Have They Been Born Into A New World?

Metro Birmingham Living

Losing it

Weight loss breakthroughs

METRO

A RiveR Runs thRough it

the Cahaba is Birmingham’s lifeblood

DespeRAte MeAsuRes

hostage negotiators At Work

hAve they Been BoRn into A neW WoRLD?

Race and the city fifty years forward. www.b-metro.com SEPT. 2013

$4.99

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

Have they been born into a new world?

Photo by Liesa Cole

102

b-metro.com

Race and the city, fifty years forward.

Fifty years ago, Birmingham was the white-hot crucible of the civil right movements, the place where the hopes and fears of millions seemed to crystalize into a moment in time where the greatest hatred and the greatest heroism became palatable.

It has been a bitter dish to consume for half a century. The racial stigma of those years has informed so much of our city’s politics and life that this seems to be a place, maybe more than anywhere else in America, always defined by race.

Still our problems with race are the same as race problems in every corner of America. Perhaps we just think about it, longer and harder. We seem to always stare at each other across this stark divide of race.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll is very illuminating. According to the ongoing poll, which was started in January 2012 and has surveyed about 11,000 people a month since then, about 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their

own race.

After the Trayvon Martin trial ended, President Obama expressed optimism about the future, saying his daughters’ experiences show younger generations have fewer issues with race.

“It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But...they’re better than we are, they’re better than we were, on these issues,” he said.

Younger American adults appear to confirm this, according to the poll.

About one–third of Americans under

b-metro.com

103

the age of 30 who have a partner or spouse are in a relationship with someone of a different race, compared to one tenth of Americans over 30. And only one in 10 adults under 30 say no one among their families, friends or coworkers is of a different race, less than half the rate for Americans as a whole.

Maybe that is what 50 years forward means for all of us. Time, whether the days in our lives or the relentless movement of the years, heals all wounds.

It seems to have healed Melvin Ware.

I sought out Melvin and his brother James because they were unwilling participants in a second, sometimes forgotten tragedy that played out on that long-ago Sunday in September 1963.

The bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that took the lives of four little girls and shook the city and the nation had occurred at precisely 10:22, that Sunday morning, September 15. Late that same afternoon, James Ware and his brother Virgil were riding a bicycle along Docena Highway to the west of Birmingham. Virgil was perched on the handlebars. The brothers had set out that day to pick up another bicycle from an uncle

because all three, James, then 16, Melvin, 14, and Virgil, 13, were planning to split the duties and income from a Birmingham News paper route.

Two white teenagers, Larry Joe Sims, then 16, and Michael Lee Farley, 16, riding on a red motorbike pulled alongside James and Virgil. Sims had been at a segregationist rally that day. On this fateful highway on this fateful, hate, fear and four teenagers came together in what would be the final violent act of that most violent day. Sims fired two bullets, both striking Virgil Ware and killing him, right there on the side of the road. Sims and Farley were convicted of manslaughter but received suspended sentences and probation.

To this day Melvin Ware believes with all of his heart that second shot was meant for his brother James. For many years, he was bitter about the way his brother died, but then like a deep fog it lifted. Melvin credits his faith.

“I had been sick maybe seven or eight years ago. I came out of the hospital and was home one Sunday evening when the phone rang. My daughter told me it was a long

distance call from Mississippi, Gulf Port. I answered the phone and a man introduced himself as Larry Joe Sims. He was the one who pulled the trigger. He asked me how I was feeling. I told him okay.

“We had done an article for Time magazine and had told the world that we did not hold a grudge. I had given my life to the Lord and we had forgiven them.

“He asked me, ‘would I forgive him.’

He said he had been bothered for years and years. He and I talked for I don’t know how long. Every other year around Thanksgiving, he will call me or I will call him.

“It was really a remarkable experience,” Ware says.

As remarkable, perhaps, as this journey we as a city have been on these past 50 years.

We are in such a better place now, of course, but we still struggle with the past and the future—still hard-headed, perhaps, or still in fear of those whose experience, history, skin color are different from ours. As Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth famously said after being beaten by the Klan in 1957, “The Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”

Babies from previous spread: Vera Cate, daughter of Emily and James Brown; Madison Chibusomma Ifediba, daughter of Olivia and Anthony Ifediba; Zara Kelly, daughter of Katie Ford and Garret Kelly; A'lona Darline Pizarro, daughter of Traycye Pizarro and Benjamin William Sokol, son of Laurel Mills and Arik Sokol.

Melvin Ware contemplates the past.

Photo by Lynsey Weatherspoon

104

b-metro.com

Empowerment Week

Engage, Educate, Empower. September 11-15, 2013 To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement, Birmingham has designated September 1115, 2013 as Empowerment Week. Thousands will be in Birmingham at that time, ready to be engaged, educated and empowered through speeches, panel discussions, entertainment, community service and educational activities. For more information about events, please visit www.50yearsforward.com.

Wednesday, September 11 Service.

More than 5,000 volunteers from the faith-based community, companies, colleges, universities, the city and civic organizations will clean up parks, libraries and neighborhoods in this citywide effort. Join us for an afternoon closing ceremony at Kelly Ingram Park, where Grammy award-winning artists Donnie McClurkin and CeCe Winans, the Rev. Bernice King and a host of others will be featured. Trinity Broadcasting Network will broadcast the event to an international audience of 2 billion.

Thursday, September 12 Reflection.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors will host nationally-known civic and opinion leaders to discuss events surrounding the 1963 movement and the progress that’s been made in the United States. Panel discussions will be held throughout the day at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. A special screening of “The Watsons Go to Birmingham: Road Trip of a Lifetime,’’ will be shown at the Alabama Theatre. “A Walk to Freedom,’’ music and multimedia presentations will be featured in Linn Park.

SeanPavonePhoto/Shutterstock

Friday, September 13 Restoration.

International and national civic and opinion leaders will join Congresswoman Terri A. Sewell at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to address the movement and its effects on international human rights. International mayors will lead an afternoon panel at the church. Several evening arts and cultural events will be held around Uptown, Birmingham’s new downtown entertainment district.

Saturday, September 14 Reconciliation.

