Word: birminghams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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TAKING stock of a troubled chapter of current history, this week's cover story, written by Associate Editor Jesse Birnbaum, examines the state of Alabama and its Governor, George C. Wallace. For the background of his cover painting, Artist Boris Chaliapin chose the broken window of Birmingham's bombed-out 16th Street Baptist Church as a particularly striking symbol of the depth and bitterness of the struggle...
...wake of his retreats he has left passions that could lead only to such sickening crimes as Birmingham's Sunday school bombing. Today, many Alabamians who yield nothing to Wallace in their devotion to segregation accuse him of bringing about the bombing almost as surely as if he himself had planted the dynamite sticks. Says Birmingham Real Estate Dealer Sidney Smyer, 66, a lifelong segregationist and former state legislator who in recent months has tried to act as a mediator in his city's racial disputes: "There wouldn't have been any trouble if Wallace had stayed...
...Bombingham." And then there is Birmingham-an entity of its own, a region of the mind. A sooty, sprawling city of 340,000, Birmingham has been called the Pittsburgh of the South. Yet except for its location, it is hardly a Southern city...
...center of an area rich in minerals, ranging from iron ore to arsenic, Birmingham was only founded in 1871, has none of the antebellum traditions or grace of the Old South. Its symbol since 1936 has been a forbidding 60-ton, 50-ft.-high, aluminum-coated statue of Vulcan, who was the Roman god of fire. Vulcan, high atop Red Mountain, drew workers like moths from all over the state. Most of them were unschooled, out-of-work farm people, attracted by the promise of prosperous city life...
...instead of finding that life, they found only more poverty, sporadic unemployment-and the threat of job competition from the city's large (40%) Negro population. The result is described by University of Alabama Philosophy Professor Iredell Jenkins in a perceptive if unprofessorial comment. "The obvious thing about Birmingham," says Jenkins, "is that there's just a lot of goddam white trash that's conglomerated there." It is, therefore, no coincidence that since 1947 "Bombingham" has known 50 bombings that can be ascribed to racial conflict-and not one of them has been solved...