Tune in as we interview Dr. Glenn Eskew, author of the book But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle.

Ranger: Welcome to We Will Rise: National Parks and Civil Rights. Close your eyes and imagine a National Park. Are you picturing waterfalls and mountains, or do you think of Dr. King's childhood home, Japanese internment camps, or a school that became a battleground for racial integration? National Parks aren't just wilderness. They are spaces of remembrance founded to preserve the stories of who we are and how we came to be. National parks inspire us to do better, be better. To climb mountains both physical and figurative. Join park rangers, researchers, authors and activists as we discuss what liberty and justice for all means on our public lands. The following episode features an interview with Dr. Glenn Eskew, author of the book, But for Birmingham. The first 30 minutes are detailed synopsis of the book. If you haven't read it, this is a great opportunity for a deep dive. If you have read it or just want to listen to the author interview, skip to minute 30.

Ranger Kat: So I'm so thrilled to be speaking with you about your book, But for Birmingham: the Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. And I have to say just a couple of days ago, an uncle of mine teaches African American history at a college in Michigan, and he and his wife sent us a bunch of books about African American history in the region. And one of the books he sent us was your book wonderful?

Dr. Eskew: Wonderful!

Ranger Kat: Yeah. And I haven't spoken to him about it yet, but I can't wait to message him and say, guess who I spoke to today? Your book has traveled far and wide and is one of the books that really, I think, does an incredible job of explaining the movement in Birmingham, a really overall incredible, incredible summary, but also really gets into the details. And I've had the good fortune of reading it. But I'm wondering for those who haven't read it, if you could give us a couple of minutes of a synopsis of the book?

