chapotraphouse

I mean one of MLK's most known writings has it in the title. and he was there because Birmingham, AL was one of the places with some of the sharpest civil rights struggles and campaigns and is usually talked about in US schools' US history classes when they get to the civil rights era. So I'd say it's pretty known.

Any American socialists who don't know anything of it really should considering its role in the Civil rights era (the 16th Street Church Bombing) as well as it being where the Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party originated and operated up until the 50s.

"In 1928, at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, an association of international communists, established the official line on the "Negro Question." Being that the region of the American South was dominated by cotton plantations and rich white elites despite a numerical black majority, the entire region would be defined as an "oppressed nation." The adopted resolution maintained that as an oppressed nation, African Americans had the right to self determination, (the control over political power as well as the economy,) and as such had the right to secede of the United States. In 1930, the resolution was further defined to account for the material differences between the North and South. The new resolution took the position that Northern Blacks sought integration and assimilation giving Blacks in the South the exclusive right to secession.

While it had been argued that South was impenetrable to radical politics and organizing, the Central Committee of the CPUSA chose Birmingham, the industrial center of the South, for the location of their headquarters for their newly establish District 17 chapter. This district encompassed, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

From 1928 to 1951, the Alabama Chapter CPUSA played its most important roles in terms of organizing and fighting against unemployment and the development of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, a court case involving a group of falsely imprisoned Black youths known as the Scottsboro Case, and for basic civil rights such as voting, to sit on juries, as well as housing and employment equality."

(lifted from Wikipedia but the sources are solid Hammer and Hoe and Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist’s Memoir)

I only know of Birmingham Alabama because of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham City Jail

I always joke that Black Sabbath are from Alabama

roll tide roll