| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980. By Charles E. Connerly. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xviii, 360 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2334-4.)
Charles E. Connerly's case study of housing, policy, and segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, lends weight to the argument that the pattern of residential apartheid found in both northern and southern cities was organically linked to political action, public policy, and a process of black-white negotiation that (though often skewed and terribly one-sided) spurred both organization and protest within the African American community. "The Most Segregated City in America" is very much a part of a growing literature that is muting regional distinctions (especially on racial questions) while placing southern cities in a discernable American "mainstream."	1
Connerly's examination of both pre- and postwar generations demonstrates the city's consistency of purpose in restraining black movement. The desire to codify residential segregation was so great in Birmingham that it led to defiance of the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). Not only did the city adopt a racial zoning plan after the Court had outlawed such ordinances, but it implemented the blueprint until halted by a direct court challenge in 1951; by that time Birmingham's engagement in a wider "zoning movement" linked an emergent planning profession and public planning agencies with the consolidation of segregated—and, for blacks, disadvantageous—housing patterns (p. 46).	. . .

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