This is an opinion column

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Today’s guest columnist is Terry Barr.

Not that long ago I was visiting with my friend, the Birmingham writer TK Thorne.

Her two nonfiction works, Last Chance For Justice and Behind The Magic Curtain, focus on the troubling and violent days of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.

Despite the darkness her work focuses on, TK’s voice shines through as a way of helping us all face the uncomfortable past so that we can see what we did or didn’t believe in then and who we are and want to be now.

Her dive into Birmingham’s dark history should make us hurt, and I don’t want to jump too far ahead in my story today. Let’s feel the hurt because if we don’t, then our past, Birmingham’s racial transgressions, will get swept too deeply into the dustbin of history.

But we should also celebrate writers like TK who do want us to see the uncomfortable truths, not just about Birmingham’s racial past, but also about the corners of “home” that many of us know nothing about and possibly have never heard of.

Reading such accounts, though we can barely believe they happened, can help us to see that today’s Birmingham can and should be lauded as a city full of creative writers who speak truth to the darkness.

For instance, in our conversation that day, TK asked me if I had read Mattie C’s Boy: The Shelley Stewart Story, a biography of former Birmingham DJ/citizen Shelley Stewart as told by Stewart to writer, and former Birmingham DJ, Don Keith. I had heard of Stewart, of course, through his work at WENN and WJLD.

I think I had even heard or read about those times when Stewart would communicate coded messages to the teenaged marchers during the months when downtown Birmingham was alive with protests attempting to end public segregation and racial discrimination. However, I didn’t know the story of Stewart’s upbringing—the violence he witnessed, the pain he suffered. I didn’t know how he lived for a time under the care of a white man.

I also didn’t know the story of Homewood’s Rosedale neighborhood.

I wish I had paid more attention to Stewart when he ruled the airwaves, but most white kids like me didn’t listen to WENN or WJLD. We missed so much music, so much life.

I missed other music celebrations and venues, too, around my native environs. A few weeks ago, I was reading the recent history of 1960’s Girl Groups—But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? By Laura Flam and Emily Siem Liebowitz—and ran across an item about the first integrated concert in Birmingham, held in 1963 at Miles College during the same season as notorious Klan rallies and the bombing of the AG Gaston Motel and the 16th Street Baptist Church.

The amazing show included The Shirelles, Johnny Mathis, and Ray Charles. How had I never heard of this event? When I looked into it further, I discovered a poster for the event on Birmingham writer Burgin Mathews’ website.

I thought Matthews name looked familiar, and sure enough, he had just published a history of Birmingham’s Jazz tradition, Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America that was already sitting in the “to read” stack on my desk.

You’ll likely recognize certain Birmingham jazz legends here like Sun Ra and Erskine Hawkins, but you’ll also learn the history of Parker High School (Industrial High School) band leader JT “Fess” Whatley, and the heyday of downtown Birmingham’s 4th Avenue district where the nightlife boomed in the 1930s through the 50s and where certain Black clubs would admit white people for shows, even though these shows were still segregated.

So much of this history I didn’t know, or had vaguely heard about. One startling fact to me as a particularly Bessemer native was that Blues originator and Florence, Alabama, native WC Handy, spent his formative years in Birmingham and worked for some of those years at a pipe shot in Bessemer. It was in Bessemer, according to Handy, that people who knew him began referring to him as “Professor” (Mathews 15-16). Again, how did I not know this—why had I never heard this about my home? Shouldn’t it have been celebrated and commemorated?

Toward the end of his study, Mathews also mentions another Birmingham writer, cartoonist/graphic novelist Howard Cruse. Cruse went to Birmingham Southern College in the mid-1960s and later wrote comic strips for The Birmingham Post-Herald, and the University of Alabama’s Crimson and White.

His most well-known work, however, is the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, first published in the 1990s and recently republished in its 20th Anniversary edition by First Second Press.

Cruse’s novel is a loose autobiography of his teen and early adult days in Birmingham, when as a closeted gay white man, he struggled to find himself and admit to himself his own truth.

The novel is set against the Civil Rights era in Birmingham (called “Clayfield” in the novel) and takes us on a journey through time. In that time, once again, we see that segregated Birmingham was never as strictly confining as we might think. Black and white, gay and straight people met at private homes, in churches, at mass rallies, and at gay clubs like “Rhumba” which in reality was 1st Avenue North’s Tito’s Lounge.

Cruse, who came out in the 60s himself and was legally married to his longtime partner Ed Sedarbaum in 2004, died shortly after the 20th anniversary edition of Stuck Rubber Baby was released. His willingness to address his own mistakes, his grief, and his joy in writing about his journey should be more widely known and celebrated.

And finally, likely the most well-known Birmingham author in this accounting is Daniel Wallace of Big Fish fame. Last summer, he published a nonfiction work, This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew. Wallace’s family lived in the Mountain Brook area of town, and as I read about places I knew pretty well, I kept feeling a bit strange, though of course, I had no idea why.

The story mainly focuses on Wallace’s brother-in-law, the cartographer, William Nealy, who eventually killed himself. Wallace looked up to Nealy and so wanted to understand his life and why he took it. I would want to know that, too, and the book does shed much light and so rewards us for following Wallace’s obsession with truth.

Nealy’s life was a mystery, definitely so. But buried within this mystery is another: a friend of both Nealy’s and Wallace’s named Edgar. And this is the point when I got that very strange feeling.

Have you ever known something before you’ve actually known it? I did with Edgar. I knew him, and I mean, I REALLY knew him. He worked downtown at Dugan’s for a time. I didn’t know him well at all, but I did know his brother. I went to college at Montevallo with Edgar’s brother.

And I lost track of both of them until I read This Isn’t Going To End Well. Let me just say that the title is more than adequate and true. Are some mysteries better left unrevealed? Sometimes, you don’t even know that a mystery really is a mystery, that it exists at all.

But that’s what reading will do for you, what history will do for you, and that’s why Birmingham and its citizens should know these writers and their subjects: Brave people who seek and want to reveal our truth. They should be so proud of their work.

And we should be, too.

Other columns by Terry Barr you might enjoy:

Terry Barr is a native of Bessemer. He has been a Professor of English at Presbyterian College in upstate South Carolina since 1987. His most recent essay collection, The American Crisis Playlist (Redhawk Publications 2021) is available at Amazon.com, and you can find his work at medium.com/@terrybarr.

David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).

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