Birmingham Southern College - Southern Accent Yearbook (Birmingham, AL)

Page 7 text:

What we ' re really trying to do in this book, and may- be it isn ' t even our |ob, is to impress you with the single historical fact of having lived in Birmingham during the past year. Our purpose is to help, or even make, you recall how things in this town and nation looked to you in that year. Without making a value |udgment for you, we want you to remember exactly how it was in this city in May, 1963. We would have you remember watching the rioters and riot-watchers gather in the afternoon, the great hairy cops with carbines and shotguns, the smell of old pine shacks burning in the night down in the black ghetto. Remember, long after you ' ve forgotten your spring quarter point average or S.G.A. elections or who you dated that spring, that ten blocks from you, America changed. There was,really, little noise and little pain for such a great battle, the meeting of hundred year old ad- versaries in Kelly Ingram ' s park. Remember, too, how deeply you were touched and untouched by it all; how strongly you pulled for whichever side was yours and how happy or sad you were at the end of each day, and remember how, during Birmingham ' s slow crucifixion, you went to class and took tests and sat in the cafeteria drinking your iced tea. i« ■■ -.

Page 6 text:

! 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.

Page 8 text:

In speaking of the past year and how it affected students on this campus, there is no way to omit November 22, 1963, and, really, little use to remind you that on that day two bullets struck and blew away most of John Kennedy ' s head. Surely, you must remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard of the shooting and, later, of the death. It was during finals,and most of us spent the whole weekend watch- ing the reports and funeral on television, knowing of the necessity for study, but yielding to the greater demand of seeing in the formalized grief of John Kennedy ' s funeral the true meaning of being an American, and seeing this more clearly than Americans have since World War II. These two events, the Negro Revolution and the assassination, formed the backdrop up- on which we played our individual lives. There is no need here to recount the specific facts. There will be books and magazines — thousands of words — to set them down. We ' re in no danger of losing from our national history exactly what happened and when, but this is the only book intended to help you recall the way it was with you in that time. This is all very fine, you may say, but what of my specific life; what does this ac- tually mean to me? It is really amazing, and frustrating,too, the mundane things which occupy us even in the midst of great and portentous times. After everyone, as we all did, took a few solitary moments to evaluate the enduring relevance in our individual lives of these events, after the secret interior cataloging and filing was over, the surface flow of our lives went on as before. No one may say in what exact direction or degree another ' s life was moved, but there is no doubt that each life was shaded in some way by the er- ratic mood and tempo of the past year. If our recent history was the canvas upon which each inscribed his own tiny and personal motif, we must all wonder what marks we left on that canvas, on ourselves, and on each other.