Dr. Eskew: Sure. And what I would do and sketching out the story is begin by setting the stage of looking at Birmingham. Most people are aware that it's a city rooted in industry, that was founded after the Civil War. So it has no Antebellum past, no official history with quote the enslavement of people, and was rather born of the brash New South, with foreign capital coming in to invest and extract the mineral wealth from the region. And that aspect of that, that story is accurate up through really the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. And so it helps to frame the story within the context of the iron and steel industry. Because the iron and steel industry, while it was not premised in enslavement, it used a racially divisive bifurcated wage to exploit labor for the benefit of the industrialists. White people ended up earning about twice as much as Black people. That goes back to after the war, all the way up to the civil rights era. And so if you begin to comprehend that the story is rooted in economic exploitation that used race to divide people and to take advantage of them economically, then you can see how folks got so vested in maintaining segregation. White people who saw it is their only way to get an advantage, and African Americans as the barrier that's keeping them from gaining access. And it's within that framework that we find the civil rights struggle itself. Now the movement comes about in the post-World War II era. It's led by, the modern civil rights movement is led by ministers, people in churches who are, by virtue of that, independent of white authorities and white business owners. So they're able to speak with that kind of independent voice. And these Church leaders were articulating the goals and aspirations of their members, members who wanted in the post-World War II period to gain access to the system, to get the better things in America that were being mass produced, now that the country had defeated the Nazis and Japan and created American hegemony. And to get that, they recognize the need for education, the need to get into schools that were adequately supported. And the civil rights movement then clearly reflects this expression of desire to gain access to the system across the board, both economically and politically and socially, all lumped into the notion of integration. In Birmingham, that movement, which was really kind of a new reflection, was symbolized by the work of the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a group formed in 1956 that brought together the activist members of the city's NAACP chapter that had really been kind of moribund. Shuttlesworth, when he moved to the city, he was a native of the city, well, he had grown up in Birmingham, he had left, but came back after the Second World War when he was brought in as pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Collegeville, which was a prominent Black church in Birmingham. And as pastor of that congregation, he became active in the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as its membership chairman, working to recruit people into the organization. But the state of Alabama in 1956 hands down a ruling trying to get the membership records of the NAACP. And in the process, the organization decided to close its doors in Alabama rather than identify the people who were in it, knowing that they would be the targets then of white supremist violence. And so when the NAACP got outlawed, Shuttlesworth decided to create a new group. Well, in many ways, there had already been pushing within the NAACP to reflect this kind of activism. But Shuttlesworth was particularly charismatic man, and he believed that God was helping him fight segregation and that he was, in a sense, especially after he survived the bombing of the Church, Bethel Baptist and the Parsonage on Christmas night of 1956, believed that God had saved him to fight against segregation. Now, he had attended Alabama State University in Montgomery. He was friends with Ralph David Abernathy. Abernathy is a key pastor involved with the Montgomery bus boycott. He's the one who encouraged his friend at that point, Martin Luther King, Jr. to get involved in the bus boycott. King, of course, gets selected to lead the MIA. And Shuttlesworth was actually in Montgomery witnessing all of this taking place in 1955 when the organization is formed. Consequently, he takes that idea with him up to Birmingham in 1956. And it's through his Alabama Christian Movement that we see the nascent civil rights movement in the city accomplish its successes, challenging segregation at the railroad depot, challenging Birmingham Terminal station it was called, challenging segregation with the effort to desegregate the public schools, this occurring during the height of the Little Rock crisis in 1957. When the bus boycott decision is handed down the year before in Montgomery, in December of 56, Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement announced they're going to ride the buses in Birmingham in a desegregated fashion because the courts have ruled that legal, and it's on that night that the Klan bombs the Church and Parsonage and nearly killed Shuttlesworth. He really reflected that desire for change, and as a charismatic leader, was willing to risk his life to achieve those goals of gaining equal access to the American system, ending segregation and achieving first class citizenship, as it was called. The movement, though, kind of runs along. Because of its emergence in 1957, Bull Connor, who had been the city Commissioner since the 1930s and had gained a reputation for at first preventing biracial unionism and then resisting desegregation, had been able to come back into political power just barely by something like 110 votes. He beat the incumbent who had replaced him in office and Connor returned to power as the Commissioner of Public Safety basically vowing to defeat Shuttlesworth in the Alabama Christian movement. The larger, one of the larger arguments in the book is to contrast this local struggle with the national movement. Now, when I started the research back in the 1980s, there was a general assumption about the Birmingham story that Dr. King had come to Birmingham, created a movement, and had a strategy that played out as he envisioned, forcing the hand of the federal government to then declare desegregation. And that general narrative, written by journalists and by some of the early scholars, never really looked at what happened on the local level, downplayed the significance of Reverend Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement and really kind of misinterpreted the story, seeing civil rights as an external thing that came into communities, a national movement brought into local protests. In that sense, it played into the old arguments of the white supremists who tried to dismiss the civil rights struggle as one of outside agitators. But the reality was, of course, that no, there had been a local movement, this local movement demanding change had existed before Montgomery and had really come about in tandem with the effort there with the bus boycott, so that there were a series of these local movements that came together to create what will be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC and select Dr. King to lead it. And that effort by Dr. King was to coordinate these local protest groups. Now there had already been a national movement in what you would call the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It had existed since 1910 and had focused on voting rights and other kinds of reform, pushing legislation with the federal government. And it had chapters in Birmingham and elsewhere, that’s what the state had outlawed. But those were really tightly controlled by the external organization in New York, and they largely worked within the framework of segregation. They kind of compromised with a larger segregated social structure to accommodate the interests of the Black elite that ran the organization. What Shuttlesworth does is challenge that and the Black elite in Birmingham, what was called at the time the Negro leadership class. The traditional Negro leadership class didn't control Shuttlesworth or these ministers of these congregations of these Black working class people who were demanding a more activist approach. That's the organization, the Alabama Christian Movement, that invites King and the SCLC to come to Birmingham in the spring of 1963. They created the great event we know of as the Birmingham Demonstrations, where Bull Connor brings out the police dogs at first and tries to use violence to suppress the demonstrations, ultimately turning to fire hoses to blast the youth who get involved in the demonstrations and tip the scale in the end to achieve the victory won in the streets of Birmingham. And that larger story that we know of also points to something fundamental that I argue in the book. And just quite simply, that is, the old iron and steel industry was in decline. The political economy of the south has been changing since the 1930s and 40s. The Great Depression and the Second World War: those 2 global events had brought about the end to the industrial paternalism that was the basis of the bifurcated race wage, the segregated system. And once that industrial economy began to collapse, that segregated social structure no longer made sense. And the bifurcated race wage that justified paying white people a little more than Black was increasingly impractical. What was replacing it was a potentially new economy, one rooted in the service sector that saw racism as a kind of irrationality on capitalism, and as a result, was willing to sacrifice segregation for the benefit of a larger, integrated economy. There was more to be gained. “Money is green,” as A.G. Gaston, the Black millionaire in Birmingham, liked to say. And there were representatives of that new political economy, recognizing what was going on in Birmingham and seeing how a defensive racism was really holding the city down, limiting its evolution and development and mobilized against it. That effort was led by a man named Sidney Smyer, who was the head of the Birmingham Realty Company, real estate being one of the key elements of the service sector, where you rent space for your business or commercial enterprise. And Smyer mobilized likeminded progressives, people, many of whom were inspired by John F. Kennedy in this era of the space age and opportunity. Smyer mobilized them to at first change the form of government to try to get rid of Bull Connor. And this was accomplished by adopting legislation to replace the City Commission with the Mayor Council form of government. Connor challenged that defeat of his election as Mayor by filing a lawsuit against the very change of government that he had just run for Mayor off. But it tied it up in the courts, and it left two governments in charge of Birmingham at the height of the demonstrations. One, the old City Commission, with Connor still in charge of the police and the fire departments, and the other, the new City Government of a Mayor and City Council. They kind of duplicated their actions day after day. And so you see, Birmingham itself was undergoing a very