Dr. Bill Cosby, filmmaker Spike Lee and other national arts, culture and entertainment figures will host a day filled with conversations and a screening on the movement in Birmingham. An all-day diversity fair, complete with career workshops; cook-

ing demonstrations; a Kids’ Zone; a health fair; an art display; an international street fair; and cultural performances will be held at and around the BJCC. The BBVA Compass Concert for Human Rights, cosponsored by Live Nation, will include an all-star list of musicians and comedians at the BJCC that evening.

Sunday, September 15 Commemoration.

Closing ceremonies for the week will include an afternoon worship service at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. There will also be live theatrical events at three of the city’s major downtown parks: Kelly Ingram Park, Linn Park and Railroad Park. A closing ceremony will be held at Regions Field.

Special presentations that salute Birmingham’s civil rights foot soldiers and the four girls will be made in Kelly Ingram Park.

b-metro.com

105

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

The Questions That Matter

What are we really talking about, when we talk about race?

Written by Lindsey Lowe

When I told a friend I was writing on the “question of race,” he laughed and asked, “What’s the question?” His perspective—the boy is Northern—made me smile first, but then it hit me: Maybe he’s onto something.

I grew up in the South, the real, true Deep South, in a town just outside of Montgomery, Ala., the very city where Rosa Parks stood her ground on a bus and began asking questions. Some things you learn right away: from an early age, I knew I might be challenged at times because I’m a girl, and I knew I never would because I am white.

When I left that town for college at the University of Alabama in 2009, I came to a campus bustling with some 30,000 students.

That August, I stepped into a world that wasn’t just black and white. Chinese, Vietnamese, Latino, French, German, AfricanAmerican, Caucasian: We shared the same sidewalks, classrooms, fear, hope. There were people who looked like me, talked like me, thought like me—and there were people who didn’t. All of these people groups, including Southern white girls, came with their stereotypes, and most of us were trying to break through them.

What privileged me during my time in college wasn’t that I was white. I sat next to Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and country boys who worked math problems faster than me and earned better marks on psychology tests and proposed more interesting points in literature class. What made me privileged during my time in college was that I was in college. I was in college, a place where one is allowed to ask questions.

My generation takes a lot of joshing—if I had a quarter for every article I’ve read 106

b-metro.com

had a friend over, and despite my intentions of going straight to bed, I was drawn into conversation with the two of them. We talked about the things that young girls do, about boyfriends and cheap wine and dreams. We laughed so loudly that the people who lived below banged on the ceiling, and that just made us dissolve again. It never once occurred to me that we were living in the world Martin Luther King Jr. had dreamt of, the one where white girls and black girls sit in a living room and cause a stir in the middle of the night.

I asked them both a lot of questions that night. I asked, “Will you tell me more about that?” I asked, “How did that make you feel?”

I asked, “Will you pass the chocolate?” These are the questions we need to be asking now, questions that take us from different to the same and back again, questions whose answers reveal shared experience and shared dreams and many things we don’t share, too.

My friend did understand, when he asked me what the question of race is, anyway: the questions of race aren’t about race

that begs 20-somethings to put down their iPhones, I’d have at least $5—but we’re getting some things right. I often sat on the steps of Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library on UA’s Quad and watched as the multitudes passed; some of the things I saw, like interracial couples, that would have caused my parents’ and grandparents’ generations to squirm didn’t even give me pause. But we owe them: The answers found by those who have come before us give us a foundation to tread upon as we What privileged me during my time share the sidewalks. “You and in college wasn’t that I was white. I me,” I hope my smile says to sat next to Asian-Americans, Africanpassersby, “We are both worth Americans, and country boys who the same, just because we’re worked math problems faster than breathing.” For everything the me and earned better marks on psypeople before us got wrong, for chology tests and proposed more the black-and-white-tinged hate interesting points in literature class. that most of my generation just What made me privileged during my doesn’t understand, they are time in college was that I was in colstill the ones who stood up and lege. I was in college, a place where began asking questions. one is allowed to ask questions.

And I hope my generation and the ones who are following us are ready to do the same. We have come a at all. The questions are just about people, long way, but let us continue to insist there’s people who live and breathe and trek so far to go. Let us understand that all the through the world on the same sidewalks. In work that’s been done is a challenge to keep the past, it’s been tempting to suggest that striving to be people who hand over the miit’s the way we look that determines who we crophone and say, “You talk. I’m listening.” are, and in some places, this is still the way I’m not asking for a world where we don’t it’s done. But I’ve seen hope in a place with notice race, just one where we don’t let it 30,000 Millennials; I’ve seen them pass one shape our minds. And I’m not suggesting we another on the sidewalk, look up from their shake our fists; I’m just saying we ought to iPhones and smile at whoever is passing by, keep asking questions, the ones that matter regardless of color. I’ve seen them meet one now, day by day, person by person. another in line at Starbucks, and ask the first Not too long ago, I came into my apartquestion: “What’s your name?” ment after working all night. My roommate After all, that’s where it all begins.

Last Chance for Justice

Telling the tale of the search for justice in the church bombing made for quite a personal odyssey.

Written by Teresa Thorne

I never dreamed I would be the first Jewish police officer in Birmingham, Alabama.

Nor did I ever imagine that I would write a book about the inside story of the city’s most heinous criminal case—the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, a bombing that killed four young girls, terribly injured another and changed the world.

As a nine year old growing up in Montgomery, Ala., I watched with confusion the television footage of the street confrontations in Birmingham. At that time, I didn’t know that my family members were supporters of civil rights or that the Klan had burned a cross in my grandparents’ front yard during the 1955 bus boycott. I just knew that treating someone as “less worthy” was wrong.

By a series of coincidences, I found myself a sworn officer in the Birmingham Police Department in 1978, those values remained part of me. I learned to respect the sacrifice and courage of the police officers I worked with. At the same time, I heard stories of how black people had been treated by the “po-lice” in the past, and I began to understand the African–American community’s deep distrust of law enforcement.

During my career in the police department, I worked in patrol and vice-narcotics with Ben Herren. In 1996, Sergeant Herren “disappeared,” partnering with the FBI in a secret investigation on the church bombing case. It was not until many years later that I heard him speak about the five-year investigation and realized his story was a unique and important historical perspective that needed to be preserved.

