Birmingham
City
Downtown Birmingham Vulcan 16th Street Baptist Church City Hall Alabama Theatre Birmingham Museum of Art
Flag Seal Logo
Nicknames:  "The Magic City", "Pittsburgh of the South"
Location in Jefferson County, Alabama
Birmingham Location within Alabama Show map of Alabama Birmingham Location within the United States Show map of the United States
Coordinates: 33°31′03″N 86°48′34″W / 33.51750°N 86.80944°W / 33.51750; -86.80944
Country	United States
State	Alabama
Counties	Jefferson, Shelby
Incorporated	December 19, 1871
Named for	Birmingham, United Kingdom
Government
• Type	Mayor – Council
• Mayor	Randall Woodfin (D)
Area [1]
• City	149.54 sq mi (387.31 km2)
• Land	147.02 sq mi (380.77 km2)
• Water	2.52 sq mi (6.53 km2)
Elevation [2]	597 ft (182 m)
Population  (2020)[3]
• City	200,733
• Estimate  (2023)[3]	196,644
• Rank	129th in the United States 2nd in Alabama
• Density	1,365.37/sq mi (527.17/km2)
• Urban	774,956 (US: 58th)
• Urban density	1,521.7/sq mi (587.5/km2)
• Metro [4]	1,115,289 (50th)
Demonym	Birminghamian
Time zone	UTC−6 (CST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC−5 (CDT)
ZIP Codes	35201-35224, 35226, 35228-35229, 35231-35238, 35242-35244, 35246, 35249, 35253-35255, 35259-35261, 35266, 35270, 35282-35283, 35285, 35287-35288, 35290-35298
Area codes	205, 659
FIPS code	01-07000
GNIS feature ID	2403868[2]
Website	birminghamal.gov

Birmingham (/ˈbɜːrmɪŋhæm/ BUR-ming-ham) is a city in the north central region of Alabama. Birmingham is the county seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2022 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 196,910, down 2% from the 2020 census,^[3] making it Alabama's third-most populous city after Huntsville and Montgomery.^[a] The broader Birmingham metropolitan area had a 2020 population of 1,115,289,^[4] and is the largest metropolitan area in Alabama as well as the 50th-most populous in the United States. Birmingham serves as an important regional hub and is associated with the Deep South, Piedmont, and Appalachian regions of the nation.

Birmingham was founded in 1871, during the post–Civil War Reconstruction period, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, notably, Elyton. It grew from there, annexing many more of its smaller neighbors, into an industrial and railroad transportation center with a focus on mining, the iron and steel industry, and railroading. Birmingham was named after Birmingham, England, one of the UK's major industrial cities. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry.^[5] The city may have been planned as a place where cheap, non-unionized, and often African-American labor from rural Alabama could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast.^[6]

From its founding through the end of the 1960s, Birmingham was a primary industrial center of the South. The pace of Birmingham's growth during the period from 1881 through 1920 earned its nicknames The Magic City and The Pittsburgh of the South. Much like Pittsburgh, Birmingham's major industries were iron and steel production, plus a major component of the railroading industry, where rails and railroad cars were both manufactured in Birmingham. In the field of railroading, the two primary hubs of railroading in the Deep South were nearby Atlanta and Birmingham, beginning in the 1860s and continuing through to the present day. The economy diversified during the later half of the twentieth century. Though the manufacturing industry maintains a strong presence in Birmingham, other businesses and industries such as banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have risen in stature. Mining in the Birmingham area is no longer a major industry with the exception of coal mining. Birmingham ranks as one of the most important business centers in the Southeastern United States and is also one of the largest banking centers in the United States. In addition, the Birmingham area serves as headquarters to two Fortune 500 companies: Regions Financial and Vulcan Materials Company,^[7] along with multiple other Fortune 1000 companies.

In higher education, Birmingham has been the location of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine (formerly the Medical College of Alabama) and the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry since 1947. In 1969 the University of Alabama at Birmingham was established, one of three main campuses of the University of Alabama System. Birmingham is also home to three private institutions: Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College, and Miles College. Between these colleges and universities, the Birmingham area has major colleges of medicine, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, law, engineering, and nursing. Birmingham is also the headquarters of the Southeastern Conference, one of the major U.S. collegiate athletic conferences.

History

Founding and early growth

Birmingham was founded on June 1, 1871, by the Elyton Land Company whose investors included cotton planters, bankers and railroad entrepreneurs. It sold lots near the planned crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads, including land formerly a part of the Benjamin P. Worthington plantation. The first business at that crossroads was the trading post and country store operated by Marre & Allen. The site of the railroad crossing was notable for the nearby deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone – the three main raw materials used in making steel.

