Mobile is angling for an annexation plan they hope will make the Port City bigger than the Magic City for the first time in 120 years.

It’s also occurring 52 years after Birmingham last had an opportunity to annex large sections of Jefferson County as part of the “One Great City” campaign.

Those plans failed, and the city has been freefalling in population ever since.

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Supporters of Mobile’s annexation say Birmingham’s past serves as a warning on what could go wrong if their annexation plans do not materialize. Birmingham’s struggles were included in a third-party analysis ahead of this month’s city council vote, which determined Mobile should proceed with a special election on annexation.

“We leverage our story off what happened to Birmingham in the past,” said Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson. “At one time, (Birmingham’s population) was at 360,000 residents in the 1960s. So now they are little less than 200,000. That is what can happen to you.”

Opponents to Mobile’s annexation say Birmingham is being held up as a scare-tactic ahead of a campaign that will determine if up to around 26,000 new residents should be added to Mobile.

Both cities continued a long trend of steady population decline, according to recent Census figures. Since the 2020 Census, Birmingham and Mobile have experienced around a 2% drop in population.

There is no date set yet on when Mobile will conduct a special election on annexation.

“I think Birmingham should be congratulated on what it decided to do by growing from within and supporting opportunities to grow the city in terms of business, cultural events and those kinds of things,” said Beverly Cooper, co-founder of Stand Up Mobile, a non-profit organization that has led the opposition to the city’s annexation push.

“There are ways to do this and not scare the community that you will be landlocked as if there is something wrong with that,” Cooper said. “I am in favor of seeing Mobile grow. But in the extent it grows, let’s bring back areas (in need of revitalization), and bring attention to them and bring some of the housing back that was torn down (in recent years).”

The attention on Birmingham is resonating in the Magic City – a nickname given to the city due to its rapid early 20th century growth.

Mayor Randall Woodfin, while speaking with the media last week, said the strategies of Mobile and the growth in Huntsville left him “motivated.” He hinted at laying out an economic plan with a focus on growing the city from within its existing boundaries.

“Birmingham is no longer in an annexation war,” Woodfin said. “There’s not a lot of unincorporated Jefferson County, particularly from a contiguous land standpoint for Birmingham to be in a position to annex.”

Past struggles

Once the nation’s 34th largest city in 1950, Birmingham has since plummeted to No. 133 and is no longer Alabama’s largest city, losing that designation in the 2020 Census to fast-growing Huntsville.

And if Mobile proceeds with its annexation plan, Birmingham will be vying with Montgomery in a narrow race for the third largest.

Birmingham has continued to see a steady population decline since 1960. The city is also relatively landlocked, meaning annexation is unlikely unless one of its surrounding cities unexpectedly decides to become unincorporated. Birmingham is surrounded 35 independent municipalities, or more incorporated suburbs than any other Southern city.

The city’s history includes multiple political and legal blowbacks toward annexation punctuated by civil rights struggles. Annexation efforts were foiled three times from 1959 to 1971, as the city’s white leadership at the time attempted to annex or merge with surrounding white suburbs.

According to Birmingham’s 2017 comprehensive plan, the annexation efforts “failed because of school desegregation, which was at the root of ‘white flight’ that increasingly affected the city during the 1960s and 1970s.”

“The biggest factor has probably been the fallout from the civil rights movement,” said Joshua Rothman, professor and chairman of the Department of History at the University of Alabama.

“In some measure, the perception by white people that the city had become ‘dangerous’ was surely at play,” he said, “though arguably that’s a euphemism for fear of having to live in the city with segregation laws, and it’s surely not a coincidence that numerically the largest drop off in population happened between 1960 and 1970.”

John Giggie, director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama, added, “There are cautionary tales in Birmingham’s history. It’s reluctance to attack the legacy of segregation for many decades is among them. That contributed to its inability to recruit and maintain in the post-industrial economy while Nashville was able to negotiate and work on those issues earlier and recruit and retain in the new economy, whether it was IT or information base.”

One Great City

A 1970 annexation campaign attempted to reverse the trend and was led by then-Mayor David Vann. It was dubbed, “One Great City,” and aimed at uniting various municipalities and unincorporated areas of Jefferson County under a combined metropolitan government. Backed by Birmingham businesses, One Great City’s polling suggested it had favorable support from people living outside the city limits.

But in the spring of 1971, a countywide referendum died in an Alabama legislative committee. No vote ever took place.

David Sher, publisher of “Comeback Town,” which advocates for sustainable growth in Birmingham, wrote that the failure of One Great City represented a “blown chance” that other Southern cities – like Nashville and Louisville – have been able to capitalize on through land annexations and a consolidation of government services.

“Vann’s ‘One Great City’ was defeated, and the population of the City of Birmingham went into free-fall,” Sher wrote in a 2016 piece.

Wayne Flynt, historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, said One Great City had a purpose that included expanding Birmingham’s city limits to Homewood, and the southern white neighborhoods, which would have extended the city’s size and “blocked the Balkanization” of Birmingham.