Over the course of a year– and–a–half, I met with Herren and his FBI partner Bill Fleming to record interviews about their experiences—how they began with little hope of finding the evidence they needed to bring the last suspects to justice; how they spent 18 months just reviewing the massive files from the 1960’s; and how their first interview with Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry broke open the case, but not in the way they expected. Along the way, Herren and Fleming’s initially chilly relationship melded into a solid partnership and friendship. One by one, witnesses stepped forward. They were unlikely heroes who told what they had seen or heard. It was the courage of those people that kept Herren and Fleming going.

On the last day of our interviews, I asked them what we should do with the tapes, thinking we could send them to a library or the Civil Rights Institute. I’ll never forget the moment—they looked at each other and then at me, and Herren said, “We want you to write a book.”

So began another phase of the journey. I talked in depth with Bob Eddy, the investigator who worked the 1977 case that resulted in the conviction of Klansman Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. A private person who never sought the limelight, Eddy gave me his trust and let me dig around in his memories for the answers to some of the remaining mysteries surrounding this case. I also had the privilege of interviewing Bill Baxley, the Alabama attorney general who prosecuted

Chambliss. It was especially gratifying that he remembered my mother and her work for better government in Alabama. Other prosecutors gave me their insights into the case, but primarily this was the investigators’ story, and I kept the focus there.

It took four years to complete my research and write Last Chance for Justice. The process changed me, giving me a deeper understanding of the civil rights struggle that left its scars on the world. The bombing of the church was and always will be a symbol of those struggles and of a horrific criminal act that became a turning point in history.

The following summer, President John F. Kennedy signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public places, voting registration requirements and segregation in schools.

On a personal level, telling the story of finding justice and the dedication of those who sought it, brought me full circle, connecting me to my own family legacy. It is my hope that it might also be a step in the healing. b-metro.com

107

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

four spirits A sculpture is being created in the memory of four little girls, whose deaths changed the course of the struggle for civil rights in Birmingham and beyond.

Written by Tom Gordon

108

b-metro.com

seeks with her sculpture to “translate

language of the body into a three On a late July afternoon, William Johnson thedimensional reality that symbolizes the real essence of movement, exwas about to take a walkabout on some pression and human dignity.” That concept is evident in the of Birmingham’s sacred, historic ground. realized dynamic, bronze figures bearing her and on display throughout He planned to stroll through Kelly Ingram name the world, and close to home. In her nine-foot tall dePark, tour the Birmingham Civil Rights Montgomery, piction of Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is on the grounds of Institute, and take a closer look at the Blount Cultural Park near the Alabama Shakespeare Festival theatre.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

In Knoxville, Tenn., her 34-foot Johnson, a Walker County native, has lived in Wisconsin since the mid-50s, but he kept up with the events that happened here in 1963, now being commemorated in ceremonies, services and symposiums. He knows about the civil rights marches, firehoses and police dogs in Kelly Ingram, and about the bombing at the Sixteenth Street church that took the lives of four girls getting ready for a Sunday service on Sept. 15.

“I (just) thought that that was the most horrible thing in the world, that you could do that, to little kids,” Johnson said. At the same time, Johnson saw the bombing as just another in a series of attempts to frighten and discourage those who were trying to topple the segregated system that earned Birmingham comparisons to Johannesburg, South Africa.

That system, as it existed then, was toppled. Kelly Ingram is dotted with monuments to those who helped make it happen —Martin Luther King Jr., and the youngsters who marched and were jailed by the hundreds—as well as to the fiercely fanged dogs and nozzled fire hoses that were used against them.

While standing in the park’s northwest corner, Johnson could see some of those memorials. But he was surprised to learn he would not find anywhere in the park a memorial to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, the girls who died at the Sixteenth Street church.

This month, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, that void will be filled in a dramatic way. As Johnson was standing in the park, and his son, Earnell Lucas, was

taking iPad photos of the King statue, a Birmingham-born sculptor named Elizabeth MacQueen was 2,300 miles away, in the San Francisco Bay area, working to complete a life-size bronze memorial to the four girls.

When it is installed, the memorial will stand on a corner stretch of sidewalk alongside the park, across from the Civil Rights Institute and diagonally across from the church. It will depict the girls in poses that reflect what MacQueen, who has a muchpraised feel for the human form, learned about their backgrounds and personalities.

It also will have six distinctly crafted, skyward bound doves and a bench.

Much of MacQueen’s spring and summer—about nine weeks—was taken up with sculpting clay models of the girls. By late July, parts of some of the figures were in bronze, awaiting the completion of other parts so they could be welded together. MacQueen had turned her attention on the configuration and posture of the doves, etching details on the bench, and resculpting the face of Denise McNair.

“She was just not good enough so I’m resculpting her…It doesn’t look like her,” MacQueen said during a workday morning at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, Calif., standing near a table where a wax likeness of Denise and her upper torso, blue tissue covering the face, sat amidst wax likenesses of some of the doves. “I had her in clay and I don’t know what I did. I had, like, some belch of a moment…and I just destroyed it, I went past it, trying to overdo, and sometimes you have to say ‘My gosh, that’s great, just stop,’ you know?”

According to her website, MacQueen

high sculpture of three female players, each of them moving with a ball in hand, is one of the centerpieces at the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

“They say MacQueen makes bronze fly,” the sculptor said in describing her technique.

Just how MacQueen took on the memorial to the Sixteenth Street Church girls—and how the memorial project began at all—is the result of a serendipitous coalescence of events that included the reading of a passage in a book, the placing of a phone call, and a friend showing MacQueen an ad in a weekly newspaper.

In the spring of last year, Birmingham attorney Chervis Isom happened to be reading While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement, a 2011 memoir by Carolyn Maull McKinstry. McKinstry had been one of the youngsters who marched in ’63 and writes of getting “a handful of hair torn from my scalp by (Police Commissioner) Bull Connor’s powerful water hoses.”

She also was a member of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. She was there for Youth Sunday service on the morning of Sept. 15, and she writes of picking up the receiver on a ringing telephone and hearing a male voice at the other end of the line utter two words whose significance she did not readily grasp: “Three minutes.”