Birmingham is the only place worldwide where significant amounts of all three minerals can be found in close proximity.^[8] From the start the new city was planned as a great center of industry. The founders, organized as the Elyton Land Company, borrowed the name of Birmingham, one of England's main industrial cities, to advertise that point. The growth of the planned city was impeded by an outbreak of cholera and a Wall Street crash in 1873. However, it began to develop shortly afterward at an explosive rate.

The town of Elyton, Alabama, and several other surrounding towns were absorbed into Birmingham in 1911. The start of the 20th century brought the substantial growth that gave Birmingham the nickname "The Magic City", as the downtown area developed from a low-rise commercial and residential district into a busy grid of neoclassical mid-rise and high-rise buildings and busy streetcar lines. Between 1902 and 1912 four large office buildings were constructed at the intersection of 20th Street, the central north–south spine of the city, and 1st Avenue North, which connected the warehouses and industrial facilities stretching along the east–west railroad corridor. This impressive group of early skyscrapers was nicknamed "The Heaviest Corner on Earth".

Birmingham was hit by the 1916 Irondale earthquake (magnitude 5.1). A few buildings in the area were slightly damaged. The earthquake was felt as far as Atlanta and neighboring states.

While excluded from the best-paying industrial jobs, Black Americans joined the migration of residents from rural areas to the city for its opportunities. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Birmingham especially hard as sources of capital that were fueling the city's growth rapidly dried up at the same time that farm laborers, driven off the land, made their way to the city in search of work. New Deal programs put many city residents to work in WPA and CCC programs, making important contributions to the city's infrastructure and artistic legacy, including such key improvements as Vulcan's tower and Oak Mountain State Park.

The wartime demand for steel and the post-war building boom gave Birmingham a rapid return to prosperity. Manufacturing diversified beyond the production of raw materials. Major civic institutions such as schools, parks and museums, were able to expand their scope.^[9]

Despite the growing population and wealth of the city, its residents were markedly underrepresented in the state legislature. Although the state constitution required redistricting in accordance with changes in the decennial census, the state legislature did not undertake this until the early 1970s, when forced by a federal court case to enforce "one man, one vote". In addition, the geographic basis of the senate, which gave each county one seat, gave undue influence to rural counties. Representatives of rural counties also had disproportionate power in the state house, and failed to provide support for infrastructure and other improvements in developing urban population centers such as Birmingham. At this time, the General Assembly ran county governments as extensions of the state through their legislative delegations.

Birmingham civil rights movement

In the 1950s and 1960s Birmingham received national and international attention as a center of the civil rights struggle for African-Americans. Locally the movement's activists were led by Fred Shuttlesworth, a fiery preacher who became legendary for his fearlessness in the face of violence, notably a string of racially motivated bombings that earned Birmingham the derisive nickname "Bombingham".^[10]

A watershed in the civil rights movement occurred in 1963 when Shuttlesworth requested that Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Shuttlesworth had co-founded, come to Birmingham, where King had once been a pastor, to help end segregation.^[11] Together they launched "Project C" (for "Confrontation"), a massive assault on the Jim Crow system. During April and May daily sit-ins and mass marches organized and led by movement leader James Bevel were met with police repression, tear gas, attack dogs, fire hoses, and arrests. More than 3,000 people were arrested during these protests, almost all of them high-school age children. These protests were ultimately successful, leading not only to desegregation of public accommodations in Birmingham but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964.^[12]

While imprisoned for having taken part in a nonviolent protest, Dr. King wrote the now famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, a defining treatise in his cause against segregation. Birmingham is also known for a bombing which occurred later that year, in which four black girls were killed by a bomb planted at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The event would inspire the African-American poet Dudley Randall's opus, "The Ballad of Birmingham", as well as jazz musician John Coltrane's song "Alabama".

In 1998 the Birmingham Pledge, written by local attorney James Rotch, was introduced at the Martin Luther King Unity Breakfast. As a grassroots community commitment to combating racism and prejudice, it has since then been used for programs in all fifty states and in more than twenty countries.^[13]

Recent history

In the 1970s, urban-renewal efforts focused around the development of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which developed into a major medical and research center. In 1971, Birmingham celebrated its centennial with a round of public-works improvements, including an upgrade of Vulcan Park and the construction of a major downtown convention center containing a 2,500-seat symphony hall, theater, 19,000-seat arena, and exhibition halls. Birmingham's banking institutions enjoyed considerable growth as well and new skyscrapers started to appear in the city center for the first time since the 1920s. These projects helped diversify the city's economy but did not prevent the exodus of many of the city's residents to nearby independent suburbs. In 1979, Birmingham elected Dr. Richard Arrington Jr. as its first African-American mayor.

