Birmingham Moving Quotes

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there!

The führer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.

They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get into some terrible trouble before he is seen again, and before anyone can help him. It is the spirit of the people, the eyes which endlessly watch them, eyes which never meet their eyes. Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner. They spend more of themselves, each day, than they can possibly afford, they are living beyond their means; they drop into bed each evening, exhausted, into an exhausting sleep. And no one can help them. The people who live here know how to do it - so it seems, anyway - but they cannot teach the secret. The secret can be learned only by watching, by emulating the models, by dangerous trial and possibly mortal error.

The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years. While Negro initiative, courage and imagination precipitated the Birmingham and Selma confrontations and revealed the harrowing injustice of segregated life, the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to move Congress and the administration without the weight of the aroused conscience of white America. In the period ahead Negroes will continue to need this support. Ten percent of the population cannot by tensions alone induce 90 percent to change a way of life.

The next morning there was time before the funeral to wander around my sister’s neighborhood, the same neighborhood we moved to when I was in eighth grade and she was in second, the same neighborhood where our father had lived as an even younger child. I found the spot at the end of the road where rusted tracks emerged from the weeds, the exact place where my father had waited for his own father to step off the trolley after work. I stopped at the bridge over the creek where my eighth-grade boyfriend first held my hand. I named to myself all the neighbors who had once lived on our street, every one of them gone now, as a scent drifted on the air that I couldn’t place. Then, finally: gardenia! It blooms in profusion in Birmingham but not at all in Nashville, where I have lived for decades.

On my next weekend without the kids I went to Nashville to visit her. We had a great weekend. On Monday morning she kissed me goodbye and left for work. I would drive home while she was at work. Only I didn’t go straight home. I went and paid her recruiting officer a little visit. I walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt so my injuries were fully visible. The two recruiters couldn’t hide the surprise on their faces. I clearly looked like an injured veteran. Not their typical visitor. “I’m here about Jamie Boyd,” I said. One of the recruiters stood up and said, “Yes, I’m working with Jamie Boyd. How can I help you?” I walked to the center of the room between him and the female recruiter who was still seated at her desk and said, “Jamie Boyd is not going to be active duty. She is not going to be a truck driver. She wants to change her MOS and you’re not going to treat her like some high school student. She has a degree. She is a young professional and you will treat her as such.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ll do better. I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You convinced her she can’t change anything. That’s a lie. It’s paperwork. Make it happen.” “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” That afternoon Jamie had an appointment at the recruitment center anyway for more paperwork. Afterward, she called me, and as soon as I answered, without even a hello, she said, “What have you done?” “How were they acting?” I asked, sounding really pleased with myself. “Like I can have whatever I want,” she answered. “You’re welcome. Find a better job.” She wasn’t mad about it. She just laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” “I will always protect you. You were getting screwed over. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about it, but you wouldn’t have let me go if I had told you ahead of time.” “You’re right, but I’m glad you did.” Jamie ended up choosing MP, military police, as her MOS because they offered her a huge signing bonus. We made our reunion official and she quit her job in Nashville to move back to Birmingham. She had a while before basic training, so she moved back in with me. We were both very happy, and as it turned out, some very big changes were about to happen beyond basic training.

We didn’t move up here because it was fashionable because, goodness me, it wasn’t fashionable. It was too special. Fashionable to me implies conformity, and the Dakota didn’t conform to anything in the city at the time.

Gilly had decided that this was a dream. The Witches' Carnival didn't exist in the real world. And the Gilly who existed in the real world was not brave or cunning enough to have done everything that she'd done in the past day. The real Gilly was not beautiful enough to be lying in bed beside a woman like Maggie. Gilly had decided this was a dream, and also that she'd let that real Gilly, deep asleep somewhere in the outskirts of Birmingham, wither away and never wake up. Already, Gilly could see herself arcing across the earth bright as a comet, moving too fast for the Ashleys and Tracyes, the thousand tiny insults and humiliations of the waking world, to ever catch.

Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.

Old Guard” names of German Jewish finance—with the exception of the Guggenheims—had migrated to New York City. Familiar on the streets of downtown Manhattan were the two Lehman brothers, prospering as cotton brokers. Marcus Goldman, with bits of commercial paper filling out the lining of his tall silk hat, was still a one-man operation. Two Strauses, Lazarus and son Isidor, who, like the Seligmans and Lehmans, had been peddlers and small shopowners in the prewar South, had moved to New

I believe more than ever before in the power of nonviolent resistance. It has a moral aspect tied to it. It makes it possible for the individual to secure moral ends through moral means[...] While addressing an audience in Birmingham, a man mounted the stage and suddenly punched King in the face, while a shocked audience watched in amazement as King made no move to strike back or turn away. Instead he looked at his assailant and spoke calmly to him. Within seconds, several people pulled the attacker away. While others led the crowd in song, King and his colleagues spoke with the assailant at the rear of the stage. Then King returned to the podium to tell the audience that the man was twenty-four-year-old Roy James, a member of the Nazi Party from Arlington, Viriginia. King refused to press charges.

One is not startled on the Main Line to hear a businessman conclude a deal with a cheerful “All righty-roo!” Or to depart from a party with a bright “Nightie-noodles!” to his host and hostess. As for the accent, Barbara Best calls it “Philadelphia paralysis,” or “Main Line lockjaw,” pointing out that it is not unlike “Massachusetts malocclusion.” Mrs. Best recalls that when she first moved to the area a native said to her, “My dear, you have the most beautiful speaking voice. I can understand every word you say!

Walker discussed what he and so many of those present had just endured: the SCLC’s sustained civil rights campaign in Albany, Georgia, the year prior, in 1962. It had failed completely. It had failed for numerous reasons, Walker said, but one of them was that the nonviolence the SCLC favored and had learned from Gandhi’s success in India—assembling marchers and having them sit at the seat of white power, and then not move—needed to be met by violent white authority to work.

They did not chain or hogtie him in any way, which was a wonder, until Smith attended to the faces of everybody they passed. For in truth, he did not really see their faces. The great mass of people turned or dropped their heads and averted their gaze, and the three Gestapo men moved through the crowds thronging the main concourse of Haus Vaterland as though their long, black leather coats made them invisible… and Smith along with them. He had been some hours in the peculiar environs of the Wild West Bar, and during that time it appeared as though all of Berlin had gussied themselves up to take in the night airs. Many thousands of them strolled to and from their dinners, or shows, or to the innumerable nightclubs such as Smith had just left. The summer night, now late, had come upon the city without any appreciable glooming. Indeed, Haus Vaterland

objects. Added to the trauma of moving

In 1948 at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he waved a Confederate battle flag as he led the so-called Dixiecrat delegation in a walkout to protest the party’s civil rights platform. Such moves boosted Connor’s popularity among white voters—the only ones who mattered to him in Birmingham.