McKinstry also knew Addie Mae, Carole and Cynthia, all of whom were 14, and Denise, who was 11, and she says Cynthia was her best friend. She writes of speaking to the four girls not long before she felt the “thunderous boom” of the bomb that took their lives, and she recalls her testimony in the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry, one of three b-metro.com

109

men who were prosecuted years after the bombing and sent to prison for their roles in it. The girls are among those to whom her book is dedicated, and on page 204, she quotes an article written in 1982 by future Birmingham School Supt. Geraldine Bell that called on Birmingham and Alabama “to seek some type of appropriate commemoration” for the girls’ senseless deaths.

“Several decades have passed,” McKinstry writes. “We’re still waiting.”

The passage stunned Isom, a Birmingham native who grew up in Norwood and who has written a memoir about coming to terms with his own racial prejudices. Like William Johnson and many others, he had assumed there was a significant, prominent, memorial to the girls. He called McKinstry, whom he did not know, and the conversation led to the formation of a multi-member committee dedicated to getting a memorial in place in Kelly Ingram.

The committee is called Four Spirits, (www.

FourSpirits1963.com) Photo: Beau Gustafson and it draws its name from the title of a 2003 novel on Birmingham’s civil rights era by another city native, Sena Jeter Naslund. Late last year, the committee was seeking a sculptor who could design a memorial, putting out ads in the weekly, Weld for Birmingham. The submission deadline was a few days away when MacQueen, who had stopped in town to see friends and family while on her way to Martha’s Vineyard, was shown the Weld ad by her friend Hank Black.

With help from Black’s wife, Martha, she put a proposal together and turned it in two hours before the deadline.

“We were in a frenzy, you know, to get the proposal together, because she thought it was a great idea,” Martha Black said. “Cause she had been looking for work.”

MacQueen described her proposed memorial as “Innocence at the peak of life.” It was one of six submitted to a three-member jury consisting of McKinstry, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Helen Shores Lee, 110

b-metro.com

the daughter of civil rights attorney Arthur Shores, and local businessman Larry Thornton, who is known for his pencil portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and other notable African Americans.

In part of the narrative which accompanied her rough sketch of the finished sculpture, MacQueen touched on her desire to use her life and art to as a positive counterpoint to the blind prejudice and hatred that she has seen in her home state and beyond.

She was 14 at the time of the bombing, one of four children raised in Mountain Brook, multitalented and restless, pushing against

living, like MacQueen, in quarters at the foundry’s other studio in Richmond, CA. “She’s perfectly suited for this or any kind of sculpture that is serious about an event that has changed history.”

“The concept that Elizabeth is expressing is very important because it (the bombing) was a moment in history when things started to change and to do something like that, you really have to be passionate about that,” Kauinana added. “It can’t be rote …

It has to be a with a lot of feeling, and Elizabeth has that.”

One of MacQueen’s key team members is her longtime friend and fellow sculptor Galo Paz. A native of Ecuador, Paz came to the U.S. about 20 years after Birmingham’s civil rights events.

He helped MacQueen fashion the clay models of the girls and says the finished sculpture will be an important part of the historical memory of Birmingham, Alabama and America.

“Being part of someChervis Isom and Carolyn Maull McKinstry one else’s work is an honor, that’s how I see it, boundaries. Eventually, she pushed her way and also being part of this west, studying art in California, adding to history, of this, I think it’s important that her knowledge and skill in Italy, Belgium everybody needs to be part of it,” Paz said. and other far-off places, compiling mile “We don’t have to forget. People tend to dismarkers of experiences that have led her to appear if you forget them. “ call herself a native of the South, but a citiA nation, Paz added, should remember zen of the world. its pain, “because…it’s what makes us great For much of her time in California, as later.” she has pushed to move her vision from Other people, friends, family and Four concept to a vibrant, human form, about a Spirits Committee members such as Isom dozen people were physically helping here, and McKinstry, have offered long-distance thinking out loud there, in some instances support. While seeking to raise money initially unaware of the four girls’ story, then to cover the project’s estimated price tag getting caught up in it and MacQueen’s com- of $250,000, they also prescribed healing mitment to meeting the September deadline emails when MacQueen was afflicted by low for the memorial’s completion. spirits or a high fever.

“It takes a team, a team,” MacQueen “I believe that she is physically tired, said. Then she added another thought. “If but her spirit is joyous!” McKinstry said. the whole world worked as a team, just think “I believe that Elizabeth has embraced this of what we could accomplish.” project with all that is within her and is at“What she’s doing is incredible,” said tempting to feel what was felt by parents, Kazu Kauinana, a sculptor from Hawaii who other survivors and the city in general. She spent most of the summer working on a has undertaken this project with a sense of project of his own at Artworks Foundry and urgency. She recognizes, as all of us do, that

this sculpture recognizes the ongoing redemptive work of Birmingham, our nation and our world.”

“I feel that she has ‘immersed herself’ into the life of each girl, knows them ‘in spirit’ and is attempting to represent who they were and ‘might have been.’»

MacQueen put it in a shorter, blunter way a day later when talking about her plans for the sculpture’s bronze bench: “They hired me for my creativity, and I’m using it.”

At the time, her creativity was being tested by what she later called a “two hump camel challenge” involving the memorial’s mini-flock of six doves. Fashioned by Artworks Foundry mold room supervisor Gabrielle Curry, the birds represent the souls of the four girls and and those of Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, two youngsters killed in separate racially charged incidents in the hours after the church bombing. MacQueen says the birds also can signify peace or the presence of the holy spirit and the dove motif will be in evidence throughout the finished memorial.

“Each girl has something—a feather, a nembossed dove into clothing, something,” MacQueen said.

But the flock will be most prominently connected to Denise McNair, who will be reaching skyward to catch the birds. Two of the doves will be in her hands, while feathers on her hands and forearms will suggest she is joining them, moving from the physical realm to the spiritual. She also will be wearing a hat that resembles a beret, bearing what MacQueen calls “an adornment” of feathers “with a flying dove in the center.”

As her final weeks of work began, the

challenge for MacQueen was how to place the two doves in McNair’s hands and connect them to the other four in flight. After their casting in bronze, the birds would have to be aligned to allow each of them to be connected by steel rods, and the rods would have to be hidden from view.

On the late July morning when Paz stopped by the foundry, MacQueen enlisted his help in configuring a wax version of one dove with a wax version of one of McNair’s hands.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, going over and over in my mind on this,” MacQueen said as Paz, ponytailed, bearded and impassive, tinkered with one of the doves and one of the hands.

