Episode 16: A Tour of Birmingham, AL history with Clay Cornelius - a podcast by Geoff Browning

If you are anything like me, you like to think of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & 60s as a movement that helped our country achieve, maybe not the entire dream that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described, but at least something that was closer to that dream, something that showed we were on the right path toward fulfilling that dream. After all, didn’t the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act get passed and implemented by the government? Haven’t we seen great strides in the implementation of fair housing and lending? Hasn’t segregation been relegated to the dark corners of our past? Unfortunately, this is a mythology that many of us would like to hold on to. The assassination of Dr. King in 1968 should have been enough to disabuse us of that mythology. And yet that mythology persists. In more recent years, it has been perforated and torn time and again by the abuse and murder of Black citizens by police and white supremecists: Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castille, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice and so many more.

These names represent our collective failure to realize King’s dream of justice, equality and equity. Perhaps, if nothing else, these names help those of us in the white community to understand just how frayed and fractured that mythology of progress really is. And there is no place that I can think of that reveals the stark contrast between our hopes and their unfulfilled promise than the city of Birmingham, Alabama. 

 

My guest today is Clay Cornelius, the owner and guide of Red Clay Tours in Birmingham, AL. How do we get to know cities that we visit? How do we get the lay of the land and find out what really happened there? Of course, we can visit monuments and historical sites, but that doesn’t begin to fill in the canvas of a city. Clay is the sort of guide that will fill in that canvas with stories and historical detail that you can’t get anywhere else. And that detail is especially important for a city as famous and infamous as Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham, as we know, played a huge role in the era of the civil rights struggle. It was the place of confrontation with Bull Connor, of tragedy with the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the deaths of four Black children. It was where Dr. King was jailed and wrote one of his most extraordinary writings, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. As I mentioned on a previous episode, I was part of a wonderful civil rights pilgrimage with a group from Westminster Presbyterian Church here in Olympia, WA. And Clay was our guide when we were in Birmingham and as you will hear, he is a fount of knowledge about Birmingham and its history.

Books Mentioned in this episode:
“Carry Me Home” by Diane McWhorter 

 “But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle” by Glenn Eskew

 “A More Beautiful and Terrible History” by Jeanne Theoharris

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