It is an industrial monster sprung up in the midst of a slow-moving pastoral. It does not belong—and yet it is one of the many proofs that Alabama is an amazing country, heterogeneous, grotesque, full of incredible contrasts. Birmingham is a new city in an old land.
—Carl Carmer
Perhaps more than any other city, Birmingham comes closest to embodying the mythic New South creed. Its resident and absentee mine and mill owners turned a cornfield and a swamp into a multiracial, bustling, smoky bastion of industrial capitalism where profits ruled and the feudal values of the Old South echoed faintly in the background. Their wealth depended on a huge, disciplined, docile labor force, but unlike machines, working people and their advocates fought to alter conditions they considered unjust or intolerable. Thus, as a competing center of heavy industry, Birmingham was to the Deep South what Cripple Creek, Colorado, or Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, was to the West—a cauldron of class conflict. But as Carl Carmer so eloquently explains above, the matrix of old and new makes Birmingham an unparalleled industrial center. The mine and mill owners hoped to mold an industrial proletariat in a city founded less than a generation after the abolition of chattel slavery and “peopled . . . with two races afraid of each other.”1
From the discovery and exploitation of large mineral deposits in central Alabama emerged the Birmingham industrial complex—a region often called the “Pittsburgh of the South.” Before 1879, the Pratt Coal and Coke Company mined and exported the rich deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone to Northern industries. When TCI took over the holdings of the Pratt Coal and Coke Company in 1886, which five years earlier had been purchased by industrialist Enoch Ensley, TCI became the most prodigious iron and steel manufacturer in the South. TCI swallowed up a large portion of the local iron and steel industry, and most remaining holdouts merged into three competing companies: the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company, the Woodward Iron Company, and the Republic Iron and Steel Company.2
The juxtaposition of limestone, coking coal, dolomite, and red hematite ore substantially reduced production costs, but it was not enough to make Birmingham's coal and iron industry competitive on the national market. Unlike the alluvial ore found in the Great Lakes region, Birmingham's deposits were buried deep below mountainous slopes, and the region's insufficient water supply, increased transportation costs, and the lower metallic content of its ore rendered capital investments comparatively higher. Yet, cheap black and white labor from the Alabama countryside compensated for the capital-intensive nature of mining, making the Birmingham district one of the least costly industrial centers in the country.3
Although Birmingham's profits rarely measured up to expectations and fortunes were earned and lost in an economy that resembled a slot machine, the district nevertheless generated tremendous wealth for a tiny minority. In 1910, individuals whose net worth was over $35,000 comprised merely 1 percent of the population, whereas 80 percent earned below $500 per annum. In addition to having the means for an elegant lifestyle, this small group of industrialists wielded enormous economic and political power. Interlocking directorships and control over various real estate, banking, and mining ventures were held by such individuals as Henry T. DeBardeleben, Robert I. Ingalls, Erskine Ramsay, Robert Jemison, Jr., Walter Henley, and others. Although few held political office, these men used financial strength to exercise considerable power over local government. Birmingham's nouveau riche industrialists spent lavishly and developed a strong consciousness of class and a sense of social cohesion. They built plush mansions in areas such as Shades Valley and Mountain Brooks Estates, distant from the bellowing smoke of the steel mills. In a spectacular display of wealth, one Birmingham capitalist built a home replicating a Roman temple. Alongside numerous bronze and plaster statues sat “two dog houses, built like miniature Parthenons, with classic porticoes and tiny pillars.”4