significant transformation. And then finally, what the book looks at that was distinctive about it, too, is how the Black community was no more monolithic than the white community. White people had long seen the Black community is kind of monolithic, meaning that there weren't really distinctions or divisions within it per se. Rather than seeing the Black community as divided as the white one with an elite Black class kind of dominating institutions, and the Black masses of people working in these menial jobs, and the two not necessarily having the same interest at heart. Such was the case, certainly, with the white community. There was a white elite in Birmingham. There was the white working class in Birmingham, and there was a middle class and a kind of petty bourgeoisie between the working class and the middle class in Birmingham. And they all had different interests in seeing the city function. The white elite, as residents of the city know full well, live in the privately incorporated communities of Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, and Homewood. And that's where they lived at the time of the civil rights struggle. The white working class was scattered across the entire industrial sector of Birmingham, the Birmingham district it's called. And there was a kind of middle class that if it didn't live over the mountain, it lived in the city proper, but had vested interests in maintaining segregation. That was the electorate of Bull Connor, and he would pull a majority of it. These were people who held their jobs as firemen or policemen or clerks in the city government or staff at a local store because they were white, because they were given that privilege, and so they had a vested interest in maintaining it. Now, looking back, we can see how this all came together in the demonstrations of 1963, and through federal intervention, we get desegregation, which brings about an end to the legal white supremacy that required the separation of Black and white, got rid of justifying the bifurcated race wage that allowed legal payment of white people more than Black people for the same job. That got rid of disenfranchisement, preventing African Americans from voting, and enabled them to gain Black political empowerment. We can see how all that played out. But what we also can see now is that the service economy emerged full blown, that that transformation allowed for things like the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the medical school to expand and become the dominant employer in the city, bringing with it those dynamic jobs in the medical industries that employed people regardless of their race and still exploited labor. But did it through different means. It wasn't simply rooted in race, and that transfer information becomes more clear. And the economy then became in sync with really the national economy that had evolved by the time of the Second World War and was the case across the nation by the Sixties and and Seventies. The protest in Birmingham also brought to a head this clash between local and national interests. And one thing my book argues that some people agree with and others disagree with is the idea that the local movement led by Shuttlesworth did not appear to receive its objectives in the immediate outcome of the demonstration. And then, in fact, as the protests were playing out in May of 1963, it looked as if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC had been able to wrestle out of a snatch victory at the very last moment by convincing the federal government to intervene and therefore achieve desegregation. And Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement had been holding out for a wider transformation of the system. In some ways, that argument is rooted in the notion of the protests, really, in the even in the 1930s, when during the unionization drives the Great Depression, there were calls for what was known as industrial democracy, getting better jobs that paid living wages, economic change in the system with a redistribution of wealth. And yet, as things evolved by the 1950s and 60s, the economic issues have been pushed off the table, and reform has really kind of centered on the idea of civil rights, meaning an end to discrimination in the public sphere. Getting rid of the white and colored signs, having a seat at the lunch counter. But as Ella Baker would note, you know, if you don't have the money to buy the hamburger, it doesn't do you a lot of good to get the seat, right? And so Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement had been pushing for getting African Americans hired as policemen, getting them hired as clerks in the local stores, gaining economic change in addition to removing the signs. But it appeared in ‘63 that King was able to end the demonstrations with the promise that something was going to change. And so that feeling of shortcoming became very real. And the book’s epilogue points to this shortcoming in its persistence. And this is what we're hearing today. It's all about the failure of the movement to have addressed the fundamental issue of economic inequality. To be fair to the Movement, that wasn't always part of the effort. The local and national movements struggled because the national movement claimed the victory of change and left Birmingham, King did, and as it happens, he kind of left in charge people like AG Gaston or Lucius Pitts at Miles and certainly Arthur Shores, members of the Black elite and kind of left Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement out of that leadership, Black leadership that was working with the white one. And we'll see Attorney Shores then become the first African American on the city Council. And we see the Black elite having been able to work within the desegregated framework that emerges of political leadership in the city that's in the 19, latter Sixties and Seventies. But the issue of economic reforms became more ambiguous. And the epilogue of the book kind of points to that. When the logic of how the civil rights movement occurs, removing the signs, gaining equal access, desegregating the space, plays out at Shoal Creek, an exclusive white country club south of the city that not only didn't let black folk in, didn't let Jewish people in, wouldn't let you were me in or anybody else who's just white and happens to maybe you're a nice guy, but if you're not a millionaire, you can't join my club. Right. And the logic for the movement was, well, until you let some African American in and treat them as equal, then your not, of course, it's not an equal set up. It's a class thing. And it really pointed to instead, we have gross inequality in this nation. It persists. It existed back then, and the movement didn't really mobilize to tackle it like it might have. There had been an effort in the 1930s, but it had failed. Nevertheless, the changes that occurred in Birmingham in 1963 were of not only national significance but global significance, because those demonstrations, those nonviolent protests that kept going because of a handful of people committed for weeks and ultimately tipping the scale with the thousands of people who filled the streets and filled the jails. That transformation did bring about the end legal white supremacy in the nation through the implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that required desegregation of public space, the right to sit at a lunch counter or a restaurant, assuming you have the money, the right to vote and participate in the political system, of the right to go to the school that you want to go to. That change happened. And it happened because of Birmingham.