“What is it that you want?” Paz asked.

“Galo, you know, if I knew, I would have done it,” MacQueen said.

“It needs to be morphed. The hand needs to be becoming the feathers, becoming the bird itself.”

Other challenges, anticipated and unexpected, awaited. Gallons of molten bronze had yet to be poured in hollow ceramic molds formed by “wax positives” melted out of the busts, torsos and other parts of the memorial fashioned by MacQueen and her team members. MacQueen said those bronze pieces would have to “cool and harden like lava,” be reworked and welded together, sprayed with chemicals to give them the desired color, then given a protective coating.

After that, the entire sculpture was going in a specially designed protective container and put on a delivery truck.

Inside that container, Denise, the youngest, will be barefooted, reaching and morph-

ing. The helpful Addie Mae, also barefooted, will be kneeling and adjusting a bow at the back of Denise’s dress.

The more reserved Cynthia will be reading a passage from a poem MacQueen thought appropriate for the memorial, “The Stolen Child” by William Butler Yeats: Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Carole, the leader, will be walking away, motioning to her three friends, seemingly telling them they’d better get moving or they’ll be late for the morning service.

When the delivery truck departs, a romantic might be tempted to put another interpretation on what the gesturing Carole is trying to say. Perhaps it will be obvious, given the truck’s destination, but if she is striding toward the cab of the vehicle, she will be beckoning her friends eastward, as if to say, “It’s time to go home.”

Home. To Birmingham.

Tom Gordon visited Elizabeth MacQueen in California in late July.

Editor’s note: The Four Spirits Committee is raising money for the memorial through the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, at http://www.foundationbirmingham. org/4spirits. You can donate online or mail donations to the foundation at 2100 First Avenue North, Suite 700, Birmingham AL 35203-4223.

Be sure to put “Four Spirits” on the check’s memo line. As of Aug. 1, a total of $167,660 had been raised, with an additional $15,000 pledged. b-metro.com

111

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

4 Little Girls

Memorial Fund The 4 Little Girls Memorial Fund, which provides college scholarships in memory of the four young girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963, will host a 50-Year Tribute Event at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on Saturday, September 14, 2013, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Established in 1983 as a 501(c)3 private foundation by AmSouth Bank (now Regions) and The Birmingham News, the 4 Little Girls Memorial Fund strives to honor and preserve the memory of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley whose young lives were extinguished in an instant by the infamous bombing of the church.

Growing out of that tragedy, the 4 Little Girls Memorial Fund has awarded more than $250,000 in scholarships to 69 exceptional students since the first grants were made for the 1984–85 school year. By raising funds and awarding scholarships annu112

b-metro.com

Artwork: Chris Clark

ally, the Fund helps deserving students fulfill their dream of getting a college education— an opportunity swept away from Addie Mae, Denise, Carole and Cynthia in 1963.

The September 14th event is a fundraiser for scholarships with admission by invitation or ticket only, and space is limited. Special guests will include family members of the four little girls, former and current Memorial Fund scholarship recipients, as well as local, state and congressional dignitaries. Attorney Gail Pugh Gratton and Odessa Woolfolk serve as president and vice president of the board, respectively.

According to Ms. Gratton, who is a cousin of the late Carole Robertson, “The heartbreaking deaths of Addie Mae, Denise, Carole and Cynthia fifty years ago became the catalyst for landmark Civil Rights legislation intended to promote justice and equality for all. Over the ensuing years, the Memorial Fund has paid homage to the girls’ ultimate sacrifice by paving new pathways

for opportunity and success through college scholarships.”

Lisa McNair, whose sister Denise perished in the bomb blast, and Greg Hodges, long-time Memorial Fund board member, are serving as co-chairs of the 4 Little Girls Memorial Tribute. The September 14th event is part of the City of Birmingham’s 50 Years Forward celebration.

In commemoration of 50 Years Forward, individual tickets to the 4 Little Girls Memorial Tribute are $50 (of which $40 is tax deductible) and all proceeds will benefit the 4 Little Girls Memorial Fund. Patron tickets, and other sponsorship levels, are also available.

For more information, email Trust Officer Cara Gober at cara.gober@regions. com or call her at (205) 264-7132. Find out more on Facebook at www.facebook. com/4littlegirlsfund.

The Power of One Person

A.G. Gaston built an empire of success.

As Birmingham commemorates the 50th anniversary of the events of 1963, the memoir of the city’s most successful black entrepreneur has been republished for the first time in four decades.

Green Power: The Successful Way of Dr. A.G. Gaston, originally published in 1968, tells the story of Gaston’s success from his first enterprise selling rides on a swing in his grandmother’s backyard, to the founding of the Booker T. Washington Burial Society, to the establishment of a myriad of businesses including a motel, a realty company, a life insurance company and more.

All proceeds from the sale of the 2013 reprint of Green Power will go to the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club, a Birmingham-based nonprofit established in 1966 that provides enrichment programs for at-risk youth. The program is affiliated with Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and it serves more than 1,200 students in the greater Birmingham area each year.

The republishing of A.G. Gaston’s book was initiated by energy company Alabama Power as part of its 2013 Power of Leadership initiative and is supported by Alabama Power and Wells Fargo.

The reprint is available on Amazon.com or directly through the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club. The price is $21.95.

Excerpts from Green Power My slogan became ‹A Part of All You Earn Is Yours to Keep.› And I began to tell my people, ‹Never let the bank down. Go to the bank before the note is due, not after, to make arrangements to renew.› The virtues of frugality and the futility of trying to get rich quick were driven home to me again and again. In my business ventures, the realization of a sincere need for the services offered had proven to be the soundest basis for profit.»

