BIRMINGHAM: Integration's Hottest Crucible

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. (pop. 360,150), most concentrated heavy-industry city in Deep South, steel mills, iron foundries, etc., set up 1871 in midst of Jones Valley iron ore, coal, limestone; now centers around Tennessee Coal & Iron Division of U.S. Steel Corp. with 25,000 employees, also diversifies into 720 firms, e.g., Hayes Aircraft Corp., which turn out 3,250 products. Ample cheap labor force: rural white in-migrants, Negroes. Negro population: 38.9%, with rising living standards, though only 21.1% of Negro families make upwards of $4,000 a year against 77.2% of whites. Tourist attraction: Vulcan, 55-ft. monument on top of 120-ft. pedestal on Red Mountain to god of metalwork.

VULCAN'S city burned with resentment last week as it waited for U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers to make good on his promise to call the federal grand jury to investigate a possible violation of civil rights by Birmingham's police force. Six weeks ago Birmingham's cops arrested three Negro ministers from Montgomery who were caught talking with local Negro leaders about a possible bus boycott, charged them with vagrancy. Said Birmingham's police chief, Eugene Connor, who refused even to discuss the case with FBI agents: "I haven't got any damn apology to the FBI or anybody else. Maybe I just didn't tell the FBI what Rogers wanted me to tell them. Maybe that's why that jackass is yapping his brains out."

"Bull" Connor is a big voice in Birmingham, where a smelter economy, stamped onto Alabama's rural culture, makes a melting pot of raw men as well as raw metals. Birmingham, settled six years after the Civil War, is no repository of genteel Southern tradition and or moderation, has been keyed to violence, whether labor troubles in the 1930s or desegregation in the 1950s. And Birmingham's white country people, teeming in from piney woods to steel mills, view desegregation less as an abstract threat to be fended off by lawyers than as a specific, bread-and-butter threat to jobs, promotions, family security. Says Bull Connor: "If the North keeps trying to cram this thing down our throats, there's going to be bloodshed."

Blast of Bombs. This sort of prediction, oratorical in many areas of the South, has to be taken with seriousness in Vulcan's city. Reason: in the last decade, by minimal count of Birmingham's white newspapers, there have already been 22 dynamite bombings and four arson burnings at tributable to race tensions. Fountain Heights and North Smithfield, where Negroes, with a go-ahead from federal courts, began moving in nine years ago to break the city's segregated housing patterns, are now known as "Dynamite Hill." The $18,000 home of the Negro woman who had won the lawsuit was torn by a dynamite blast days after the court decision. And many years, many blasts later, the ordeal turned to terror one night last July when three whites drove onto Dynamite Hill, tossed one bomb at a Negro home, lobbed another at the home of a white family that was talking about selling to Negroes. The police eventually got all three; one was convicted last week by a Jefferson County circuit court jury that recommended a ten-year prison sentence, with probation; the other two are out on bail awaiting trial.

Birmingham's best-known Negro leader, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a tough, thick-skinned, egocentric sort, has had his home bombed, his church bombed. Arrests in the case to date: nil. So Shuttlesworth has taken his protection into his own hands, now musters a guard of a dozen or so Negro volunteers at his church and home every night on shifts dusk to dawn.

Silence of Fear. In this situation Birmingham's moderates mostly prefer to keep their thoughts to themselves. Result: a vacuum of leadership. Those businessmen who profess moderation run the risk, if not of dynamite, of economic reprisals such as loss of jobs, promotions, trouble with city licenses, city contracts, harassment on petty auto mobile offenses, tightening up on loans, etc. Mayor James Morgan, popular with businessmen, in office since 1937, is privately telling friends that he intends to resign next year -- "I used to enjoy going to the City Hall. I don't any more." Housewives who profess moderation run the risk of social ostracism. White ministers, asked to help improve communications between the races, reply only with general ities. Says one moderate: "It isn't enough that you are in favor of segregation. You've got to say so out loud or you're suspected of being on the other side."

Such segregationist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens' Councils concentrate unerringly on keeping the moderates silent and leaderless. Method No. 1 : In formers. One of the six men arrested in a Negro castration case turned out to be a Ku Klux Klan captain of intelligence -- and a member of Alabama's interracial Council on Human Relations who had sat quietly through all council meetings. Method No. 2: Quick Mobilization. The Citizens' Councils have a chain-telephone-call system that can blanket the city in twelve hours. Method No. 3: Phone Threats. A Presbyterian minister who wrote to the Birmingham News last September simply to protest Orval Faubus' indictment of Presbyterian ministers as "brainwashed left-wingers" (TIME, Sept. 29) still gets regular, threatening, dead-of-night phone calls. And the thing that makes such psychological warfare real is the threat of dynamite. One Methodist minister, active in the hard-harassed Council on Human Relations, has moved his daughters, aged 3 and 1, into the back bedroom be cause of "fear of bombings."

This is why, in the death of leadership, the silence of fear, the bomb blasts of hatred, Birmingham, Vulcan's crucible, is the toughest city in the South, and likely to get tougher. It is also why the voice of a police chief, Bull Connor, has emerged as the voice of one of the great cities of the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.