"The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980.

"The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980. By Charles E. Connerly. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 360. $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2334-4.)

Modern Birmingham's inscription in public memory as "the most segregated city in America" has been well deserved. Even after half a century, the name Bull Connor still resonates, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church still haunts, and the image of city officials turning fire hoses on black children as they demonstrated still evokes shame. In examining how city planning tools helped maintain the color line, Charles E. Connerly extends and deepens Birmingham's racist image. Connerly demonstrates that time and again, when prevailing laws upholding segregation were challenged, the establishment relied on planning practices to maintain the status quo. He exposes planning's "moral ambiguity--that is, the tendency ... to appeal to both high and low moral values," even as he helps further illuminate the pervasiveness of southern racism (p. 6).

A background chapter establishes Birmingham's emergence as part of the Jim Crow South. African Americans, who constituted nearly 40 percent of the city's population by 1920, found themselves isolated not just in the least desirable industrial jobs but also in residential areas stigmatized by poor construction and woefully inadequate services. The rise of a black middle class put some pressure on exclusively white residential areas. To block any prospect of transition, city officials embraced the practice of zoning, arguing that it could be used to exclude undesirable people as well as land uses. Aware of the vulnerability of such practice in the aftermath of court decisions striking down racial zoning in other southern cities, city leaders successfully made minor adjustments in boundaries to preempt individual court challenges. When it became clear that zoning could no longer withstand court scrutiny, city fathers turned to federal programs, notably urban renewal and highway development, to achieve their purposes. If African Americans could no longer be legally contained in selected neighborhoods, they could be removed.

Such policies inevitably created housing shortages for blacks, thus increasing pressure on white neighborhoods that were subject to change as residents followed the national pattern of moving to the suburbs. A moderate faction within the business community looked to the city of Atlanta as a model for facilitating a transition through negotiated agreements between black and white leaders. As a city commissioner, Bull Connor would have nothing of compromise, however. In the absence of accommodation, planning efforts proved increasingly inadequate to sustain segregation. As residential lines were broached, whites resorted to violence. The 1963 tragedy at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was but the most dramatic in a series of violent acts that Connerly shows were directed exclusively at areas undergoing racial transition.

Connerly's story is not entirely a hopeless one. The civil rights movement built on years of community-based opposition to centralized planning. With the 1979 election of Richard Arrington as the city's first black mayor, the stage was set for a style of advocacy planning that should have served black residential neighborhood interests well. Although Connerly's account is not fully detailed, he suggests that this potential was compromised by planning's continuing moral ambiguity. With the loss of human and monetary capital to the suburbs, even a black mayor made decisions that too often helped serve investors more than residents.

Extensively detailed and illustrated with maps, Connerly's book enriches the study of segregation. At the same time, by linking planning practice, North and South, he widens our perspective. Birmingham may have been exceptional in its reputation, but it invented neither the concept of exclusionary zoning nor that of urban renewal as a tool for black removal. This study, then, should also enlighten any student of planning about the profession's troubled legacy.

HOWARD GILLETTE JR.

Rutgers University-Camden