He said that white neighborhoods feared losing their autonomy and some also feared the prospect of taking in a city like Fairfield, where today over 90% of residents are Black.

“The origins of the movement were both civic (expansion to the Cahaba River, a healthier economic base than the declining manufacturing base, etc.) and for some – both Black and white – racial,” Flynt said via email. “Defeat of the movement was a real turning point in Birmingham’s history.”

Flynt added, “It also triggered a movement South of the Cahaba River that led to gridlock for commuters trying to get to work in the downtown and hastened ever more balkanization south into Shelby County.”

And the latest Census data yet again shows sustained growth in smaller and newer suburbs farther south of the city, fast-growing places like Chelsea and Calera.

In the Mobile area, growth is occurring in periphery cities like Semmes and Saraland. Nearby Baldwin County remains one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama.

The attempt to reverse Mobile’s population decline through annexation is illuminating challenges of bringing in large numbers of people in a mostly white area west of the city limits, while maintaining a slim majority-minority status.

Mobile’s voting age population is 49.7% Black-44.% white. Under the annexation proposal, the city would add in an extra 12,533 white voters and 5,103 Black voters. If the full annexation is approved, it would make Mobile’s overall voting age population almost split evenly between white and Black residents – 77,600 Black voters or 46.8% of the overall voting age population to 77,315 white voters, or 46.7%.

“Today, the voter suppression continues, but in disguise through the rose-colored glasses of annexation,” said Mobile native Shalela Dowdy, a law student and plaintiff in Milligan v. Merrill, the voting rights case under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

1980 annexations

Birmingham has seen successes with annexing undeveloped properties, namely in the 1980s through an aggressive push by the city’s first Black mayor.

Richard Arrington, who served as mayor from 1979-1999, led the annexation push first laid out by Vann in the 70s, which increased the city’s geographical size by the mid-to-late 80s.

Arrington’s leadership led to the annexation of large swaths of undeveloped properties along future growth corridors such as U.S. 280 – home to The Summit shopping center since 2014 — and Oxmoor Valley.

Some of the annexations, which were approved by voters, added about 10,000 new residents. The predominately Black communities like Brownville and Roosevelt City merged into the city during this era.

Arrington, in comments to AL.com on Thursday, credited Vann with providing him with advice about an annexation strategy called the “long lasso,” in which public rights-of-way, like a single road, that connects a city to distant parcels can be used as a form of contiguity – which is required legally for annexations.

Arrington said the effort doubled the land area of Birmingham.

“We expanded the city from 60 square miles to 120 square miles using that (long lasso) system,” Arrington said.

“For us, it led to an expanded tax base to create parks and jobs for Birmingham,” he said. “It left the city with a large surplus of tax revenues which otherwise (would not have been available without the annexations).”

Birmingham’s population, however, has not risen despite the activity, even as its tax base increased.

“Malls like the Summit and office buildings down U.S. 280 are big revenue generators both through the sales tax and occupational tax,” said Thomas Spencer, senior research associate with the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama and a former journalist with The Birmingham News who produced a 2017 report on Birmingham’s fragmentation. “Despite the outflow of people, jobs stayed concentrated in Birmingham and the (occupational) tax allows Birmingham to provide large scale services and amenities for those commuting in for work, recreation, and entertainment.

Future considerations

Woodfin, in comments this week, said his focus will be with laying out an economic blueprint for the city’s future, similar to what he says he sees from Stimpson in Mobile and Mayor Tommy Battle in Huntsville.

“What I love about Tommy Battle, who I respect as mayor, and what I love about Sandy Stimpson, who I respect as a mayor, is they’ve been in their seats for quite some time to figure out the long-term play of their city,” Woodfin said. “Tommy’s in his fourth term and I’m in my second. Same thing for Sandy. He’s in his third term. He’s had time to lay out his next play.”

Said Woodfin, “We’re laying out our next play. That next lay exists at this intersection of healthcare, innovation, biotech, followed by advanced manufacturing and technology, followed by logistics, etc. I’m in the beginning stages of laying out, over the last five years, of who we want to be.”

For Mobile, that next step includes adding enough residents to push the city above 200,000 for the first time since 1980, and to increase its population to its highest-ever mark.

The addition of up to 25,806 residents, though, comes at a time when the city continues to experience a steady population decline. Mobile, which had a population count of 187,041 in 2020, is down to 183,289, according to the latest Census data.

The lost population also comes as Semmes, incorporated with 2,897 residents in 2011, continues to aggressively move eastward, annexing land toward Mobile. The small city is now around 5,500 residents, up 10% from 2020 when the population was 4,991.

“We see a situation with Birmingham in which they are landlocked, and they are losing their numbers every year because people are moving into those (nearby) municipalities,” said Mobile City Councilman Cory Penn who represents the city’s largest Black council district. “They are coming to work (in Birmingham) and going back to those other cities (at the end of the work day).”

He added, “We didn’t want to put Mobile in that situation where we lose numbers as well, where we could put ourselves in an opportunity to grow our city, receive more federal funding and have more opportunities. We wanted to be prepared for that.”

Reporter Greg Garrison contributed to this report.