– page 70

I studied, read, listened attentively to the advice and counsel of auditors, lawyers, brokers, bankers and other financial advisors. I learned to quickly digest a profit and loss statement. I realized the great importance of keeping good records and was scrupulous about their detailed accuracy. I saved a part of all I earned, was always watchful for sound investments, insisted on the top-flight performance of my employees, and learned the hard way not to make the same mistake twice.» – page 74

It is not necessary to aim all over the world, but it is necessary, if one wishes to live a good life, to have a few well-defined aims or goals and to work constantly for their attainment. Yes, we can do anything we aim for or want to do. I have done this. You can too!» – page 130

Not a single one of [my businesses] had been started for the purpose of making money. I found a need and filled it. That is the principle on which sound businesses are founded. Filling a need. It had worked for me since my very first business. Find a need and fill it.» – page 144

b-metro.com

113

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

March Memories

They were teenagers when they marched for freedom. Today the memories come flooding back.

Written by Joe O'Donnell Photography by Lynsey Weatherspoon

Janice Kelsey

“I remember a lot about those years. I remember segregation and living in that society. I remember not being able to sit down and eat, or drink from a fountain that was marked for whites only. For a long time it did not bother me. I did not like it, but I did not know there was something I could do to change it. Our first mass meeting in 1963 was when I became aware of the opportunity to make that change. When I went to my first mass meeting I was 15, by the time the demonstrations began I was 16 I was so impressed with the ministers and how articulate they were.

The music, the choir. The people were so responsive. In Phillips High School, they had three rooms of electric typewriters; at Ullman where I attended, we had one. That turned a light on in my mind.

I marched on Thursday, May 2, and I was very excited. My mother cautioned me not to get in any trouble. But my mind was made up when I left the house that morning. We came out of the church singing “We Shall Overcome.” I was stopped by a police officer. I had never been confronted by a white man before, much less a police officer. He said, ‘Get out of this line or you are going to jail.’ Being defiant was difficult for me, but I did not obey.

I was first in the municipal court, and then in county jail. On Friday, when things really heated up, I was transferred to Fair Park. I remained there until my parents got me out on Sunday. The significance rings more and more in my mind now than it did then.

I wanted things to change regarding school and movies and restaurants. Now I realize it is so much deeper than that.

We are still a separate society, but it is based primarily on economics.

Racist acts have not disappeared, but today it is all more subtle.

114

b-metro.com

Clifton Casey

“I had not dwelled on it until recently.

The main reason I did not want to bring it up was that my mom told me told me not to go down there. It was horrible. I spent nine days in jail, and just to put emphasis on it, I have not been back in jail for anything since.

I was 17.

“Jail was the most traumatic thing I had experienced. There was people who left home with the intent of going to jail, had their toothbrush and toothpaste in their

pocket. That was not me. I got caught up in the emotion of everyone leaving school and going downtown to protest. It did not occur to me that I could go to jail.

“My mother had gone to Ohio to close on a house so we could move to Cincinnati that summer. Her instructions were for us to not get involved in anything because she would not be here to help us out. She was watching television up in Cincinnati and she saw either me or my brother being shoved in a paddy wagon. She took the next train back to Birmingham.

“She was in Cincinnati because it was getting so bad here. It just was not safe in Birmingham for a black person at that time. She was concerned about our safety. We moved in June but I returned to Birmingham in the fall to finish school and live with a relative.”

Following graduation from high school, Clifton Casey joined the military, then worked for 17 years for the railroad. After that, he went back to school and received an accounting degree. He became an international tax accountant working in Europe, primarily Berlin, for 13 years. When he retired, he came back home to Birmingham.

Historic images courtesy of The Civil Rights Institute

b-metro.com

115

50

FIFTY YEARS FORWARD 

Open Adoptions

Beyond black and white in adopted families.

Written by Darlene Robinson Millender Photography by Beau Gustafson

J

ennifer Burczyk-Brown and her husband, Todd Brown, were living and working in Baton Rouge, La., when they got the call. An adoption agency representative told them about a newborn who was set to be adopted but the family no longer wanted him.

“Well, his birth mother was white and she’d said the father was also white, but a nurse noticed that his ears [and other body parts] were becoming darker. That family said, ‘No, thank you.’ And since we were seeking a child, regardless of color, we were delighted to get the call,” said Burczyk-Brown. They brought Trevor, the biracial newborn, home at six days old.

A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis set the Browns on the path toward adoption. Burczyk-Brown had been diagnosed with MS before she and Todd married. “At first, we didn’t know what impact that would have on our fertility or whether that would change anything about how our decision to parent 116

b-metro.com

would look. But after we were married for three years, we began to think we were reasonably settled and had a feel for where my husband’s career path was going to go. It was time to start talking about kids. And I started reading about pregnancy risks for women with MS. I was warned that there’s a fairly high likelihood that you could have an exacerbation of your disease almost immediately post-partum. And I thought, oh my gosh, that’s the last time you don’t want to be 100 percent. You need to have all your wits about you, have all your faculties, have all your physical ability at that time. The baby needs so much,” she said.

In addition to nine-year-old Trevor, the Browns have adopted two more children: eight year-old Sophia and seven-year-old Eryk. Sophia’s and Eryk’s biological parents are African–American.

The Browns now live in Chelsea. Even though they are raising their children near

the city that was once known as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,” discussions of race and Birmingham’s, and the country’s, past treatment of blacks are rare. “Right now, we are more concerned that the children know that they are loved and appreciated,” says Burczyk-Brown, a data analyst for UAB. “I admit I want to shield them. That may be a Pollyanna approach, but that’s where we are right now.” But Burczyk-Brown also says they will have the hard conversations when necessary.

“Our daughter, Sophia, recently visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute with her summer camp. She came home and asked if I knew about the four little black girls who’d died at church. I told her yes and tried to explain why some people do unspeakable things.”

When Lorie Corley and her husband, Kyle, received the call about their son, Cooper, their foremost thought was how soon

Lorie and Kyle Corley with son Cooper and daughter Bailey.

b-metro.com

117

Jennifer Burczyk-Brown and husband, Todd Brown with children Trevor, Sophia and Eryk.

they could pick up their son from the agency.

“I didn’t ask what color, what gender or how old. We didn’t care. We were open,” says Corley. Cooper, who is biracial and now 15 months old, has a big sister named Bailey, who is Caucasian. Before the Corleys adopted Bailey, they experienced the heartbreak of a failed adoption attempt. “We were so excited. We made sure the birth mother had a place to live. We paid her expenses. Then she decided to keep the baby and we were devastated,” says Corley, who had an emergency hysterectomy soon after her marriage to Kyle.

