| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929-1979. By Christopher MacGregor Scribner. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. xiv, 188 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-8203-2328-4.)

The comprehensive works of Bruce J. Schulman and Pete Daniel and the fine case studies of Ronald H. Bayor on Atlanta and Thomas Hanchett on Charlotte highlight the transformative role of federal policy in the South since the 1930s. Christopher MacGregor Scribner's well-researched and clearly written analysis of the impact of federal funding on Birmingham reinforces that growing literature, but it also underscores the limits of change, especially with respect to race. 1

There are two stories here, both of which support the author's thesis of the federal government's transforming role in Birmingham, but in physical, not racial, terms. Birmingham's leaders accepted federal funds, ignoring the social strings attached to the grants until the 1964 Civil Rights Act officially dismantled Jim Crow. Even then, the city moved glacially on desegregation and equal employment opportunity, forfeiting a 1968 Model Cities grant application in the process. By the 1970s, massive white flight rendered meaningful desegregation moot and left only the medical center complex and university as the one bright star in an otherwise dim firmament of a mostly poor, mostly African American city surrounded by affluent white suburbs. . . .

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