Growing up in Birmingham in the fifties and sixties was idyllic, which is probably very hard to imagine, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 and all of the tumult of the ’60s. But, I was in high school before our church member, James Armstrong, a barber with an independent income that insulated him from white factors, filed his lawsuit to permit his young sons to integrate the Birmingham public schools, in 1963. Their sister was in my homeroom class at the time the courts ordered their admission. However, there were many other events unfolding in our lives and the race issue was not always uppermost in our thoughts. Many times it was the furthest thing from our minds. Life in the black community was full, varied and dynamic.
Although Birmingham was a large city for the South and I’ve always considered myself as having grown up in an urban setting, for we were only a mile from the downtown business district, the atmosphere of our neighborhood was actually quite rural.