After the failed attempt, Corley says her husband became a bit hesitant about undergoing the process again, but her desire to become a mother was still strong. Months later in 2008 they were able to adopt Bailey as a newborn. Cooper was adopted last year.

Like the Browns, the Corleys, who live in Vestavia Hills, are more interested in raising 118

b-metro.com

their young children in a loving environment than introducing them to the complexities of race in America. “Bailey doesn’t see color.

She doesn’t see the difference, so why point it out. The only comment she’d made was when we were coming back from the beach recently. She said, ‘How come I’m losing my tan and Cooper’s not.’ It’s amazing how kids don’t see the difference. But that’s not to say as the children age, things will not become more challenging,” says Corley, a clinical researcher. “If we raise our kids to be loved, that will help them overcome some of the challenges. We will take it one day at a time.”

Both Burczyk–Brown and Corley say that celebrities like Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock have raised awareness of transracial adoptions, albeit global ones.

While each of Burczyk-Brown’s and Corley’s children was adopted domestically, both mothers are asked frequently where their

children come from. “We answer with a real Southern drawl, “Huntsville,” says Corley of Cooper’s birth city. “A lot of people don’t realize how many kids here need homes.”

“There are people who feel they are called to adopt someone from another country. That wasn’t the call we got,” says Burczyk-Brown.

Both mothers also agree on the importance of having a strong, diverse, support system. They both have consulted with African American friends on how to best care for African-American hair and about other concerns. And both say they are not afraid to ask for guidance in the future. “Every situation is different. If something comes up that I don’t have an answer to, then I’ll reach out,” says Corley.

“I’m sure they’ll be more questions.

We’ll navigate them the best way we can,” says Burczyk-Brown.

50

fifty years forward the Power of a Diverse City

b-metro.com

119

50 years forward

SPECIAL PROMOTION

A Birmingham Renaissance Fifty Years in the Making.

At Regions, we are proud to commemorate “50 Years Forward,” by honoring those who put their lives and their beliefs on the line in 1963. In 2013, Birmingham is once again an international focal point as city leaders, corporate partners and community leaders recognize the city’s role as a catalyst for change in the long struggle for civil rights.

Headquartered in Birmingham, the state of Alabama’s only Fortune 500 company, Regions has been part of the fabric of the neighborhood for more than 140 years. As a corporate citizen, we are proud of the role we’ve played, knowing that a successful, vibrant Birmingham is critical to the future of the state. Yet, as historic as the last 50 years have been, the next 50 years moving forward offer unprecedented potential.

Birmingham, dubbed the “Magic City” for its growth a century ago, is on the move again. Signs are all around us.

Railroad Park and the state-of-the-art Regions Field provide a relaxing, exciting oasis in the middle of an urban setting. Take a yoga class or a stress-clearing jog through the 19-acre green space of Railroad Park, affectionately known as Birmingham’s Living Room. Or buy a hot dog and your favorite libation and lean back for nine innings of baseball at Regions Field, where the major league stars of tomorrow hone their craft. The view, from the majestic ridge of Red Mountain to sweeping skyscrapers including the Regions Center, is breathtaking. You won’t lack for company – the Birmingham Barons are breaking turnstile records for attendance. And that doesn’t include the one spectator who catches every game from his perch above, Vulcan.

The world’s largest cast iron statue, Vulcan served for a century as the constant reminder of Birmingham’s meteoric rise. Now he welcomes a bright future, one coming at the speed of light.

120

b-metro.com

Forbes recently identified Birmingham one of the nation’s best emerging downtowns, due to the influx of residents moving back to the city center. National Geographic and Livability.com lauded the city as a destination location. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute reminds us not only about where we’ve been but where we are going.

The Associated Press proclaimed a renaissance underway in a June story that ran in major newspapers from San Francisco to New York: “Once Dying, Birmingham is Suddenly Hot.” Birmingham’s culinary scene is respected internationally, thanks to prestigious honors from the James Beard Foundation Restaurant and Chef Awards to the television shows that regularly make the pilgrimage here.

With a Metro population of 1.2 million, the Birmingham region takes pride in education, boasting some of the nation’s best public schools, colleges and universities.

From a metal and steel youth to a medical and technological maturity, Birmingham’s current boom is tied to medicine and research. Children’s of Alabama, the main benefactor of the annual Regions Tradition golf tournament, is ranked one of the nation’s premier pediatric hospitals. UAB Hospital is a Level I trauma center adjacent to one of the most respected medical schools anywhere. Birmingham’s reputation for sports medicine makes it the go-to destination for elite professional athletes across the globe.

At Regions, we commemorate our past and are excited about a vibrant future. What forward looks like to us is a continued economic development of capital that grows business and creates jobs throughout the city and state, providing better opportunities for everyone.

What ForWard Looks Like The pioneers of civil rights changed us. Today, we embrace our differences more than ever. Nowhere is that more apparent than right here in Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement. At Regions, we’re proud to honor those who stood up for equality half a century ago, as well as those committed to diversity and inclusion today.

Visit regions.com/socialresponsibility Š 2013 Regions Bank.

50 years forward

SPECIAL PROMOTION

The Power of Leadership in the Movement that changed the world At its heart, the Civil Rights Movement was about equality. It was a fight for equal rights and equal opportunity for all people.

That struggle was not merely a series of events at a park, or a bridge, or a church. Instead, this movement toward equality happened over time as leaders of all kinds pushed our city forward.

The often-heralded leaders of the Civil Rights Movement are the brave and memorable men and women who stood on the front lines of conflict. But, there were many more silent leaders without whom progress in the African-American community would have been left wanting.

As the city of Birmingham commemorates 50 years since the activities of 1963, Alabama Power has focused its efforts on celebrating the lives and legacies of a different sort of leader – leaders in Birmingham’s black business community who blazed the trail for economic progress.

“We wanted to celebrate some of the unheralded leaders of the movement: pioneers of business,” said John Hudson, vice president of Public Relations and Charitable Giving for Alabama Power. “Specifically, our focus has been on preserving the legacies of entrepreneurs A.G. Gaston and Dr. Jesse J. Lewis, Sr., both of whom had enormous influence in the black community in the years during and following the movement. They were not activists, but they were living examples of success and progress.”

