The South Won't Rise Again

And thank God that it won't, because it was a truly awful, shitty place:

In many ways, the story of modern Birmingham starts on Center Street, a leafy hill lined with neat brick ranch-style houses. In the 1940s, Center Street was the city's color line. To some, the west side was the white side and the east side was in transition.
Standing at the top of the hill, Jeff Drew remembers when the first black families tried to cross that divide.
"If you wanted to get a house on the west side of Center Street chances are you were going to have some resistance from white folks," Drew says.
But Drew's family, along with other up-and-coming black professionals, moved to the west side of Center Street anyway in a determined effort to take on one of the most segregated cities in America. At first, Drew says, the Ku Klux Klan would burn the doors of the houses that African-Americans moved into. Sometimes members of the Klan would fire shots into the dark of night.
"Those big cathedral windows were what were being shot at all of the time," Drew recalls.
And then there was dynamite. Drew says they knew a blast was coming when they heard decommissioned police cruisers burning rubber up Center Street.
"Flying up the hill. They'd throw that bomb, and we used to marvel at how fast those guys could drive. Cowards. Right up this hill," Drew says.
Those trips were so frequent that Center Street became known as Dynamite Hill, which was quite a distinction in a city that had its own notorious nickname: "Bombingham."
Birmingham historian Horace Huntley says white supremacists, with the power of the government and police behind them, were trying to intimidate civil rights pioneers.
"There were 40 plus bombings that took place in Birmingham between the late 40s and the mid 60s. Forty-some unsolved bombings," says Huntley.

What a truly twisted, fucked up region.  And yet, I can strike up a conversation with somebody any day of the week in Ohio and find out they think the world would be a better place if "the NAACP and the liberals hadn't forced political correctness down our throats."  Listening to the gun nuts, you'd think they themselves had government officials throwing bombs at their houses every night.  However, I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.  The folks in the story above actually did have bombs thrown at their houses, and it was the government officials, or their sanctioned henchmen doing it.  But, Goddamn, things were better in the olden days, when "the ....... (pick your favorite racist term) knew their place and stayed in their part of town."  Racism may no longer involve throwing bombs at people's houses, but it sure as fuck isn't dead.