The population inside Birmingham's city limits has fallen over the past few decades, due in large part to "white flight" from the city of Birmingham proper to surrounding suburbs. The city's formerly most populous ethnic group, non-Hispanic white,^[14] has declined from 57.4 percent in 1970 to 21.1 percent in 2010.^[15] From its highest population of 340,887 in 1960, the population was down to 200,733 in 2020, a loss of about 41 percent. That same period saw a corresponding rise in the populations of the suburban communities of Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Alabaster, and Gardendale, none of which were incorporated as municipalities until after 1950.

In 2006, the city's visitors bureau selected "the diverse city" as a new tag line for the city.^[16] In 2011, the Highland Park neighborhood of Birmingham was named as a 2011 America's Great Place by the American Planning Association.^[17] In 2015, the International World Game Executive Committee selected Birmingham over Lima, Peru and Ufa, Russia, for the 2021 World Games, but the event was delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[18][19] After the 2020 census, Birmingham lost its long-standing status as Alabama's largest city, with Huntsville overtaking Birmingham in total population, though Birmingham remains the state's largest metropolitan area. Birmingham hosted the 2022 World Games in July 2022.

Geography and climate

Geography

Birmingham occupies Jones Valley, flanked by long parallel mountain ridges (the tailing ends of the Appalachian foothills – see Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians) running from north-east to south-west. The valley is drained by small creeks (Village Creek, Valley Creek) which flow into the Black Warrior River. The valley was bisected by the principal railroad corridor, along which most of the early manufacturing operations began.

Red Mountain lies immediately south of downtown. Many of Birmingham's television and radio broadcast towers are lined up along this prominent ridge. The "Over the Mountain" area, including Shades Valley, Shades Mountain and beyond, was largely shielded from the industrial smoke and rough streets of the industrial city. This is the setting for Birmingham's more affluent suburbs of Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, and Hoover. South of Shades Valley is the Cahaba River basin, one of the most diverse river ecosystems in the United States.

Sand Mountain, a smaller ridge, flanks the city to the north and divides Jones Valley from much more rugged land to the north. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad (now CSX Transportation) enters the valley through Boyles Gap, a prominent gap in the long low ridge.

Ruffner Mountain, located due east of the heart of the city, is home to Ruffner Mountain Nature Center, one of the largest urban nature reserves in the United States.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 151.9 square miles (393 km²), of which, 149.9 square miles (388 km²) is land and 2.0 square miles (5.2 km²) (1.34%) is water.

Surrounding suburbs

Most of the metropolitan area lies outside of the city itself. In 2007, the metropolitan area was made up of 7 counties, 102 cities, and 21 school districts.^[20] Since then Alabaster and Pelham have broken away from the Shelby County School System to form their own school systems. Some argue that the region suffers from having so many suburbs because companies can receive large incentives to move a short distance to another city, with no net gain in the area's economy.^[21]

Birmingham suburbs (in order of population, 2020 US census):

Cityscape

Climate

Birmingham has a humid subtropical climate, characterized by hot summers, mild winters, and abundant rainfall. January has a daily mean temperature of 43.8 °F (6.6 °C), and there is an average of 47 days annually with a low at or below freezing, and 1.4 where the high does not surpass freezing.^[22] July has a daily mean temperature of 81.1 °F (27.3 °C); highs reach or exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on 65 days per year and 100 °F (38 °C) on 2.^[22] Precipitation is relatively well-distributed throughout the year, sometimes falling in the form of snow during winter; however, 10.3 inches (26.2 cm) fell on March 13, 1993, during the 1993 Storm of the Century, which established the highest daily snowfall, one-storm, and winter season total on record. Normal snowfall for 1981–2010 is 1.6 in (4.1 cm), but, for the same period, median monthly snowfall for each month was zero.^[22]

The summer months are hot, with high humidity. Most of the precipitation that falls in the summer are from thunderstorms, most of which occur in the afternoon and evening hours.

The spring and fall months are pleasant but variable as cold fronts frequently bring strong to severe thunderstorms and occasional tornadoes to the region. The fall season (primarily October) features less rainfall and fewer storms, as well as lower humidity than the spring, but November and early December represent a secondary severe weather season. Birmingham is located in the heart of a Tornado Alley known as the Dixie Alley due to the high frequency of tornadoes in Central Alabama. The greater Birmingham area has been hit by two F5 tornadoes; one in Birmingham's northern suburbs in 1977, and second in the western suburbs in 1998. The area was hit by an EF4 tornado which was part of a larger outbreak in April 2011. In late summer and fall months, Birmingham experiences occasional tropical storms and hurricanes due to its proximity to the Central Gulf Coast.

The record high temperature is 107 °F (42 °C), set on July 29, 1930,^[23] and the record low is −10 °F (−23 °C), set on February 13, 1899.^[24]