Ranger Kat: Thank you. And you brought up a lot of things that hopefully will have time to discuss later. But before we go into some of the details of the book, I want to ask you a personal question. I did some Googling and looked into you as a person. And I know you've been working and living in Georgia for a number of years as a College Professor and researcher and author, of course. And I'm curious if you're from the south, and just in general, what spurred this deep interest in looking so in depth at the story in Birmingham?

Dr. Eskew: Sure. Yes. I'm a native Southerner, although I was born in 1960, so these events happened when I was in diapers, and I was not aware of any of it when it was taking place. But I became fascinated with the idea of Southern history and the transformation of it. And so I wanted to explore that story. And my approach was to find somewhere that would allow me to consider how the south went from being the region of agricultural production of cotton, the old plantation, labored on by the enslaved. How did that change into the dynamic south that we saw in the 80s when I was in graduate school in a place like Atlanta, o,r as my major professor encouraged me, to look at Birmingham, and so I did. And looking at Birmingham was able to not only explore that transformation, because in many ways, Sloss furnaces, the Alice furnaces, and the housing near it on the south side, those were industrial plantations. This is not that different from what you would find in Dallas County, outside Selma or anywhere else in the Deep South. And indeed, the culture of industrial paternalism that developed in Birmingham was very similar to the culture of the plantation itself. And so finding that and then seeing how it was completely transformed by the 1980s was the challenge for me. And Atlanta offered a great contrast with Birmingham, because Birmingham was a company town and the big horse, not the only horse, but it was the main horse in town, was the United States Steel Corporation, locally, the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. And as a result of that, it controlled town like any small Southern County seat that has a textile mill in it. The mill would control town. Here we find the industry being controlled by this entity, and it was externally owned. It was owned by shareholders in New York and in Pennsylvania and around the world. And that undue influence of external forces, this outside control, created its own dynamic of inferiority among the white elite in Birmingham who, you know, they didn't really control their destiny. They were trapped within it. Unlike in Atlanta, where Atlanta, you had this interesting mix. It had manufacturing. It also had service. It had transportation, and those elements were all in kind of balance. And so there wasn't a single economic structure or entity or industry or political economy that dominated Atlanta. The diversity allowed for a greater influence of local people and Atlanta had the good fortune of indigenous capital, that is, money generated in the region that was put in local banks and control by local people that could then benefit the local community. Unlike Birmingham, where the money was really externally brought in and then taken right back out with interest through profits.

Ranger Kat: I want to ask you a question about money and the role that money plays in racism. One of the things that I found incredibly well researched in your book was the economic disadvantage that's woven into racism. And you mentioned just a moment ago, it's one thing to take down signs that delineate where African Americans can go and where white people can go. It's another to be able to access a system that is financially just out of your league. You mentioned the quote by Ella Baker, and you know how she said, there's no use at gaining a seat at the table if you don't have any money to buy anything at the restaurant, which I think is an excellent quote. And you also mentioned, too, how obvious that disparity was if you look back at what salaries were like. And in your book, for example, in 1950, the average annual salary for a white man was $2274, and the average for a black man was $1,087. These are annual salaries. I'm wondering, why is it important to remind people that racism isn't about signs? It's not about name calling. It's about economic disenfranchisement. Why is that important? And why is that often not discussed?

