One of Planetizen's Top Ten Books of 2006
"But for Birmingham," Fred Shuttleworth recalled President John F. Kennedy saying in June 1963 when he invited black leaders to meet with him, "we would not ...be here today." Birmingham is well known for its civil rights history, particularly for the violent white-on-black bombings that occurred there in the 1960s, resulting in the city's nickname "Bombingham." What is less well known about Birmingham's racial history, however, is the extent to which early city planning decisions influenced and prompted the city's civil rights protests. The first book-length work to analyze this connection,"The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980uncovers the impact of Birmingham's urban planning decisions on its black communities and reveals how these decisions led directly to the civil rights movement.
Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly's study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning. The result of this obstruction was the South's longest-standing racial zoning law, which lasted from 1926 to 1951, when it was redeclared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the fact that African Americans constituted at least 38 percent of Birmingham's residents, they faced drastic limitations to their freedom to choose where to live. When in the1940s they rebelled by attempting to purchase homes in off-limit areas, their efforts were labeled as a challenge to city planning, resulting in government and court interventions that became violent. More than fifty bombings ensued between 1947 and 1966, becoming nationally publicized only in 1963, when four black girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Connerly effectively uses Birmingham's history as an example to argue the importance of recognizing the link that exists between city planning and civil rights. His demonstration of how Birmingham's race-based planning legacy led to the confrontations that culminated in the city's struggle for civil rights provides a fresh lens on the history and future of urban planning, and its relation to race.
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan is the first book to consider how mass motorization reshaped cities in Japan and Britain during the 20th century. Taking two leading ...‘motor cities’, Nagoya and Birmingham, as their principal subjects, Simon Gunn and Susan C. Townsend show how cars changed the spatial form and individual experience of the modern city and reveal the similarities and differences between Japan and Britain in adapting to the ‘motor age’. The book has three main themes: the place of automobility in post-war urban reconstruction; the emerging conflict between the promise of mobility and personal freedom offered by the car and its consequences for the urban environment (the M/E dilemma); and the extent to which the Anglo-Japanese comparison can throw light on fundamental differences in cultural understanding of the environment, urbanism and the self. The result is the first comparative history of mass automobility and its environmental consequences between East and West.
This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century:
• 1900-1917, the ...formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector;
• 1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need;
• the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant;
• 1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another.
From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chest’s Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.
Two famous and powerful men of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) and George Cadbury (1839-1922), towered over one of the great cities of the British Empire - ...Birmingham. Together, they offer a fascinating window into the rapidly changing world in which they lived and the preoccupations of their generation.
Throughout their lives both men pursued a common mission - to improve the lives of their fellow citizens - and zealously pursued a philosophy of social and civic responsibility rooted in nonconformist religion. However, these were very different characters sharing a single stage. Having aggressively built a fortune in engineering as a young man, Chamberlain entered civic politics and, during three terms as mayor, he made Birmingham the global model of good civic governance. But his ambitions stretched beyond Birmingham to Westminster where he became the first great middle-class statesman of modern Britain and the leading Radical of the age, although his career ended in failure and he never achieved the highest office he craved. Throughout this turbulent career, Birmingham, sometimes referred to as his "Duchy", remained Chamberlain's political base and his family home. It was here, after an incapacitating stroke, that Chamberlain was buried following a funeral where the size of the crowds brought the whole city to a halt.
It was also here in Birmingham that Cadbury created his fortune and where his programmes for social improvement caught the attention of the world. Taking control of the confectionery business established by his Quaker family, Cadbury built it into one of the first great global brands. The wealth he created allowed Cadbury to introduce far-sighted benefits for his workers, including the visionary model village of Bournville which was his response to the jerry-built slum housing of his workforce. Then around the houses, schools and green open spaces of Bournville Cadbury created a distinct community founded on strict adherence to his Quaker values of temperance and industrial discipline. Meanwhile, on the national stage, Cadbury successfully campaigned to improve the lives of men and women labouring in sweatshops and worked for the introduction of pioneering social reforms, including non-contributory old age pensions. Throughout this time, unlike Chamberlain, he abhorred party politics and his pacifist views brought the two men into conflict during the Anglo-Boer War which Chamberlain championed. By his death, Cadbury was lauded as one of the leading philanthropists of his age.
So, both Chamberlain and Cadbury championed political and social reform based on their experiences in Birmingham and subsequently became important figures in British life.
Yet for all that they had in common, they were radically different from each other. Their ambitions and their methods for effecting change took divergent routes: as a result from time to time they came into conflict in the arena of national affairs and in Birmingham, where they were reluctant neighbours.
Two Titans: One City is the first study to explore, compare and contrast the lives of these two very famous but very different figures. Historian and author Andrew Reekes uses archives, correspondence and contemporary accounts to reveal the fascinating lives and rivalries of these two important figures of their age.
On a sultry September morning in 1955, a young African American man, the son of share corppers, boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham, Alabama, to leave his home state for the first time in his life. ...He was headed for the University of Detroit on a teaching scholarship from Miles College. Richard Arrington could not have guessed then that his future as a teacher would be postponed for decades by big-city politics--and that he would serve a record-setting five terms as chief executive of Alabama's largest city. Under Arrington's leadership, Birmingham rebuilt itself from a foundering, steel-driven industrial center to one of the most diversified metropolitan areas in the Southeast, with an economy fueled by health care, biomedical research, engineering, telecommunications, and banking. As mayor, Arrington's economic legacy is impressive. When he left office, Birmingham boasted a record number of jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in its history. Additionally, Birmingham had built the strongest tax base in Alabama, expanded its city limits by 60 square miles, reduced crime to its lowest level in 25 years, and funded a $260 million school construction program. Today Birmingham is financially sound and is the only city in the Southeast with a $100 million endowment fund.
While studies on microplastics in the marine environment show their wide-distribution, persistence and contamination of biota, the freshwater environment remains comparatively neglected. Where ...studies on freshwaters have been undertaken these have been on riverine systems or very large lakes. We present data on the distribution of microplastic particles in the sediments of Edgbaston Pool, a shallow eutrophic lake in central Birmingham, UK. These data provide, to our knowledge, the first assessment of microplastic concentrations in the sediments of either a small or an urban lake and the first for any lake in the UK. Maximum concentrations reached 25–30 particles per 100 g dried sediment (equivalent to low hundreds kg−1) and hence are comparable with reported river sediment studies. Fibres and films were the most common types of microplastic observed. Spatial distributions appear to be due to similar factors to other lake studies (i.e. location of inflow; prevailing wind directions; propensity for biofouling; distribution of macroplastic debris) and add to the growing burden of evidence for microplastic ubiquity in all environments.
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•These are the first microplastics data for UK lake sediments, an urban or small lake.•Sediment concentrations are comparable to, or lower than, other equivalent data.•Microplastic fibres and films were the most common particle type.•Distributions appear to be related to inflows, wind directions and macroplastic litter.
This paper presents the first microplastics data for UK lake sediments and, more broadly, for small and urban lakes, thereby contributing to the growing burden of evidence for microplastic ubiquity.
Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham's Civil Rights Days is a remarkable look at a historic city enmeshed in racial tensions, revealing untold or forgotten ...stories of secret deals, law enforcement intrigue, and courage alongside pivotal events that would sweep change across the nation.
Irish music enjoyed popularity across Europe and North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Regional circumstances created a unique reception for such music in the English Midlands. ...This book is a musical ethnography of Birmingham, 19502010. Initially establishing geographical and chronological parameters, the book cites Birminghams location at the hub of a road and communications network as key to the development of Irish music across a series of increasingly visible, publ.
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