The Railroad Park and the Birmingham Jail

The Railroad Park and the Birmingham Jail
Or The Strange History of Jim Crow

This article flowed out of my consciousness as I was thinking about the construction of the New Railroad Park in Birmingham, Alabama and reading Martin King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail.

What is the reason for development in Birmingham? We are all in Birmingham and injustice is still here. We are all compelled by God to build the gospel of freedom and justice for all in this city, yet we reject the call again and again and again.

We are aware of the interrelatedness of all in our city, county, state and nation. We know that injustice to anyone is a threat to justice for everyone. Anyone who lives in Birmingham can never be considered an outsider or undesirable and excluded because of how they look or by what they have. So I continue to be deeply grieved that our leadership cannot acknowledge the conditions of poverty, homelessness and injustice in Birmingham and address these issues.

The Railroad Park is an expression of a broken promise to the poor and marginalized of Birmingham. It is the cause of the dark shadow of a deep disappointment to settle on us when we spend the scarce resources of our community on amenities for the wealthy and the deep injustice of no permanent supportive housing for the homeless is built or no quality regional transit constructed.

What majestic heights of understanding goodwill for all are enshrined in the Railroad Park? What beloved community is the fruit of its construction?
To long has our beloved Birmingham been bogged down in a tragic monologue that benefits the wealthy and powerful, rather than a dialogue with and for all of our residents that builds justice instead of parks.

We know through the painful experience of the 60’s that freedom and justice are never voluntarily given by the oppressor. Freedom and justice must be demanded by the oppressed. The Railroad Park is a call for new demands to be made with nonviolent direct action using the power of love to build justice and freedom. When we still see the large numbers of our people in Birmingham living in homelessness, poverty and deteriorating neighborhoods, still suffocating in the airtight cage of poverty in the center of an affluent region; our cup of endurance is about to run over!

We have stood on the sidelines and mouthed pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities to long. We have failed to advance the struggle for racial and economic justice in Birmingham for the poor and homeless. The Railroad Park is a new railroad to hopelessness and exclusion for the homeless.

But one day Birmingham will recognize the real reason for development in our city! We will with courage and a majestic sense of purpose build justice for all, not parks for some. We will rise up with our true sense of dignity and decide to build quality regional transit, affordable supportive housing, world class fully and equally funded public education, living wage jobs and healthcare for all.

We will do this instead of building parks that honor an oppressive past, because it was the railroads that spread Jim Crow across the south as C. Van Woodward makes clear in his book The Strange History of Jim Crow. We will build a future for all of Alabama, a future of action not a park in the past, a future of freedom and justice for all.

May God help us do these things!

R. Lawton Higgs, Sr.
June 9, 2010

How do we challenge the scapegoating of the poor and develop clear thinking and build justice in Alabama?

How do we challenge the scapegoating of the poor and develop clear thinking and build justice in Alabama?

On a recent trip to Saint Louis, Missouri to attend the United Methodist Women’s National Assembly we stopped for lunch. At lunch Nancy and I ate with one of the gentlemen on the trip. He asked us about our ministry at Reconciler and I shared with him the work we are doing to address the needs the homeless have for justice in Birmingham. He immediately changed the subject and began to scapegoat the poor who use their food pantry at his home church, denigrating them for the perceived abuses they use to take advantage of the charity offered by his faith community. This scapegoating is not an uncommon experience for me to hear as I relate my work with the poor and marginalized in Birmingham. As I was boarding the bus for the remainder of the trip, I decided to write a response to the common practice of scapegoating the poor in Alabama. What follows is the response I wrote.

Poverty creates crime, ignorance and disease. Poverty is the fruit of injustice. Poverty happens to people, it is not something they bring on themselves. This truth needs to be communicated. Injustice is the lack of access to resources and relationships that we need for meaningful and abundant life. When injustice reigns, poverty is created and grows.

If a society is organized to deny some of its members access to resources and relationships for meaningful life; the denied, the excluded will use their creativity to survive. These necessary creative survival responses are often outside the social mores’ of the dominant society. These survival strategies are often criminalized by the dominant group and the poor and marginalized are blamed for using the only survival possibilities they have.

An inadequate and limited charity system is not a substitute for justice. When injustice exists, abuse of the charity system is a necessary skill to live. Injustice or the denial of access to resources and relationships needed for a meaningful and abundant life is the fundamental theft perpetuated by the dominate society and experienced by the poor and marginalized. They are then driven to abuse a limited and insufficient charity system to survive for which they are scapegoated.
Rather than scapegoating the poor and homeless for abusing a weak charity system, it is more important to see that the tax structure that funds education in Birmingham City Schools at $2,400.00 per student, Jefferson County School System at $5,100.00 per student, and $6,800 per student in Mountain Brook Schools is the fundamental theft of access to quality education that produces and maintains ignorance, poverty and disease for the historically marginalized.

Instead of criticizing the hungry and sick for their impatience with the charity bureaucracy, why aren’t we impatient with our city, county and state for refusing to provide the matching funds to use federal dollars to build and operate a quality regional transit system? No quality regional transit system denies access to employment, healthcare, education, shopping, and recreation to tens of thousands of people who live in poverty. This denial is an overt robbery of the poor and marginalized and of our entire economy. Many would work and provide for themselves and their family with quality regional transit. It is not clear thinking or acting to denigrate the poor for manipulating an inadequate charity system when they are denied the access that quality public transit provides.

To deny human beings access to the legitimate economy by not providing meaningful work at a living wage is serious robbery. For a man or woman to work in a structure that denies a living wage is the generator of poverty and the generator of the abuse the poor cause in an inadequate charity system.

The lack of clear thinking and justice also results in the policy of punishment and removal as a way to address long term homelessness, another form of scapegoating. The long term or chronic homeless are single unaccompanied adults with a serious disabling condition who have been homeless for more than one year or with four periods of homelessness in the last three years. Studies across America have proven that it cost less to end chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing than it does to control the chronic homeless with punishment and removal using the police and courts. We are stealing from our whole community by not solving chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing.

Scapegoating the poor and marginalized instead of exposing injustice and building justice for all is limiting all of us and our whole culture. The poor and marginalized are not inferior and incompetent. They are victims of injustice. The next time you hear someone or the media scapegoating the poor and marginalized let it be a red flag for you. Identify the underlying injustice and contradict the scapegoating.

Scapegoating: –noun
The act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself.

Check out these web sites for personal stories of the struggle of the homeless.

http://homelessinbirmingham.blogspot.com/
http://www.prayforthehomeless.org/
http://homelessplight.wordpress.com/

R. Lawton Higgs, Sr.
May 31, 2010