Birmingham, 1963

From Rick Perlstein's book, Before the Storm:

To its white citizens, Birmingham, Alabama, was a proud and grimy symbol of the South's industrial future, presided over by United States Steel Company's dwarfing works on its outskirts and a fifty-six-foot statue of Vulcan, Roman god of fire, in its bustling downtown-"Magic City," they called it, in wonderment at its population's doubling since the war.  To its black residents, who could be hardly called citizens, Birmingham was an everyday hell of quiet humiliation and frequent terror.  No segregation code was stricter ("It shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together...in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers"); nowhere were the consequences of transgression more terrifying.  In 1957 a local black minister name Fred Shuttlesworth announced his intention to send his children to white schools.  In retaliation, the Klan abducted a black man at random, castrated him, and poured turpentine on the wound.  Blacks lived on the east side of Center Street in Birmingham, whites on the west, and not for nothing were the borderlands in between nicknamed "Dynamite Hill."

Violence was burned into the city's soul.  U.S. Steel had been the last and the most viscious of the blue chips to accept industrial unionism in the 1930s.  The savagery of the battle shaped Birmingham's political culture.  In the early 1950s, U.S. Steel slowed down its hiring, then took advantage of the ensuing anxieties to demagogically install a low-tax, low-service city government.  As public safety commissioner, they chose a notorious savage who had got his start in police work as a union-busting goon: Eugene "Bull" Connor.