Dr. Eskew: Oh, that's an excellent question and a hard one. And I'll begin by also emphasizing Ella Baker observation that it's bigger than a hamburger. Right? So it's more than just economic. These gains in the sense that civil rights reform and an end to racial discrimination, of course, has all kinds of implication for reflection of self-worth and value and just the whole notion of equality among people and freedom. True freedom. So I don't want to sound like it's simply a matter of economic issues or that it's simply a matter of spatial issues, of gaining actual space to something like being able to sit at the lunch counter. However, the reality is that political economies often use divisions for purposes of exploitation. One of the maximum principles of capitalism is you reduce cost and you can increase profits. And one of the easiest ways to reduce cost is to lower wages. And this could be, in the case we're looking at with the struggle in Birmingham it's over race, but it's also seen in gender, with gender discrimination in employment. We're still trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment past to pay women the same wage as men. And as we've seen in this pandemic, the gross inequalities in wages that women earn and the terrible situation in which they find themselves so vulnerable because of the pandemic as a result of the employment opportunities that they confront. So it could be written from the perspective of these industrialists, places like Pittsburgh were rife with ethnic discrimination. And you had had some of that in Birmingham with Italians who had been brought in to work in the iron and steel industry in the Birmingham district being discriminated kind of in between Asians, same way, in between Black and white. But the bigger crux in the bigger point is simply that economies often use tactics such as racism to divide workers. And I think it's no surprise that we can apply many of these lessons that I discovered, so clearly evident in the Birmingham of the 1950s and 60s to the recent past we've just experienced. ow racism is used to divide workers. I think we could even go so far as to see our nation currently confronting a declining old economy like the iron and steel one in in Birmingham, only today, it's the Petroleum based economy, which is not just the gas pump, mind you, it's the banks that finance all of that. It's the insurance companies that prop it all up. It's the plastic industries and then the use of plastics by consumers and manufacturers, all that's coming out of petroleum, all of that reflective of this economy that is no longer sustainable in our changing environmental situation. We see evidence of that being propped up. And yet we also see a new economy that's proposed that is transnational or global, if you like, that is driving a different kind of focus, that being one of renewable energies that creates its own dynamic for jobs and opportunities in progress. Those two political economies are currently at war. And the question is, in the end, which is going to win out. And we know deep down the petroleum one's going to die. We're going to run out of petroleum. Well, likewise, the use of race can be used in that old political economy. And I think that's why, in part, we've seen efforts to emphasize racial division and our recent political climate.

Ranger Kat: I'd like to ask you about the role of women, the LGBTQ+ community, differently-abled folks, in both the local and the national movement. I think, especially in the Birmingham campaign, where you have these really charismatic leaders like Shuttlesworth and Dr King, it's easy to focus the Movement and what they accomplished on their ability to lead. But through reading your book and understanding more of the movement, it really was this diverse movement of many. I mean, you mentioned the Children's Crusade and how that was sort of the tipping point, an inflection point in the Movement. How seeing these foot soldiers, some as young as six years old marching in the streets, really sort of shifted federal policy. But there were also folks like Ella Baker who we've quoted now a couple times, and students at Miles College who were really sort of encouraging this direct action campaign rather than the rhetoric that was more common among national leaders. And I'm wondering if you could maybe mention some women or some other diverse individuals who feel really contributed to the Movement that maybe we don't hear about, and maybe we should talk about more and hear about more.

Dr. Eskew: Well, Ranger Gardiner, you just pointed out the big flaw in the book, I'm afraid. I did not give women enough credit in the narrative and that I fully believe is a result of being attracted to the charisma of Reverend Shuttlesworth and other African American male leaders, particularly in the church, who are the typical ones we seem to think of in this period of the Movement. But Ella Baker was very familiar with Alabama, having for years worked with the NAACP, mobilizing chapters and running voter registration campaigns in the state. And I would really call out several names, number one, for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, it's true success, it wasn't just Reverend Shuttlesworth in his charisma or his, quote, lieutenants like Bishop Calvin Woods and his brother Abraham or some of the other pastors. But it was Miss Lola Hendrix, an African American woman who helped keep the records and who ran the telephone tree that was integral to the Movement’s success. She would be tipped off by Reverend Shuttlesworth that he wanted to hold a meeting or that there would be someone at a mass meeting that he wanted the community to hear. And she would get on the phone and use that phone to contact other women who contacted other women who contacted other women. And everyone then materialized, at Shuttlesworth’s request, but it was a role of the women that accomplished that. And it's the women who are demonstrating as well as the men. Men might have led the March, but they're women participating in it. And I think of young women students during the Children's Crusade of 1963. Myra Carter Jackson was one of the great one of the great foot soldiers of this effort. And yet her family had gotten involved years before with the Alabama Christian Movement, before the Children's Crusade came about. And she had been participating in these mass meetings. And then when the children marched, she was right out there marching, as was Janice Wesley Kelsey. She, too, was a student who got recruited into the Children's Crusade and then demonstrated. And I have in the book there are a couple of white people, like Martha Turnipseed, a white woman who was a student at Birmingham-Southern who was interested in the idea of what's going on here with this civil rights protest. She attends a demonstration. Tommy Reeves, a seminarian, gets involved and just shows sympathy, and white Methodist authorities run him out of town. I think Turnipseed got expelled from Birmingham-Southern. So young people and women are really the key to the success. And in the end, it really is that crowd of young folk in the Children's Crusade that forces the change. But I would add, if it hadn't been for Reverend Shuttlesworth and that Alabama Christian Movement, that group of churches scattered around the Birmingham District that met on Monday nights, week after week after week in mass meetings since 1956, had he not kept that going, there never would have been a Birmingham demonstration to attract all those students and protesting in May of ‘63 to begin with. And I believe it was Andrew Young who, coming into Birmingham and confronting this really shocked that Dr King discovered when he got there in April, that not all of the Black ministerial leadership was behind Reverend Shuttlesworth, that the Black community was not united in support of the demonstrations, as had been the case in Montgomery with the bus boycott. Young would say that it was only about 10% of the churches, Black churches in Birmingham, that were actively in the movement, and that's the reality of it. But what that tells me and should tell everyone is it never will be everybody getting involved. It's always that committed core, that dedicated few who don't give up, who keep fighting, who make the change. And I think we see that time and again in history.

