On March 6-8, Swiss captain Severin Luthi will lead his Davis Cup team to America to play the U.S. in one of our more controversial cities — Birmingham, Alabama. And thus, there’s a tale to be told.
Dear Severin,
The international tour travels from one sizzling site to another is now coming to Birmingham. The most industrial city of the deep South, has little of the cache of the tour’s prime stops. Still, you will be interested in this very poignant, very American story; a tale of redemption that saw one community emerge from infamy to become a city of significant harmony.
*****
It was Alabama’s most ambitious town. Founded six years after the Civil War, it was hardly your typical antebellum repository of genteel Southern manners. Blessed with over-the-top natural resources, Birmingham energetically created a pounding smelter economy that attracted big 19th century Northern money.
Dubbed “the Pittsburgh of the South” because of its roaring steel factories and “the magic city” due to its abundant wealth, it was a town that drew broad-shouldered workers eager to escape narrow hollers and “solidarity forever” labor organizers. From the get-go, racial and labor violence were commonplace in Dixie’s big-sweat city.
True, for many, it was a near-idyllic town to raise kin and enjoy life’s sweet pleasures. But others sensed a shadow — hazy decades of hatred where divisions drifted deep: dignity denied, the silence of fear. Segregation defines, Jim Crow dictates. Mundane “coloreds-only” humiliations met (“boy, what you doin’”) horrors. In the night the rope, the gun, the dynamite flash — America’s apartheid — everyone in their place. Do not shake. Do not stir.
Yet, Severin, Birmingham, Alabama was anything but quiet: foundries and blasts, Vulcan’s crucible. Back to the early 1900s bombs and beatings were part of the landscape.
So cynics dismissed it, calling it “Bombingham.” James Baldwin said it was doomed and Martin Luther King claimed the city was “a symbol of hard core resistance to integration. It is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the U.S.”
All the while, orderly protests, deferential marches, sit-ins, boycotts and assorted negotiations yielded little.
Assessing the dismal situation, Andrew Young — the Civil Rights worker who would become our U.N. Ambassador — concluded, “Bravery alone was not enough. We needed to bring a larger spotlight on this. Birmingham was the last place I wanted to go with Martin Luther King in 1963, yet it was the place I had to be.”
There, King — the ultimate outside agitator — confronted the most notorious sheriff in the South, Bull Connor. Snarling, red-faced, unrelenting, the Commissioner of Public Safety was, according to The New York Times, “the manifestation of the perversity upon which segregation depended for its life.” Billy-club in hand, he wouldn’t hesitate to spit in kids faces and liked to drive the police department’s imposing white tank through black neighborhoods.
Not surprisingly, shortly after King came to town, he found himself behind bars. Lucky us (so to speak). His “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” is one of America’s most erudite and provocative manifestos. Written in response to a group of well-meaning white clergy who insisted that racial progress should be pursued through the courts only and that King’s initiatives were “unwise and untimely,” King’s letter countered, “We should never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal’… There are two types of laws, just and unjust…[and] one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” So on the streets and in the parks of Birmingham, thousands protested. And when it seemed like Bull Connor had arrested almost all the adults around, kids entered the fray. The much-celebrated “children’s crusade” — thousands strong — was an inspired force: joy and justice, song ‘n spirit. And, when on a sultry day Connor attacked them with fierce water cannons and angry hounds snarling loud, the world was stunned. The graphics were startling — victim and villain. Who could not be sympathetic?
Thrust and parry, segregation and its foes were in full battle in ’63, no-holds-barred.
In January, Governor George Wallace proclaimed, “From this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland…In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny…and I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In June, Mississippi’s young leader, Medgar Evers, was gunned down outside his home, cradled by his wife and children as he bled to death. In August, a quarter million gathered in Washington under Lincoln’s gaze to hear of King’s “Dream.” Then, in early September, Governor Wallace eerily proclaimed that all we needed to do to stop integration is have “a few first class funerals.”
How prophetic.
Just 17 days after Dr. King’s “Dream” speech, Birmingham suffered its nightmare. September 15, 1963 was just another Sunday, but just as Sunday School was letting out, the 16th Avenue Church was rocked, a fateful blast. Four little innocents — the quiet nine-year-old who was one of the janitor’s seven children, the petite adopted 14-year-old who had just been scolded because her slip was showing, the librarian’s daughter who got all A’s and the Brownie who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get a sandwich at the white lunch counter — met sudden death.
Broken bodies, tattered dresses, the politics of rage: the city was shocked. Beyond Birmingham the world would change forever. The deaths seemed stark. America wondered why.
Walter Cronkite explained: “I don’t think the white community understood the depth of the problem and the depth of the hate…until that incredibly mean-spirited crime of blowing up kids in a Sunday School basement. Up to that time, people looked at it [the Civil Rights movement] as an interesting kind of social development that had come along [and would be resolved], somehow or another. But, at the moment those four little girls were blasted, America understood the real nature of the hate… that was preventing integration…This was the awakening.”
King always contended that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” But just after the bombings the arc got whiplash. Yes, much blood was still to be shed. Still, the Civil Rights movement began to score a torrent of transformative triumphs — symbolic and real: the Civil Rights Bill passed, King won the Nobel Peace Prize, the problematic Selma campaign ended with a bloody but triumphant march and voting rights were implemented.
So, too, Birmingham changed. In ’71, eight years after the bombing, Richard Arrington, a black biologist turned academic dean was — with black and white support — elected city councilman.
In ’77, a gutsy Alabama district attorney persuaded a Methodist minister to testify against her uncle, “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, who was subsequently convicted by a biracial Birmingham jury.
And in ’79 Arrington became Birmingham’s first black mayor and a black has been mayor ever since. Then just this past November 4, many an exuberant Birmingham citizen gathered to watch an African-American gain the White House.
Yes, Severin, Birmingham is far from being some kind of racial nirvana. Still, know what this place has gone through. Certainly, cities suffer psychic and physical wounds, only to wipe away their tears of regret [think: New Orleans, New York, Dallas and San Francisco]. But few other communities have seen more transformation than Birmingham: the South reborn, racial healing.
Has there been closure in Birmingham? No, issues remain. Still, as Dr. King said, in “the end what we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” Birmingham is such a place.
“Outsiders still have a negative impression of Birmingham until they come and see what a beautiful place it is,” noted Birmingham News reporter Hunter George. “It’s different here from what people think. The symphony, the opera, first class restaurants — a great place to live, to raise a family. It’s a hidden gem here in the foothills of the Appalachia.” And yeah, it doesn’t hurt these days to have the second lowest unemployment rate in America.
So, Severin, on March 6 when James Blake, a part-English/part African-American, is likely to take the court, few will even note he is black. Cheers will cascade from a multi-racial chorus of fans and we imagine that somewhere Martin Luther King Jr. will be offering a knowing nod. Thank goodness, he just might think, Birmingham has come so far. And yes, it’s just fine that this one battle — the Davis Cup tie — will not have to be resolved by a heart-wrenching confrontation on the streets. Rather it will be settled on court where fierce forehands, not stinging water canons, will prevail.
Sincerely,
Bill Simons
Publisher and Editor
Inside Tennis