As part of the company’s Power of Leadership initiative, Alabama Power partnered with the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club to republish “Green Power: The Successful Way of Dr. A.G. Gaston,” which details in his own words how this entrepreneur built several businesses despite the challenges of time and place.

“Green Power,” originally published in 1968, tells the story of Gaston’s success from his first enterprise selling rides on a swing in his grandmother’s backyard, to the founding of the Booker T. Washington Burial Society, to the establishment of a myriad of businesses including a motel, a realty company, a life insurance company and more. The reprint of the book, the first in four decades, is available on Amazon.

While Gaston did not join marches and protests during the Civil Rights Movement, he was known for providing funding for civil rights lawsuits and often allowed his businesses to be used for meetings. Perhaps more importantly, he opened the first black-owned financial institution in Birmingham so that AfricanAmericans could more easily obtain loans, and he opened a motel to help serve blacks traveling through the South.

“Our hope is that A.G. Gaston’s book will provide inspiration to a new generation of business leaders,” Hudson said.

During Birmingham’s Empowerment Week later this month, Alabama Power will honor the legacy of Dr. Jesse J. Lewis, Sr., who continues to be a business leader in the Birmingham community.

Like A.G. Gaston, Dr. Lewis had his first entrepreneurial 122

b-metro.com

A.G. Gaston

Dr. Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.

adventure at a young age. As a teenager, he started a business delivering packages for a local drugstore on his bicycle. Years later, Dr. Lewis received photography training during a stint in the military. This training set the foundation for his career in the field of journalism.

He began truly immersing himself in the craft as a student reporter for the Milean, Miles College’s campus newspaper.

Lewis then worked as a photographer for area African-American newspapers the Birmingham World and the Birmingham Mirror.

These newspapers covered the Civil Rights Movement exclusively. However, he felt there was more to tell about Birmingham’s black community. Then The Birmingham Times, as we know it, was born.

Lewis said when he launched The Birmingham Times his goal was to capture the bigger picture of black life in Birmingham’s thriving minority community, and that approach meant he was able to sell advertising to any business hoping to reach black customers. At the same time, the publication’s content satisfied the black community’s thirst for positive news and information about them, and specifically for them, in their own words.

Lewis first made plans to launch the African-American newspaper The Birmingham Times in 1963 and began circulating the paper in 1964. Dr. Lewis has had many businesses and careers. But 50 years later, the newspaper continues to circulate, having never missed an issue.

“Gaston’s famous saying was ‘Find a need and fill it,’ and that’s exactly what Dr. Lewis did,” said Bobbie Knight, vice president of Birmingham Division for Alabama Power. “Like Gaston, Dr. Lewis has been a powerhouse in the black business community for decades, and we want to celebrate his life and work this year.”

50 years forward

SPECIAL PROMOTION

Birmingham: Soaring Former presidents George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton all have airports named for them. So do former cabinet secretaries John Foster Dulles and Norman Y. Mineta, and celebrities as varied as John Wayne, Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers and Arnold Palmer.

But Birmingham’s airport is named after a simple preacher, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, an Rev. Shuttlesworth in the 1960s icon of the American Civil Rights Movement and a man whose courage, grace, and drive changed a city and then a nation.

This heroic man was born Freddie Lee Robinson on March 18, 1922, near Montgomery, Alabama. When Rev. Shuttlesworth’s family moved to Birmingham in the mid-1920s, he arrived in the place with which he would forever be associated.

Even today when people from around the world arrive at the Birmingham Shuttlesworth International Airport, they can be reminded of what one man did for freedom.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Rev. Shuttlesworth survived the bombing of his home, a vicious beating administered by Ku Klux Klan members when he tried to enroll his daughter in a whites-only high school, and fought back repeated threats to his life and his family in order to achieve civil and human rights for African-American citizens.

His life story was chronicled in a book entitled, “A Fire You Can’t Put Out,” a title that captures the drive and perseverance of this famous warrior for justice. The airplanes that soar off into the sky each day from Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport call to mind the way Rev. Shuttlesworth, through his indomitable will, caused the human spirit to soar during America’s struggle for civil and human rights.

In the spirit of Rev. Shuttlesworth and guided by the principle that the community matters, the Birmingham Airport Authority takes pride in working with neighborhood schools, families and businesses to achieve a safer and more prosperous community in which to live, work and profit. It is in that spirit that the authority partners with its fellow community members to promote and provide programs for enhanced educational and growth opportunities for the young people in our communities.

Birmingham Airport Authority’s Annual Golf for Schools has been a huge success raising money for area youth educational enrichment, and the Authority continues to partner with neighbor schools to help them uncover innovative ways of identifying 124

b-metro.com

greater resources. The Authority has partnered in the past with Curry and Gibson Elementary and more recently with Robinson Elementary. The Birmingham Airport Authority also provides summer employment opportunities for high school juniors and seniors that reside in Airport neighboring communities.

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport is Alabama’s largest airport serving the Greater Birmingham area and Shuttlesworth and Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa surrounding Southeastern cities.

Offering more than 100 daily flights to over 25 cities throughout the United States, Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) presently ranks in the country’s top 75 airports in terms of passengers served annually. BHM served over 2.8 million passengers in 2012.

The Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) is a vital and growing economic catalyst. The airport provides commercial air operations and facilitates general aviation services for businesses and individuals across the state.

The direct, indirect and induced spending that results from operations at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport combine to form a total of $567 million. In addition, research shows other local aviation-related expenditures deposited $426 million into the region’s economy.

When combined, the spending-generated and expenditurereported totals amount to nearly $1 billion in annual economic impact Birmingham Shuttlesworth International Airport has on the economy of the Birmingham Region. The airport provides 16,000 direct and indirect jobs and more than $444 million of additional payroll to the Birmingham MSA. The $201.6 million Terminal Modernization Project underway at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) is the most significant modernization since the airport was built in 1931. It is a state of the art effort, improving safety and efficiency at the airport and modernizing the appearance and amenities. The terminal modernization is part of a threeprong approach that will make the airport a strong catalyst for economic growth and open up new opportunities for the entire Birmingham region.

The terminal modernization is the third part of a multi-year revamp of the airport.

The cargo area was improved to add more capacity. In 2007, the primary runway was extended to 12,000 feet to handle larger planes.