Ranger Kat: So I thought to ask you more in depth questions about that push and pull between the national and the local movement. But I think you did a really excellent job summarizing that initially, as well also as the ambiguity of the ending of the Birmingham campaign. But I'm wondering, there's a moment in the epilogue, which you titled Ambiguous Resolution, which I think kind of says it all, where you mention the story of the integration of Birmingham's Shoal Creek Country Club in 1990. I believe I'm calling it the right name, and you mentioned it briefly in your summary. But I'm wondering if you could go more into detail as to what happened and why, for you, that's kind of emblematic of the source of changes it actually took place in Birmingham and how, for the Black masses, a lot of those changes were more symbolic rather than material. So I'm wondering if you could explain that one case study and may be connect it to the larger story of what happened as a result of the movement in Birmingham.

Dr. Eskew: I'll try if I don't get it right, ask me again on another day, and I'll, I'll actually get through reading that epilogue again.

Ranger Kat: [laughter] Fair enough.

Dr. Eskew: And get to that. But Ambiguous Resolution, I think, points to why we're still having problems today. And for a lot of people, certainly in the white community, I believe their attitude has been, “we solved this already with the civil rights movement,” and the reality is the movement was successful. I don't want to suggest anything else in the sense that, as Congressman John Lewis was oft to say, “all you have to do is go back and look and see what it was like when we started and see what things are like today. And you'll see the change.” There has been dramatic change in the 50 years since the demonstration. We no longer have spaces that are demarcated white and colored. We no longer have laws that are designed to project onto society white supremacy. All of that was removed through the Civil Rights Act 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and we received a great deal of support through Black political empowerment accomplished by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet what we've seen is the erosion of those rights in voting by new strategies of disfranchisement and voter suppression that are rampant today. And yet taking away the vote of someone is not the same thing as forcing them to sit on the back of a bus. Right? Those are separate things. Alright. So ambiguous resolution really points to the fact that the civil rights movement didn't address because, quite frankly, it was outside the purview of it economic inequalities, the persistence of that. It did try to resolve the problem of vested racism and white supremacy in institutions. And yet I would suggest your readers if they make it through the chapter on Bull’s Birmingham, and they discover how horrific police brutality was in Birmingham with the legal lynchings, they were called. The justifiable homicides of unarmed Black men by white policemen in 1950s Birmingham. How's that different than today? Right? This is nothing new. And of course, the violence is used just to really kind of prop up law and order. The law and order designed to protect private property and economic interests. Only today it's not denying someone access to the shopping mall. Everybody can go in the mall. Right? Doesn’t d you any good if you don't have any money. And so in the ambiguous resolution epilogue, I kind of point to, and in some ways it's unfair of me to, suggest that Abraham Woods and the local Black leadership is up in arms over the need to have an African American millionaire admitted to a private white country club on the outskirts of town as a symbolic gesture that yes, indeed, we are all equal. I understand why they did it. And I understand the logic that led them to that point, being the logic of the civil rights struggle, gaining equal access to the system. Now, to be fair, in the civil rights era, that meant the public sphere, things that were open to the public in general, private places were left out of the realm of this sphere. What you do in your private community is your business. If you want to be a Church that does not allow Black people in your Church because you believe in the Church of white supremacy. And somehow you can rationalize that with your, quote, Christianity. It's a private entity. Right? But it pointed to the hypocrisy that was the reason Kneel-Ins were held at white churches during the civil rights movement. How dare you express Christian belief and not extend the welcoming hand to your Black brothers and sisters? Well, Shoal Creek was a country club which still exists south of Birmingham, a beautiful space that had an outstanding golf course that was so impressive it had been able to attract the PGA, the international golfing competition. And this too points to the kind of the contradictions of the larger transformation. It pointed to Birmingham's success. The success of having weathered ‘63, undergone racial change, created a brand new dynamic service economy that was no longer rooted in the filthy, racist iron and steel industry, but now expressive of a dynamic medical industry and education and progress and thinking and the whole consumption and all of that stretch from 65 to 280 and in between that you can see south of town suggested that. Economic growth, progress, the change that the city had experienced and slap in the middle of it: Shoal Creek. And here it was hosting this international spotlight, and the founder of the country club, Hall Thompson, made the mistake of saying that, “well, we let everybody in here except the Blacks,” right? And consequently, the protests began and understandably so. And in the end, Shoal Creek desegregates by allowing an African American member, a member of the Black elite in Birmingham, to become a member of the Country Club. And through that, desegregation really provided a similar kind of resolution to what had occurred initially in ‘63. It didn't change the lives of any of the Black masses of folk trapped in the inner city of Birmingham in public housing that was increasingly being bull-dozed in slum areas with limited opportunities, in schools that were struggling to to educate the students, and in a new dynamic political economy that without an education, left you with limited job opportunities. And I would dare say that one could suggest we still confront these problems today.