Below in the “valley of the furnaces” was another world in the making. Thousands of landless farmers from the surrounding counties, particularly blacks, were rapidly drawn into the orbit of industrial production. By 1900, 55 percent of Alabama's coal miners and 65 percent of its iron and steel workers were black. Overall, African-Americans made up more than 90 percent of Birmingham's unskilled labor force by 1910, thus constituting one of the largest black urban communities in the New South. As in any other New South urban community, race penetrated all aspects of the city's life. Segregation ordinances proliferated between 1900 and 1905, and Alabama's move to disfranchise blacks reduced the state's black voters from 100,000 to a negligible 3,700 after 1901.5 Segregation in the public sphere reinforced the development of a separate black social and cultural world. Yet unlike Northern urban centers such as New York or Chicago, where blacks were concentrated in one or two dense sections of the city, Birmingham's blacks resided in several segregated pockets situated along creekbeds, railroad lines, and alleys near the downtown area. Black working-class neighborhoods throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century suffered from lack of streetlights, paved streets, sewers, and other city services. Birmingham was an unmistakably segregated city, but spatially there was no single, identifiable black community to speak of. Excluding the greater Birmingham area and the surrounding industrial suburbs, the central core of black residence settled along the Twentieth Street axis from the southern section of the city toward the railroad tracks which ran through downtown.6
Not all blacks toiled in the mines, mills, kitchens, and streets of Birmingham. A tiny but influential black elite established a flourishing business district along Eighteenth Street in the heart of downtown. As early as 1890, the Reverend W. R. Pettiford founded and presided over Birmingham's first black bank, the Alabama Penny Savings and Loan. And black residents often boasted of their millionaire inventor, Andrew J. Beard, or the affluent funeral director and insurance magnate, C. M. Harris. Black businessmen and religious leaders made their fortunes from a consumer base of working-class blacks, insured peaceful relations by creating alliances with white industrialists, and a handful secured enough “respectability” to retain the franchise. Like the white elite, they maintained their own exclusive social clubs and rarely interacted with poor blacks. While the Negro Federation of Women's Clubs and allied organizations occasionally focused on social welfare issues, black Birmingham's numerous religious and literary societies occupied a great deal of the black middle-class woman's time.7
The black elite could not always find complete satisfaction in material wealth when they, too, were denied basic democratic rights. Some black middle-class spokesmen searched for autonomous alternatives to Jim Crow within and without the region. African colonization and other emigration schemes were proposed by blacks and white liberals during the late nineteenth century, and in Oxford, Alabama, in 1899, a group of leading black citizens established one of the nation's first all-black towns. In virtually every case of black political assertion, however, the white status quo only recognized as spokespersons for the African-American community the black elite, whether followers of the accommodationist teachings of Booker T. Washington or the Back-to-Africa movement of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner. And rarely was the black elite's self-appointed leadership challenged by the masses of blacks.8
The newly created industrial complex also attracted significant numbers of immigrants from Northern mining communities or directly from Europe. By 1890 first- and second-generation immigrants, particularly Italians, Scots, Germans, and Britons, comprised nearly one-fourth of Birmingham's white population—a substantial number for the urban South. More striking is the fact that in 1910 one-half of the coal, iron, and steel workers were immigrants, many of whom had been skilled colliers and metal workers before moving South. As Southern whites left the farm to take advantage of Birmingham's employment opportunities, the percentage of immigrants in the labor force declined precipitously. Although thousands of white migrants found their way into the cotton mills and lumber yards in other parts of the state, a large portion joined black workers and immigrants in the mines and steel factories.9
During the first three decades of the twentieth century thousands of Southern women also left the farm and found work in the greater Birmingham area or simply labored as unpaid workers in the households of their husbands who toiled in the mines and mills. The proletarianization of white females drawn to the state's rapidly growing textile industry hardly affected Birmingham; textile factories there employed only 283 women in 1930. The city's 8,038 white working women were scattered in dozens of occupations, mainly clerical and professional pursuits. Although limited wartime industrialization led to an increase in white female wage labor, by 1930 most white women worked as housewives. In fact, despite numerical increases, the percentage of women wage earners in the state decreased from 40.9 percent in 1910 to 25.5 percent in 1930. And this figure mainly indicates the status of white women, of whom 85 percent were reportedly housewives in 1930. In 1920 black women comprised 60 percent of the city's 20,082 female workers, and of that number 87 percent were engaged in domestic work.10
