The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980
- ISBN-10
- 0813935385
- ISBN-13
- 9780813935386
- Category
- Architecture
- Pages
- 352
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013-07-11
- Publisher
- University of Virginia Press
- Author
- Charles E. Connerly
Description
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, 1920–1980 uncovers 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.
Get the book
Similar books
-
CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication
By M. Christine Boyer52 Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake , “ Paradise Regained , ” Architecture 80 ( December 1991 ) : 48–51 ; the quotation is on pages 48–49 .
-
Steel Surfaces: A Guide to Alloys, Finishes, Fabrication, and Maintenance in Architecture and Art
By L. William Zahner... Joe, 211 Kelly, William, 12 Kieran Timberlake, 28, 29 killed steels, 22 Kure Beach (North Carolina), weathering evaluated in, 275 M machining, 225–226, ...
-
Creating Healthy Neighborhoods: Evidence-Based Planning and Design Strategies
By Ann Forsyth, Emily Salomon, Laura SmeadBrender, Jean D., Juliana A. Maantay, and Jayajit Chakraborty. 2011. ... Chris Frost, Katharine Ker, Rebecca Steinbach, Ian Roberts, and Reinhard Wentz.
-
The World by Design: The Story of a Global Architecture Firm
By A. Eugene Kohn, Clifford PearsonIn the Army and the Navy, everyone had both line and staff duties. Line duty was your primary mission—say, as a gunnery officer—which you did while being ...
-
Designing for Autism Spectrum Disorders
By Kristi Gaines, Angela Bourne, Michelle Pearson... The Faison School for Autism is a unique and welcoming learning environment that encompasses the needs of its students, staff, and families alike.
-
Manual: The Architecture of Kieran Timberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake"A must for practitioners and students alike, Manual brings the process of design and details of architecture to life, revealing the beauty of building derived from composition within a tradition of innovative assembly."--BOOK JACKET.
-
KieranTimberlake - Fullness
By KieranTimberlakeProjects in this book include a house made from prefabricated modules in rural California that minimally disturbed its picturesque site; a major renovation of Philadelphia's Dilworth Park in front of City Hall; Cellophane House (TM), a ...
-
refabricating ARCHITECTURE: How Manufacturing Methodologies are Poised to Transform Building Construction
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThis thought-provoking book presents a compelling argument for moving architecture from a part-by-part, linear approach to an integrated one that brings together technology, materials, and production methods.
-
Cellophane House: KieranTimberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake, KieranTimberlakeThrough a series of questions, the book explores several of KieranTimberlake's ongoing research agendas including speed of on-site assembly, design for disassembly, a holistic approach to the life cycle of materials, and the development of ...
-
Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThrough the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling, the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. This is a manual for the componentized prefab.