Ranger Kat: I think many would agree with that. So I wanted to ask you a question about the role of children in the Birmingham campaign and segue into a question about a message to young people today. And I think that your conversation around this ambiguous resolution is a good segue in that there's more work to do, there's more work to be done, and that's kind of how the book ends. When I finished the book, I'll admit I felt sad. I felt frustrated. I felt like I wasn't given the resolution that we’re often given and more simplistic narratives about the civil rights movement. And I both appreciated you for that and also felt, again, that sense of frustration and like, wow, what was it, what truly was accomplished materially, economically, because it still seemed in your appraisal that the financial political situation in Birmingham remained very fraught. So, something that is, I think, really inspiring about the Birmingham Campaign is the role that children played in the Children's Crusade predominantly. And today we're seeing another resurgence of young people who are incredibly involved in trying to make the world a better place, whether that's racial justice, climate change, etcetera. And I'm curious, based on your deep historic knowledge of social movements, specifically civil rights in the South, would you say that the involvement of young people is critical to that success. And then, given that there is obviously still work to be done, what is your message to young people today who want to make changes for the better?

Dr. Eskew: Young people hold the key. They're the ones who have the most to gain. If you consider the role of the youth in Birmingham, coming in at just the right moment, the crucial time with the Children's Crusade in May of ‘63, and they were brought in in part because of the leaders of the struggle, Dorothy Cotton, one of Dr. King's key staff members, James Bevel, Isaac Reynolds, Ike Reynolds. These folks worked with those young people, training them in nonviolence. But young folks are committed, and they're willing to work and put their necks out to gain change. And we see that in the Black Lives Matter effort today. It's young people who are driving the demand for change in race relations in America today, who are pushing to force reconciliation with the past, to come to terms with America's legacy as a white supremacy nation, and to address those inequalities that persist, recognizing how racism has functioned for so long, to hurt so many people. And if we look at the civil rights struggle as a whole, the real push at key moments that kept it moving forward was that of young people. We often think of the Brown versus Board of Education case with Linda Brown. It's her father who files the lawsuit. But I like to point to Moton High School in Virginia, which is also one of the five cases that made up the Brown decision. There we find the students themselves walking out of their school because of the inequality that they experienced in that facility, the failure of the local community, the white school board, to provide African American youth with educational facilities that would enable them to be prepared for the future. It's the Little Rock students who confront the violence and hostility of the white mob as they bravely continue to participate in the year-long process of desegregating Central High. And while after Montgomery, Dr. King and other civil rights leaders in local communities like Reverend Shuttlesworth and elsewhere across the south mobilized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It really kind of spun its wheels, this national movement, looking at replicating what the NAACP had been doing, holding voter registration drives, waiting to come to the aid of a demonstration or protest like Montgomery had been, something that erupted organically, in a sense, out of a local community. And it's the students who are the ones, the young people who create those opportunities. They do it with the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four black men from North Carolina A&T sit down at a Woolworths and refuse to leave, demanding equal access to service. It's young people like John Lewis, who is a seminarian in Nashville, volunteers to participate in the first Freedom Ride that it is civil rights organizations that mobilize it, CORE, Congress Of Racial Equality, but it's young people like John Lewis who volunteers and gets on that Freedom Ride and gets beat up on that Freedom Ride. And when the original ride is called off after Birmingham, it's young people from Nashville who had organized to sit-in movement led by Diane Nash and others, who come to Birmingham to continue the Freedom Ride and to maintain that dynamic. It's young people from around the nation who to join in Freedom Fides and get arrested, white and black, and be sent up to Parchment Prison in Mississippi, it’s young people that bring in that demand for change time and again. And it's the same story we see today. I think it's clear not just in Black Lives Matter, but Greta Thunberg and others who are pushing the demand for change on the environment. They're doing so because they know full well that world they're inheriting, and either it's going to be scorched or or it's going to be livable. And similarly, America has to come to grips with its history and address the wrongs of the past. That was really the final outgrowth of Dr. King's strategy of nonviolence. It wasn't just to have a demonstration and then to affect change at the local level. It was also to accomplish a reconciliation, to come to terms with the past and to create what he called the beloved community, a world in which we all can live. And humanity has lots of examples of the need to come together or confront annihilation. We used to hear more frequently about nuclear weapons and disarmament, and that's been pushed aside. But it's still very much a reality in our society, but it's been displaced by the greater needs of the need to address the environment. But we also have to address gross inequality, or we're going to see the masses of the people pushed to the limit and rise up and challenge the handful of one percenters out there who seem to be benefiting from the system.

