Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son

In 1963, Birmingham was the scene of some of the worst racial violence of the civil rights era. Police commissioner "Bull" Connor loosed dogs and turned fire hoses on black demonstrators; four young girls at Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded in a black church; and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, defending his activism to fellow ministers.

Birmingham native Paul Hemphill, disillusioned with his hometown, had left home to pursue a journalistic career, so he witnessed these historic events with the rest of the world through newspaper and television reports. "That grim old steel town," he writes, "was the most blatantly segregated city of its size in the United States of America, and most of us regarded it with the same morbid fascination that causes us to slow down and gawk at a bloody wreck on the highway."

Thirty years later, Hemphill returned to Birmingham to explore the depths of change that had taken place in the decades since the violence. In this powerful memoir, he interweaves his own autobiography with the history of the city and the stories of two very different Birmingham residents: a wealthy white matron and the pastor of the city's largest black church. As he struggles to come to terms with his own conflicting feelings toward his father's attitudes, Hemphill finds ironic justice in the integration of his childhood neighborhood and a visit with the black family who moved into his family's former home.

In 1992, when Paul Hemphill went back to live for a while in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, his sister, Joyce, held a dinner for the returning prodigal. At one point Joyce's husband asked Hemphill what his new book was going to be about. Paul said: "Me and Joyce, Mama and Daddy, old friends, steel, all of that. And 1963." Leaving Birmingham is a powerful and passionate memoir of a man's odyssey, of growing up, under the stare of the statue Vulcan's stern eye, in a city of "muscle and sweat and danger." Thirty years later, he is back, "trying to make something positive of my past, precisely at a time when the city itself was on a similar mission." And so 1963, the blast furnace period in Birmingham's life, forms the symbolic centerpiece for this moving book. It was the year that Martin Luther King was arrested and composed his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. It was the year of Bull Connor's dogs and firehoses. It was the year, on a September Sunday morning, Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, that four girls wearing white dresses were killed when a dynamite blast went off in the church's basement. By then Hemphill was gone from Birmingham, seeking his fortune as a journalist, and to escape from what Birmingham had become as epitomized by the truck driver father he loved, "this good man now eaten by racism as though it was cancer." Now Hemphill set out to revisit his past. He found his boyhood friends, and shared their memories of baseball, beer, and girls. He visited the city's political leaders, past and present, of both races, and set down the voices of these citizens who sought in their ways to dampen the horrors of the past. He sensed the effort the city was making by building its new Civil Rights Institute. His mother and father gone, he found renewal with his sister. And as he left his parents' last home, now occupied by an African-American family, he felt "an elation - a feeling that all of the blood and the tears shed over all the

Publishers Weekly

Raised in the racist climate that pervaded Birmingham, Ala., in the 1940s and '50s, Hemphill ( Too Old to Cry ) returned to his hometown in 1992 to research the violence that had erupted there during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Interwoven with his well-written and affecting personal struggle to cope with the racist attitudes of his truck driver father are the candid reminiscences of a white suburban matron and an African American minister who also lived through desegregation. Hemphill examines the 1963 bombing of a black church by the Ku Klux Klan that resulted in the deaths of three young girls, as well as the corrosive career of police commissioner ``Bull'' Connor, who attacked black demonstrators with dogs. This is an interesting anecdotal history marred only by the misplaced insertion of the author's complaints about his first wife and other family members. (Sept.)

Paul Hemphill, a former columnist for the Atlanta Journal, is the author of numerous books, including most recently The Ballad of Little River, a book about Little River, Alabama, site of a black church burning in 1997. Hemphill lives in Atlanta with his wife, Susan Percy.