Alabama - Heart of Dixie

        Memorial Day Weekend, 2000. We stayed at the Tutwiler Hotel in downtown Birmingham. As often as possible, I made reservations at historical hotels or inns to capture the flavor of the cities in which they were built. The Tutwiler is said to be haunted by Major Tutwiler, for whom the hotel is named, but he never knocked on our door.

     

 

       We were eager to see the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of one of the saddest and most memorable occurrences of the civil rights movement, where a bomb exploded in 1963, killing four young black girls. A plaque erected to their memory reads: May Men Learn to Replace Bitterness and Violence with Love and Understanding.

16th Street Baptist Church

       Directly across the street is the Civil Rights Institute. It is a multimedia museum and on this Sunday morning it was noticeably quiet. We were watching a television video which showed a couple of black children walking into the front door of a school, accompanied by members of the National Guard. There were many people watching the children, some with angry expressions on their faces. I felt the presence of someone standing behind me, and when I turned around, an African American gentleman asked if I saw the children on the screen. I said, yes, that I saw them and commented that they and their parents must have been very brave to let them be the first black children to enter this previously segregated school. He said, quietly, “Those are my children.” This began a conversation in which he told us about his children, I think it was a boy and a girl, and how he wanted them to have a good education, a better education than they had at their separate but not equal elementary school. He told us how they had gone on to college and graduated and were leading productive lives. I think he could see how interested we were, so he asked if we would like to have him take us around to other exhibits and offer his commentary. Well, of course we did, and it made this renowned museum even more memorable. At the end, I asked him if this was his job, to be a docent at the Civil Rights Institute. He explained that he volunteered to do this only on Sundays, and that his real job was as a barber. I asked him his name and if he would allow me to take a photo of him outside the museum. This photo of James Armstrong is among my favorite photos of all our trips.

       

       Many years later, Andy and I attended a fundraiser for an organization called Fair Housing of Marin. Two documentarians showed a film called The Barber of Birmingham. It only took a few minutes for us to realize this was about James Armstrong, our barber of Birmingham. It was such a surprise and allowed us to learn even more about this special man. We also learned that evening that he died in 2009, at the age of 86. He was truly a champion of Civil Rights.

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James Armstrong, the Barber of Birmingham

     

 

       On another day, we walked by a beautiful church and tried to open the front door. It was locked. My husband asked a man sitting on a bench nearby if he knew anything about this church. He said, that in fact he was the retired former caretaker of the church. “Would you like to go inside, he asked?” He then unlocked the door for us and took us around, showing us the most significant and beautiful features and giving us some background of St. Mary of the Highlands Episcopal Church. His name was Joe and we have a great photo of him, too.

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Joe, the former caretaker of St. Mary's of the Highlands Church

       Another day we drove to Tuscaloosa to see the University of Alabama campus, stopping along the way in Vance to see a Mercedes Benz US International manufacturing plant. I had arranged for us to have a tour there, as a surprise for my husband, because he has had a lifelong love affair with Mercedes. I thought I might not enjoy this part of the trip, but we both found it fascinating. One thing that impressed us is that all the employees, managers as well as production line workers, were dressed identically. They also took lunch breaks at the same time so that they could interact and get to know each other. We were told this was the ethos of the manufacturing plants in Germany. Everything was meticulously clean and organized. Very impressive!

       We drove to Montgomery to see the capitol. As we came into town (where the temperature must have been 100 degrees), I rolled down the window to ask directions of a very large (rotund) Alabama policeman. When I finished my question, he looked at me and said, “You don’t sound like you’re from Alabama. Where ‘r’ y’all from?” I said, “San Francisco.” His reply, “Well, what ‘r’ y’all doing here?” was hard to answer at the time. If I’d said, “We are going to visit all the states in alphabetical order, and yours is first…” I wonder what he would have said! There were many signs of the Civil War in Montgomery, including the location of the first Confederate White House. As time went on and we visited other southern states, we became accustomed to these sites of Civil War history.

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       We only spent a few days in Alabama, but Andy was now sold on the idea, so we were off and running.