Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929-1979.

By Christopher MacGregor Scribner. Economy and Society in the Modern South. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xiv], 188. $40.00, ISBN 0-8203-2328-4.)

Christopher MacGregor Scribner's account of the impact of U.S. government policy on Birmingham, Alabama, after 1929 is a story of public housing, slum clearance, and the remarkable rise of what is now the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), set within a context of race, politics, and economic adversity. The evolution of a major medical complex in such an unlikely place--considering Birmingham's lack of favor with the state government, dismal civil rights experience, and lackluster political leadership--is a testament to a handful of visionary educational and business leaders, good luck, and federal help and is worthy of a full-length study in its own right.

Its economy dashed by the Great Depression, Birmingham looked to the New Deal for help, and the reality and prospect of federal support helped to shape local politics thereafter. A continuing debate among white leaders pitted pragmatists who welcomed economic benefits against those who opposed a larger federal role in local affairs and customs. During the 1930s trade unions grew even stronger and welcomed the jobs brought by public construction, though working-class voters usually joined the economic elite in supporting conservative social policies. Black leaders, especially through the NAACP, were increasingly insistent on federal help as well as reforms in voting rights and zoning.

The efforts of a local citizens' group in 1944 to lure the new medical college of the University of Alabama to the state's largest city "would eventually tie Birmingham into the postwar federal grant machine" (pp. 33-34). The Hospital Construction and Survey Act of 1946 (better known as the Hill-Burton Act) provided the catalyst for the beginning of a rising medical center on the city's Southside, and slum clearance legislation and federal funding insured its growth. Against the backdrop of a losing economic competition with Atlanta and repeated failures to annex suburban areas, Birmingham came increasingly to rely on the benefits and promise of the medical center. The state's reluctance or inability to provide funding for this project led to an even greater dependence on federal support.

Working-class whites largely remained in the city, while urban renewal displaced many blacks into even-more-crowded segregated neighborhoods. The economic elite resided mostly in the suburbs, thereby relinquishing important leverage in city affairs. All of this was a prescription for Birmingham's disastrous response to the civil rights movement. But federal assistance increasingly brought the racial status quo into conflict with the development of the medical complex that was the city's rising economic engine, and slowly and reluctantly the city adapted to new imperatives.

Scribner's well-constructed and thoughtful study--which is based on many local sources, including UAB materials, interviews, and new archival records from the Birmingham Housing Authority--addresses Birmingham's special circumstances and also places the city in the larger national context in which the policy and largesse of the U.S. government systematically transformed American cities.

BLAINE A. BROWNELL

Ball State University