The current mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, can pretty much go wherever he wants in the city these days. As a youth however he, and the other residents of the city who were of African descent, could not. They had to use specific restrooms or water fountains and sit in specific sections of theaters. One of those places was the Lyric Theatre. Recently renovated, the designers had to make a choice: remove/hide what had been the “colored” entrance to the theatre, or incorporate it into the $11 million dollar restoration. The decision: they placed a glass door with the words “Historic Colored Entrance” etched into at the poorly lit stairwell to the balcony that was walled off from the main lobby of the theatre. That’s where Black folks had to sit when they patronized the Lyric.
The question of what should be done with the architecture of white supremacy continues to be asked with increasing frequency. The “inequity built into the Lyric Theatre’s very architecture” is reminiscent of other locations, primarily in the Deep South but not exclusively.
Across the South, people are struggling with similar questions: What does a changing region do with the vestiges of back-alley service windows, segregated waiting rooms, dual water fountains and abandoned schools that once formed the skeleton of a society built on oppression?
Northern states have such reminders, too. A black heritage trail in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, includes all-black burial grounds and a plaque which explains that blacks were forced to sit in designated pews in New England churches through the mid-1800s. In Detroit, murals decorate a 6-foot-tall concrete wall built in 1941 to separate a new development meant for whites from an existing black neighborhood.
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“It has become more complicated today because people are more willing to think about the preservation of the architecture of white supremacy,” [Robert] Weyeneth [a University of South Carolina history professor who specializes in preservation] said. “Initially, no one wanted to save these things.”
The question has been asked with increased frequency and volume since the slaying of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in July of 2015. The confessed shooter, 19-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, wore the symbol of the Confederacy and had a Confederate States of America license plate on his vehicle. The New Orleans City Council voted in December to remove four Confederate monuments located throughout the city. In January, a Baltimore City Commission recommended the same for two Confederate monuments in that city. In Georgia, members of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have advocated for the removal of the Confederate engraving at Stone Mountain. The giant mountain of quartz and granite is the largest bas-relief in the world, depicting Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
The question of what to do with such reminders, and how to do it, will not be answered soon. But it should definitely continue to be asked.