Reflections on My Birmingham Guide, Colleague, and Friend, Bobby Wilson

I first met Bobby Wilson about 30 years ago when I began work on my book on city planning and civil rights in Birmingham. At that time, I was not fully certain what the book’s focus would be — I only knew that I was fascinated by the history of Birmingham and was looking for the opportunity to write a book that built upon my interests. I soon discovered several things about Bobby — he had been working on and thinking about Birmingham for much longer than I had, and that he was very open to having ongoing conversations about the city in which each of us learned from the other — mostly me learning from him. In Birmingham, we both saw the city and its racism as naked and raw, not at all hidden by any subtleties in how Whites governed Blacks in an urban and industrial setting. Oppression was raw and totally unhidden, but at the same time the Black response was bold and demonstrative — a willingness and ability to take grave chances at a micro scale (Fred Shuttlesworth attempting to enroll his kids in an all-white school), and the macro scale (the mass demonstrations that took place in 1963).

I do not remember how or when I first learned about racial zoning in Birmingham, but I know that Bobby had a lot to do with what I learned. In 2019, Bobby recalled seeing the large multi-colored racial zoning map of Birmingham hanging in the Southern History section of the Birmingham Public Library with cross-hatching indicating those neighborhoods to which African Americans were confined by the city’s zoning commission. I too remember seeing that map hanging there in superficially mute testimony to its importance in that city’s history. Soon after arriving at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Bobby and his students reproduced that map and overlaid it on a contemporary map of Birmingham with the city’s interstate highways featured. In this way, readers of his 1977 article in Southeastern Geographer could appreciate, as did I, the dimensions of 1920s’ racial zoning in Birmingham and its impact on the geography of the city 50 years later.

It was in our frequent conversations in the 1980s and 1990s that I came to appreciate the importance of racial zoning in Birmingham and out of those conversations emerged the key themes that are found in my 2005 book on urban planning and civil rights in Birmingham. But in addition to talking about Birmingham, race, and planning, we also worked together to make Birmingham’s past more available to the present. At the time, the records of the Birmingham Housing Authority were not generally available — they were still stored in one of the city’s public housing projects — what was then called Metropolitan Gardens, just east of downtown Birmingham. The records were vital to the history of race, space, and planning in Birmingham because the Housing Authority directed both the public housing and urban renewal programs in the city. Birmingham had an ambitious urban renewal program that included acquiring the city’s largest Black neighborhood south of downtown and converting it to what is today the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The story of that project was fundamental, along with racial zoning, to the story of how the city manipulated space to maintain White supremacy through Black oppression. Bobby and I made an appointment with the director of the Housing Authority and proposed that the records be made available for research. I can’t recall the details of the discussion, but we succeeded in gaining access to the records, thereby giving both us and other scholars access to them.

Bobby and I often spoke about the highly regarded Birmingham Citizen Participation (CP) Program and the role that Black neighborhood associations played in giving Black neighborhoods representation that they lacked prior to the program’s inception in the 1970s. We believed there was more to the story than the simple creation by the City of the CP Program and therefore began to investigate the role played by the Black community’s civic leagues...