The thousands of women and men who streamed into Birmingham searching for opportunities made up the cheap labor force from which local capitalists could make their fortunes. Yet the city's young proletariat was by no means docile. On the contrary, many had had some organizing experience. Two decades prior to the Populist upheaval of the 1890s, James T. Rapier, black leader of the Labor Union of Alabama, an affiliate of the newly formed National Labor Union, attempted to organize black industrial and agricultural workers throughout the state. More significantly, the Knights of Labor and the Greenback-Labor party established a tradition of militant, interracial unionism among Birmingham coal miners. Blacks comprised the majority of Greenback-Labor supporters in the Birmingham district before the party dissolved in 1880. Working among black and white coal miners and lumber workers throughout Alabama, the Knights proved quite effective, establishing a number of local assemblies in Jefferson County. While Knights led several small strikes in Alabama's coal fields between 1882 and 1885, the organization on a national level began to decline after 1886, partly because of antilabor hysteria following the Haymarket Affair, the emergence of the AFL, and the leadership's decision to adopt a no-strike pledge.11
The UMW (a local movement distinct from the UMWA), founded by ex-Knights and rural migrants who brought agrarian radicalism to the mines and mills,12 continued organizing Birmingham workers until it was crushed during the coal miners’ strike of 1894. Late in the decade, however, national leadership in the UMWA reinvigorated organized labor in Alabama's coal mines and began a campaign to rebuild the union. All three organizations left a remarkable record of labor activity: of 603 strikes initiated by Alabama's workers between 1881 and 1936, 303 took place during 1881–1905. But as the twentieth century approached, white workers began to drift away from the UMWA; during both the 1904 and 1908 coal miners’ strikes, black workers were in the majority. Taking advantage of the large black presence in the UMWA, employers adeptly used racist propaganda, violence, and black convict labor to weaken unionism in Alabama's coal fields.13
In the aftermath of the 1908 strike, TCI executive George Gordon Crawford adopted the paternalistic methods of the parent company, United States Steel, as a bulwark against unionism and to create a more stable labor force. Because of poor working conditions, dilapidated housing, overburdened public facilities, and polluted water supplies, the turnover rate for Birmingham labor hovered around 400 percent. Crawford sought to turn the situation around by establishing workers’ villages with decent, well-constructed homes, playgrounds, schools, churches, and health facilities for employees. These segregated company-owned settlements were laid out in greater Birmingham's industrial suburbs, especially North Birmingham, Woodlawn, Ensley, Greenwood, Collegeville, Smithfield, and Fairfield. The city of Bessemer established a similar residential pattern in which miners and some steel workers lived in company-owned double-tenant “shotgun” houses. By 1920 over 17,000 workers lived in homes maintained by various industrial concerns and ranging in quality from well-constructed wood frame houses to shoddy dwellings of board and batten construction. Although conditions improved in many company communities and the turnover rate dropped significantly to 5.1 percent in 1930, TCI exercised greater control over workers’ lives.14
The UMWA in Alabama was temporarily crushed after World War I, more the result of state violence and race baiting than TCI's paternalistic policies. Disaster followed when Birmingham coal miners, three-quarters of whom were black, struck for higher wages in 1919, and again in 1920. Backed by state troops dispatched by Governor Thomas Kilby, TCI crushed the strike as well as the UMWA in Alabama. The union's collapse marked the end of biracial unionism in Alabama until the 1930s.15
Iron ore miners and iron and steel workers did not establish the same tradition of interracial unionism during this period. The Metal Trades Council of Birmingham concentrated its efforts exclusively on skilled workers, ignoring black workers who comprised nearly one-half of the steel and iron workers and 70 percent of the ore miners. Given the unwritten racial quota on occupational mobility and the slowness of technological change in the iron and steel industry, black workers remained unskilled and, therefore, unorganized. In the iron ore mines, mass industrial organizing efforts were not only met with force and violence, but company officials used racist propaganda to keep black and white workers divided. Attempted strikes in 1918 and 1919 left the nascent industrial organizing campaign in shambles, and hundreds of dedicated union men, black and white, were blacklisted during the years that followed.16
