Magic in the Magic City
As if by magic, all the ingredients for milling steel could be mined in the hills surrounding what would become Birmingham, Alabama. The town’s pioneers called their new home the Magic City. Magic is emblematic of Birmingham and Alabama more generally—a bit of sleight of hand, some black magic, some white magic.
In 1990, I knew that moving from Los Angeles (New York City before that) to serve Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham would be an adventure. I wasn’t sure that I would like it. The South was a mystery then. Today I still do not fully understand it. Living in America, all Americans share a common national destiny. But the many cultures that surround us can make us feel we are living as foreigners in our own country. I enjoyed my career in the Magic City. Daily living was easy. People were polite. Southern culture was alluringly mysterious.
What distinguished Birmingham from other southern cities is its painful history. A hundred years ago, the Alabama prison system would actually lease prisoners to the factories and landed concerns. Most of those leased convicts were blacks. The Nazis did the same with Jews. Labor on the cheap provides great wealth to the powerful. Sixty years ago, a strict segregation code divided the races. The folks who presented as white generally had a magical life of ease and comfort. People who appeared to be black didn’t enjoy Birmingham’s magic nearly so much.
Before things changed, most white folks did not consider segregation to be immoral. Before 1963, most black folks, even as they complained under their breath, just accepted this injustice as the way of their world. I look back at this era aghast at what the white people were thinking and how they could justify the cruelties and indignities they imposed upon their black neighbors. The distance between the black Titusville and white Mountain Brook was only a matter of a few miles. Not until leaders like Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis rose up to hold a mirror to Alabama and America and demanded that we look at how our civic and religious ideals compared to the realities of our structured civic life, that we began the arduous job of changing our society in an attempt to live up to our ideals.
Community leaders against racial segregation mounted their pulpits to inspire and deliver hope and strength during this time of change. But people who know Birmingham know that it was largely the legions of singing children enduring the barking dogs, the sting of firehoses and police truncheons who were Birmingham’s true heroes as they marched to jail in protest.
For me, living in Birmingham was an evolving history lesson. History is never complete. Living in Birmingham was a study in America at its grittiest and most elevated. Even now, after residing in the political cauldron of Washington, DC, Birmingham taught me more about life—its ugliness and its grandeur, than any American city imaginable. I hope I did some good during my nearly three decades in the city. I am grateful that I was shaped by what I learned. Birmingham was the emblem of both recalcitrant cruelty and courageous redemption.
Early in my Birmingham rabbinate, I was fortunate to get to know Dr. John Porter, the pastor of the 6th Avenue Baptist Church. Rev. Porter served as Dr. Martin Luther King’s associate pastor in Montgomery, Alabama. A masterful preacher, Porter was a leader for the Black community and within the city at large. He served in the Alabama State Legislature while he built his church to national prominence. Rev. Porter died almost a quarter century ago and his faith is commemorated in this statue in Kelly Ingram Park, kneeling with Dr. King and Rev. Shuttlesworth.
In the early 1990’s, I asked Dr. Porter about growing up in segregated Birmingham. His answer surprised me.
“Rabbi, it wasn’t all bad. We had a sense of community, and we were driven to succeed and accomplish. You know, if some kid got out of line, the neighbors had permission to scold the child and tell his parents. We had so many watchful eyes on us all the time. The white people told us that we were inferior. But in our own communities, we didn’t believe them. We were motivated to work harder and achieve more and show the white folks that we were better than them. Our parents, our teachers, our pastors urged us on to accomplish their goals for us. Kids today (he told me this thirty years ago) don’t feel the same responsibility to their community or their parents or their church or their teachers. They can go hog wild and nobody stops to correct them. If I got out of line, my parents would give me a whooping. Segregation was wrong and demeaning, but in some ways, we did better as a community living apart where we could take care of ourselves and where we had high expectations. We did not let them define us.”
Chas v’shalom! Heaven forfend that we should ever return to the segregation and brutality of the Jim Crow South. But during that terrible time, under the surface far away from the hateful glare of the White Citizens Council and Bull Conner, the Black community had strength and dignity that impelled them on to succeed and do well under terrible circumstances.
Rev. Porter could have been describing the Jewish building of our homeland in Zion, only in reverse. One of the features of the Jewish return to Zion was not only to reclaim the land and provide a refuge from those who would oppress us. The Jewish pioneers dreamt of building a Jewish society based on Jewish values and the Jewish way of life.
As Jews returned from exile from every corner of the globe, we melded into a nation guided by Jewish values, the Jewish calendar and the Hebrew language. We had been a minority for so long, diffuse and sprinkled among the nations. We had no idea what it was like to live in the larger world and to live in that world as Jewish citizens of our own country. We had no idea what it was like to live in history with agency over our own fate. Life in Israel isn’t perfect. The challenges Israel faces feels crushing. But Jews, for the first time in two millennia, are able to grapple with the tough stuff, to figure it out and to succeed or fail on our own terms. We do not depend on the whims of the nations of the world to define us.
As I think about it, the Jewish return to Zion mirrors the experience of Birmingham breaking down its walls, only in reverse.
The unintended downside of integration in the South was the loss of a degree of community and purpose that helped afflicted people weather terrible times. Resistance brings people together. In Birmingham, we strove to break down the barriers that divided us. Birmingham is certainly better off now than years ago. But the barriers also served a purpose to forge a community of resolve.
In Israel, Jews strove to create a community out of the shadows, no longer hiding as tolerated guests in the communities where we lived. In our own country with Jerusalem as its beating heart, we learned to be resilient and self-reliant and creative, a radical departure from the generations living as a small minority having to watch over our shoulders to make sure that we Jews were acceptable to others. Our accomplishments, many as they are, are ours. And our foibles and mistakes, as challenging as they are too, are also ours. We own the good with the bad.
Birmingham and Israel are in many ways mirror image opposites. Birmingham: tearing down the walls to be integrated into the greater whole. Israel and the Jewish ingathering: building up a nation for a once weak people, isolated and alone. Both places stay with me, even after I am no longer physically present.
I am blessed that I have lived and loved two places, both very different and both instrumental in righting history’s wrongs.