Ranger Kat: I'd like to close on the question about World Heritage Sites, and I know that you've been working to add many civil rights sites to be a part of UNESCO's World Heritage Site roster. So I was looking into a little bit about what it takes to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and what the mission statement is. So I'll read just the small portion. The mission statement of the World Heritage Sites is “to preserve and protect sites around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.” What is the value that the story of Birmingham and the sites in this region, what is the value that they bring to humanity? And why do you feel they deserve to be recognized on a global scale?

Dr. Eskew: Thank you for that question, too, because, yes, I've been hard at work with colleagues on developing a serial nomination of US civil rights movement sites to be proposed for potential inscription on the World Heritage list. And Birmingham, I think, and to go back just to say about young people again. Young people hold the key, but it does no good if they don't get involved. Whenever I meet with students and talk about what occurred in Birmingham during the civil rights era, I encourage them to get involved for change for the change that they believe in, to get registered, to be able to vote so they can vote change in with politicians. If you don't get involved, if the children hadn’t marched in the Children's Crusade, there would not have been the changes we see coming out of Birmingham. And it's that very change. It's that outgrowth of those young people, Black folk standing up against Bull Connor’s fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park, those six year old little kids who marched down the street and then on to a city bus to go off to the Stockade at the state fair ground and be locked up. It’s those young people who were spun down the street like a tumble weed through the force of the water of the hoses or got bitten by the dogs. Those young people point to why Birmingham is globally significant. It's globally significant because it demonstrated the power of nonviolent protest to force a nation to address injustice. As a result of the demonstrations in Birmingham, the federal government, through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, required desegregation, required an end to legal white supremacy in American society. If you consider that within the framework of the world and you think about how around the globe there's always been discrimination, it might not be racial, might be ethnic, might be based in rooted in religion. It might be gender discrimination or sexuality might be against the aging or against people with issues of ability. There's so much evidence of discrimination written into and built into the fabric of societies. And here, for the first time, a federal government said, no longer. We're going to require the space be open to all people equally. Public space accessible all. And as it has come to be interpreted, well, initially, it was the issue of race. When the Civil Rights Act was being prepared in the Congress and debated, a slick legislator put in the word gender, thinking it would kill it, because who's going to give women the same spaces they give men? It got passed instead. And suddenly we see among the greatest beneficiaries of this are women. We since interpreted it to mean equality over sexuality issues for gays and lesbians, queer, transgendered people. It was applied to the needs of folks with disabilities so that they would have access to public space, too. We've seen it writ large across the board. Nowhere else in the world had that occurred. And it comes out of the demonstrations and protests that happened in Birmingham. It's a glorious story. It's one of which to be proud. And it's one to celebrate. That here, local people, young people mobilized, came together, demanded change. And through that demand ultimately forced the federal government power to answer. And it's the only way we're ever going to get change on any of these other issues is if people mobilize and demand it.

Ranger Kat: Thank you so much. This has been such an amazing conversation. I really appreciate not only your knowledge about the story, but the passion with which you speak about it. It will be a conversation I return to for many, many years to come, and hopefully we can have others, too.

Dr. Eskew: Well, thank you. It's wonderful to get to write about the brave people who made the difference. Certainly, it's driven by a desire to see us also deal with the problems in our own societies and accomplish the change we need for us all to be able to live together.

Ranger: This is We Will Rise: National Parks and Civil Rights. Thanks to the Psalters for use of their song, Turn Me Around. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our series. Until next time.

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