Black convict laborers, Banner Mine, Alabama (courtesy Birmingham Public Library)
The swelling ranks of women workers remained largely unorganized, and middle-class women's reform movements barely took notice of female toilers, particularly black women. Black domestic laborers, the majority of the female work force, were considered unorganizable and unimportant and thus were virtually invisible in the eyes of white male labor organizers. White middle-class women initiated a vibrant reform movement around woman suffrage, the YWCA movement, child labor reform, and opposition to convict labor. But middle-class reformers excluded poor white women and often—especially in the case of woman suffrage—exhibited hostilities toward their darker sisters. In the end, a dynamic women's interracial movement did not spring up in Birmingham as it had in areas such as Atlanta and Memphis.17
With the death of the Knights of Labor, working-class radicalism had few organized outlets. The Socialist party was visibly active in the state around the turn of the century, claiming four hundred members in 1908. The Socialists eventually attracted a small following among poor white farmers in Baldwin, Bibb, Covington, and Cullman counties and among a handful of Birmingham skilled workers. It reached its peak in electoral strength in 1912 when Alabamians cast 3,029 votes, 2.6 percent of the state's electorate, for Eugene Debs. In Birmingham the only Socialist who held office was Arlie K. Barber, a staunchly anticorporate suburban druggist elected to the city commission in 1915.18
Unlike Louisiana and parts of Texas, where Southern Socialists organized blacks—albeit in separate locals—in Alabama the SPA was strictly a “white man's party.”19 In 1905, Montgomery Socialist E. F. Andrews maintained that organizing blacks, especially on an integrated basis, would have disastrous results. Northern Socialists did not understand, he explained in 1905, that white Southerners were surrounded by “some eight millions of more or less civilized people, belonging to a race in a stage of evolution so far removed from our own that for aught we can see at present, assimilation must be impossible for an indefinite period.” Like many other Southern Socialists, Andrews believed the time was ripe for propagandizing the Socialists’ cause but feared organizing blacks would lead to charges of fostering social equality.20
The decade after World War I was marked by unsettling social and economic transformations affecting all strata of Birmingham society. Following two decades of mercurial growth, conservative values clashed with the course of industrialization. Xenophobia, racism, and rigid moralism informed mainstream politics in Birmingham during the 1920s, lasting well into the 1930s. White supremacist groups organized by some of the city's leading citizens hoped to establish order and a degree of cultural homogenization through intimidation and violence. The Ku Klux Klan, in particular, enjoyed huge numerical and financial support during the 1920s, emerging as one of the city's most powerful political forces. Klansmen sought to cleanse their city of Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, and recalcitrant African-Americans who refused to accept “their place” in the hierarchy of race.21 A large number of poor whites were also drawn to this essentially middle-class Protestant movement, but their participation did not improve the squalid poverty many were forced to endure long before the stock market crash of 1929.
Organized labor did not completely buy into the reactionary tendencies of Southern “Jazz Age” politics. Although industrial unionism lay prostrate, craft unions successfully fought for municipal reforms and sustained a dynamic involvement in local politics after World War I. Robert La Follette's Farmer-Labor party, for instance, received nearly 12 percent of the votes in Jefferson County. The Labor Advocate, journal of the Birmingham Trades Council, sustained somewhat of an urban populist tradition. It not only fought rising rents in working-class neighborhoods but supported the single-tax movement and called for municipal ownership of public utilities. A. H. Cather's eclectic Southern Labor Review, though not an official publication of the Birmingham labor movement, combined both radical and conservative tendencies. Cather outrightly attacked capitalism, called for unity of farmers and workers, advocated “cooperationism” under Christian principles, yet was among the most avid supporters of the temperance movement.22 Nonetheless, it is difficult to assess the impact of the labor press during the 1920s when all that remained of the labor movement after 1922 was fragmented craft unionism. Nativism, racism, and the violence which accompanied these attitudes served as an effective bulwark against the resurgence of an already emaciated labor movement.
