Black and Proud: Excerpt of A Community Memoir From Birmingham

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Race/Ethnicity: Housing and Cities

Abstract

“We’re a Winner” by The Impressions, and James Brown’s iconic song, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” reflected black people’s struggles and their successes, and emboldened them (us) to become proud of our blackness. Art was imitating life and life was imitating art. For Black Birmingham during the mid-1970s, the convergence of a number of events reignited the city’s dormant Civil Rights Movement. While traditional civil rights narratives often focus on national and media garnering events and personalities, Black people at the grassroots level also took matters into their own hands and resisted, rebelled, agitated, and advocated in their own way. As someone who lived in Central City, a public housing community based in an iconic southern city for two-decades (1968-1991) and whose family continued to reside there until 1999 when the housing community was razed, the author provides an “insiders” and “bottom up” perspective on public housing residents’ experiences, focusing primarily on the period between 1968 and 2001. Rather than the “master narratives” of civil rights or historical events, this bottom up and emic approach captures the experiences of everyday people who experienced what it meant to be Black and poor in a southern urban city.
Excerpted from a developing book entitled, Central City’s Blues: A Community Memoir from Birmingham, this chapter draws on historical and sociological scholarship, ethnographic interviews, genealogical research, newspaper articles, oral history, census data, and personal and collective memory in order to provide an emic perspective of the cultural experiences of Black people residing in Central City. The paper profiles how black people living in poverty, whether individually or collectively, supported their families and friends, resisted white violence, protected their dignity, fought against the razing of their community, ignited a season of discontent, and became galvanized to elect the city’s first Black mayor.

Author

• Jerome Ellis Morris, University of Missouri-St. Louis