Birmingham

Birmingham was engineered, not settled. Founded in 1871 at the intersection of iron ore, coal, and limestone deposits, the city was designed as an industrial zone from its first plat. The geological arrangement provided the lowest raw-material assembly costs in the United States—deposits sometimes only miles apart—earning Birmingham the nickname 'The Pittsburgh of the South.' By the 1950s, 45,000 workers staffed the steel mills.

The labor force came from exploitation. Alabama was the last state to outlaw convict leasing, which until 1928 supplied company mines with predominantly young Black men from rural areas. These workers died at rates far exceeding normal mortality. The racial order that built Birmingham's steel industry also made it, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963, 'probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.' Fifty unsolved bombings between 1945 and 1962 earned it the name 'Bombingham.'

The Children's Crusade of May 1963 changed history. When thousands of Black students marched and Bull Connor's police responded with fire hoses and dogs, the global broadcast forced the Kennedy administration to act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bore Birmingham's fingerprints. Four months later, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing killed four girls and galvanized the nation.

Steel collapsed in the 1970s as German and Japanese plants outcompeted aging American mills. Birmingham pivoted to medicine: the University of Alabama at Birmingham now anchors an economy of healthcare, banking, and research. Tech startups occupy Innovation Depot while food deserts persist in West Birmingham. By 2026, the city that forged steel and forged civil rights must forge something new—Huntsville surpassed it as Alabama's largest city in 2020.