The war and postwar period altered black lives fundamentally. Northern employment opportunities and Southern injustice compelled a substantial portion of Southern blacks to make their way North, although several thousand rural migrants first tested the urban South. Because the expansion of Birmingham's industrial complex also drew vast numbers of black people from rural Alabama and Georgia into the steel and iron mills, the influx into the already overcrowded and highly segregated metropolis led to a deterioration of living conditions. Moreover, the country's failure to fulfill wartime promises of equality and the renewed militancy of returning war veterans left race relations in Birmingham unusually tense. Compounded by the struggles of black miners during the violent strikes of 1919 and 1920–21, postwar Birmingham could have erupted much like Chicago; indeed, authorities anticipated riots in the “Magic City.”23 Nevertheless, the ways in which postwar black radicalism manifested itself in most of the country were not duplicated in Alabama. Besides emigration schemes that had no apparent connection with the UNIA, Garveyism had few organized followers among black Alabamians. In 1922, a small group of UNIA adherents lived in Neenah and Camden, Alabama, and a handful of North Birmingham residents read the Garveyite tabloid, the Negro World, and contributed funds to the UNIA nationally; but there is no evidence that an active chapter ever existed in Birmingham.24 By 1923, the UNIA had established divisions in Mobile and neighboring Prichard, Alabama, but these chapters were quite small: in 1926, the Prichard Division, Alabama's largest UNIA division, reported only eleven dues-paying members.25
Responding to racial tensions and rising expectations, branches of the NAACP were established in several Alabama cities, including Birmingham, Selma, Uniontown, Blocton, Anniston, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery. These branches, established by black middle-class leaders, intended to redirect black resistance toward more respectable avenues. The Birmingham branch, for instance, grew directly out of the Colored Citizens’ League of Bessemer, an organization of ministers and businessmen founded in 1916. In 1919 the league created a committee on race relations in order to quell potential violence, and out of this postwar committee emerged the Birmingham branch of the NAACP.26
The NAACP in Alabama could not sustain the immediate postwar enthusiasm for black organization. Although the Birmingham chapter claimed nearly a thousand members in 1919, in less than three years its membership dropped to a dismal thirty-six, and in 1923 it reported only fourteen dues-paying members. Five years later, the branch ceased operating altogether. Similarly, the Montgomery branch, founded in 1918, ballooned to six hundred in 1919, only to dwindle to a paltry forty-three dues-paying members a year later. Ku Klux Klan intimidation and other forms of repression partly explain the rapid demise of the NAACP during the 1920s, but racial violence notwithstanding, the association's local leadership ignored the problems black working people faced daily. The Birmingham branch's agenda focused more on the city's black business interests than on racial violence, the denial of civil liberties, and the immediate problems confronting the poor. The black middle class's silence was broken briefly in 1926, however, by a black Birmingham school teacher named Indiana Little. Six years after white women won the right to vote, Little led a predominantly female crowd of one thousand to the steps of Jefferson County courthouse and demanded an immediate end to black disfranchisement. City officials refused to hear her arguments and arrested her for vagrancy.27
In the final analysis, white middle-class reformism was more concerned with working people's moral behavior than their economic well-being, and black middle-class reformism, with its mild pleas for a junior partnership in democracy, was crushed to earth. Shorn of effective organization, workers approached a new decade on the threshold of economic disaster. The urban South began to feel the effects of the Great Depression as early as 1927, two years before the stock market crash. The Birmingham Trades Council reported an unemployment rate of 18 percent in February 1928, and between 1926 and 1929 the Jefferson County Red Cross's relief rolls more than doubled. Huge numbers of black and white workers were laid off in 1929 when TCI shut down two blast furnaces in Bessemer. A year later, coal production had reached its lowest level since 1921, pig iron output had dropped by over 41 percent, and to exacerbate an already desperate situation, Jefferson County experienced a surge of migrants hoping to escape rural poverty. And although poor blacks, particularly recent arrivals from the rural areas, had suffered steady economic deterioration since the postwar recession, whites suddenly found themselves faced with similar circumstances. Most striking is the fact that the percentage of white workers on the county relief rolls jumped from 14.5 percent in 1926 to 32.5 percent in 1930.28
By 1930, black and white working people had very little in the way of organizational power, and in the shadow of a decade of Klan violence and racist backlash within the labor movement, the prospects of interracial unity seemed unrealizable. As the effects of the depression began to take their toll, workers, particularly blacks, had few weapons against plant shutdowns and massive layoffs.