A couple weeks ago I received a copy* of Historic Photos of Birmingham, with text and captions by James L. Baggett. Baggett is Head of the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library, Archivist for the City of Birmingham, and a fomer Chair of the Jefferson County Historical Commission. And his passion for the Magic City shows on every page. The book is organized chronologically rather than thematically, giving the reading of it a sense of growth and progress. This nontraditional approach gives the book what almost amounts to a sense of velocity– Baggett takes you flying through history, showing you the past lives of so many of the places you’re familiar with today.
The first photo in the book proper is of First Avenue North in the 1890s. For a reader like me, it’s a powerful view of a road I drive on every day. The photo is completely unfamiliar except for a few of the stacks at a foundry in the distance. The earliest photos of Birmingham, from the end of Reconstruction, show exactly how it became known as The Magic City– from choleric swamp to urban and industrial center in just a few years. The earliest photos in the book are dim and grainy, as would be expected, and what’s striking about them is not the people, with their different modes of clothing and posing, but the architecture of the city, and how not different it is. You can see a clear trend in the photos showing the growth of downtown Birmingham, of maintaining a certain Victorian ideal and then an Art Deco trend in architecture, which exists to some extent to this day.
Moving in the early 20th century, Baggett threads the books with pictures of people and recreation (imagine the roaring 20s in scenic East Lake!), and also with the growth of some of the larger landmark buildings in the city: the City Federal Building, the Tutweiler, St, Paul’s Catholic Church, and the Alabama Power Building, complete with statue of Electra. There’s also a two page spread photograph of the Industrial High School band from the early 1920s, just before Industrial became Parker. All the musicians are young African-American men, and it’s one of the first photos exclusively of black people, presaging and echoing the long division between races in Birmingham.
Moving through World War II and into the mid-century, there are yet more photos of a city divided. Construction continued, as shown in many, many photographs and people seemed generally prosperous– many photos of people at work, or near their business, or in any of the worker towns that sprung up around foundries. There’s one fantastic photo of Loveman’s Department Store lit up for Christmas and it’s amazing to study its windows and see retail displays, not hordes of children learning and playing in what’s now McWane Science Center. But there’s just a single photo of a civil rights protester, outside the same building, holding a sign that says, “We’ll buy when Loveman’s hires negro clerks. Jim Crow Must Go.” Baggett’s caption, a brief acknowledgement of “injustices of racial segregation” seems an inadequate reference to a movement galvanized in Birmingham, and greater Alabama, and had such a broad effect on the rest of the coutry. The final photos are of a familiar skyline– all BellSouth and bank buildings as seen from atop Red Mountain.
The book itself is about half the size of a regular coffee table book– excellent for use in an office or lounge area. It invites readers to browse the book, flipping back and forth to see the city grow and shrink by turn, and catch glimpses of how things used to be. I’m not a Birmingham native, but I do love living here, despite its somewhat checkered history and continued civic problems, and studying this book has given me an even better idea of where my city came from. I imagine this feeling would be intensified for those people who do consider Birmingham their hometown. An excellent gift for a hard-to-buy-for historian on your Christmas list, but a great book to have, regardless.
*I accepted a gratis copy for review purposes from the publishers, Turner Publishing Company, in Nashville, Tennessee. Historic Photos of Birmingham is an installment in their Historic Photos series.