a quartered circle, intended as an allusion to the biblical text from Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech: “We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like the waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” A statue of Dr. King from the park’s previous design stands inside the entrance along one of the paths. “His dream liberated Birmingham from itself and began a new day of love, mutual respect, and cooperation,” reads the inscription at its base. But this statue is self-effacing and conventional contrasted to the park’s new sculpture.

At the park entrance at 5th Avenue and 17th Street stands a bas-relief in Alabama limestone of three black ministers kneeling in prayer, the work of Washington, D.C., artist Raymond Kaskey. The figures of the ministers are large and powerful, yet because of their attitude, they meet the visitor below eye level, conveying a sense of immediacy and vulnerability.

The park’s other new sculptures, by El Paso, Tex., artist James Drake, are dark, brooding works in steel and bronze whose static drama reenacts the violence of the park’s past. One depicts two youths standing in a doorway. Across the path from them is a wall of prison bars commemorating the marching children who were imprisoned. Another sculpture shows two young people flung against a wall by the imagined jets of water issuing from the monitor guns mounted on tripods behind them.

Researchers at present are working on the archival collections--scheduled to open at the end of this year-- that will include documents, oral histories and artifacts of those involved in the civil rights movement--both prominent leaders and ordinary citizens.

Odessa Woolfolk, the president of the institute’s board of directors, like other representatives I spoke to, stressed that the institute’s purpose, like the civil rights movement itself, crosses racial boundaries.

Priscilla Cooper, the institute’s education program consultant, spoke to us of the importance of preparing visitors, particularly schoolchildren, for what they will see in the museum. “We hold preliminary meetings with teachers in order to provide them with a materials packet and advise them on how to present the information in the classroom, before the visit.” She mentioned the upsetting responses evoked in visitors by the exhibits and said, “People are afraid, and we have to help them overcome their fears.”

At first I thought she was talking about visitors like the little black girl whom I had seen bursting into tears in the Movement Gallery, but Robin, more perspicacious than I, realized that she was delicately referringto the difficulty of reaching out to white teachers in Birmingham’s still predominantly white suburban schools. Questioned, she admitted this to be the case. “It’s hard for the teachers, because they have to face the truth. They must tell the students what really happened.”

It occurred to me that what I was witnessing was the transformation of Birmingham’s official history. Political power in Birmingham is now wielded by many who were formerly powerless, and the civil rights movement that the city once excoriated, tried to ignore and then crush, is now--with the opening of the institute and the designation of the Civil Rights District--celebrated and exalted. I recall how in my childhood Martin Luther King was denounced as “an outside agitator,” “a troublemaker” and, the worst epithet of all, “a Communist.” Dr. King and the other leaders of the movement believed that their cause would eventually triumph even if they did not live to see that day. Birmingham’s Civil Rights District is indeed a shrine, and my visit there gave me a sense of personal solace. For years, I--and many others of my generation--had felt pained by our city’s shameful past. In laying claim to the civil rights movement and in celebrating it, Birmingham has sought to replace hatred with a vision of brotherhood.

GUIDEBOOK

Right to Birmingham

Getting there: The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is in downtown Birmingham at 520 16th St. N., between 5th and 6th avenues North; telephone (205) 328-9696. From Birmingham Airport, take Airport Highway to 1st Avenue North; follow 1st to 20th Street North; turn right and proceed to 6th Avenue North; turn left; the institute is at 16th Street and 6th Avenue. Free parking behind the institute.

There are a number of rental car companies at the airport; prices are comparatively reasonable. Birmingham is about a 2 1/2-hour drive from Atlanta on Interstate 20.

The Institute/Civil Rights District: Institute hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sundays, 1-5 p.m. Tours are self-guided, the last tour admitted 30 minutes before closing. Admission is free, but voluntary contributions are accepted.

The newest addition to the Civil Rights District, the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, is scheduled to open in late May or June in the Carver Theater, the former black movie theater located at 4th Avenue and 17th Street North.

Where to stay: Recommended lodgings include the Tutwiler Hotel in the heart of downtown, Park Place at 21st Street North, (205) 322-2100; rates are $119 single, $184 suite. This famous Birmingham hotel was renovated about eight years ago. Less pricey but very nice is the Pickwick Hotel, located in Five Points, Birmingham’s restaurant and entertainment district, 1023 20th St. South, (800) 255-7304 or (205) 933-9555; $95 single, suites $119. More moderately priced is the Holiday Inn Redmont Hotel, 2101 5th Ave. North; (800) HOLIDAY; singles $52, doubles $59. The Radisson Hotel, 20th Street and 8th Avenue South, (800) 333-3333, has singles for $79, doubles $89.

Where to eat: Birmingham’s specialty is hickory-smoked barbecue. Two black-owned-and-operated, full-service restaurants near the institute are Rib-It-Up, a barbecue-rib joint, 830 1st Ave. North, (205) 328-7427, and The Universal Restaurant, a soul-food eatery, 1037 3rd Ave. West, (205) 780-2009; both have lunches for about $5.

Other choices include the Five Points restaurants Highlands Bar and Grill, 2011 11th Ave. South, (205) 939-1400, lunch about $15, and Basil’s Grill, 1318 Cobb Lane, 205-933-9222, lunch $10, which offers “new American” food. The Bombay Cafe is an upscale restaurant with a Cajun accent at 2839 7th Ave. South, (205) 322-1930; prices similar to Highlands.

For more information: The Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2200 9th Ave. North, Birmingham, Ala. 35203, (800) 962-6453 or (205) 252-9825, will make hotel and dining reservations and provide information about the Institute and the Civil Rights District. Or contact the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel, 532 S. Perry St., Dept. TIA, Montgomery, Ala. 36104-4614, (800) 252-2262 or (205) 242-4169.