! i When Southern University moved to Birmingham in 1918, the city was young and small. The people who moved the college put it on a stony hump on Enon Ridge, the northern rim of Jones Valley. Town was, the brochure said, only an eight to ten minute bicycle ride away, and the campus only 1 Va miles from the city limit. In the valley, down where Third Avenue runs now, was a little creek and a sizable swamp, and Five Points West was still a dahlia nursery, but over to the west of the college, the steel mills were already industriously spewing smoke and fumes into a graying sky. Since then the city has expanded, taken in new land and changed the land. The creek no longer has its swamp, al- though it now stinks in continuous, sullen rebellion to urbaniza- tion. Dahlias, too, seem to grow just as well on less profitable ground, but the steel mills have endured and grown and been joined by other mills, making atmospheric purity a dim, myth- ical image in the municipal memory. Steel has for so long been theme and center of Birmingham ' s story and of Birmingham-Southern ' s. Steel brought money to Birmingham and because the people in Birmingham who wanted a college had some of that money and Southern Uni- versity of Greensboro had none, the college came. And all the while, as the city grew and rechanneled its creeks and dried up swamps, absorbed farms and spilled over out of its valley Birmingham influenced this college far beyond the tacts of name and location. Never, until the last few years, had anyone realized how completely this city and the region from which it draws its life have permeated the life and attitudes ot the college and the minds and spirits of the college s people Never have we been forced so persistently to the harsh task of analyzing and evaluating the true meaning of these few acres of rocky, poor — farm dirt; to the deep realization that the forces which stoke the furnaces have seldom fed the fires of the intellect.
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