At Grounds, a queer- and Black-owned neighborhood café, retail, and community space, the collective of owners feature only vendors and creators whose practices are equitable and fair-trade, including local Cala Coffee Roasters and the American zero-waste fashion designer Alabama Chanin. It’s one of the businesses that makes Birmingham feel vital, current, pivotal even. “People look at Alabama as if we’re a radically red state, and that we’re closed-minded and that we have no elements of progress,” said Grounds cofounder Tyler Hatcher. “It’s a [place] with a dark and hard history, but if you come to downtown Birmingham, we are full of energy. I would say we’re the driving force of the good in Alabama, and you get a taste of all that right downtown.”
One afternoon, just on the other side of downtown, I wandered around the remains of Sloss Furnaces, a massive campus of ghostly rust red industrial buildings that house two 400-ton blast furnaces, casting sheds, boilers, and engine rooms that operated from 1882 to 1971, during which time it became one of the largest producers of pig iron in the world. In 1981 Sloss Furnaces was designated a National Historic Landmark, preserved so that guests might experience the history of Birmingham’s industrial largesse with tours and metalworking classes but also so that they might understand the foundation upon which the South’s economic engine was built. At one point over two thirds of Sloss’s entry-level workforce was composed of Black labor, which was socially and hierarchically segregated and, up until 1928, often sourced from nearby prisons. Despite the fact that slavery had been abolished, it was transmuted into a different form, one that America continued to exploit to expand its wealth and industry.
In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. declared the city the most segregated in the United States. Here, in May of 1963, he led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) alongside Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth into one of the most storied nonviolent protests in modern history, which would result in the eventual desegregation of the city’s public institutions. Since those moments Birmingham has occupied a central space in the physical and spiritual lineage of America’s Civil Rights Movement.
