Due to COVID delays, the official census count for the state of Alabama arrived today. Unsurprisingly, but nonetheless shocking to the senses, Alabama now finds itself with a new largest city. For decades, Birmingham, in the north central part of the Heart of Dixie, ruled as number one. Huntsville, in North Alabama, bordering the Tennessee Valley, has been making steady gains over time. To some extent, it was a fait accompli, but today is not a joyous day for many.
Now it's official. For a quick bit of history, Birmingham was founded officially in in 1871, during the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. It was a merger of three farm towns, most notably Elyton. Northern industrialists, exploring the ruined economy of the region, happened across easy access to all of the mineral and industrial elements necessary to make pig iron in one location—Red Mountain. For this reason, Birmingham was named after its older sister city in the United Kingdom. It also won a second nickname—the Magic City, due to how quickly its population took off in a relatively short period of time, from roughly 1881 to 1920.
Huntsville was largely rural and impoverished, until the establishment of Redstone Arsenal, built in 1940, and with it its connection to NASA. In 1960, Huntsville’s official population was 72,365. Just ten years later, it grew to 139,282, a gain of 340.3 percent. A piece of trivia. Had President Lyndon Johnson not been a Texan, the nearly-fatally crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft might have had to send out a distress call to Mission Control that read: “Huntsville, we have a problem.” Not Houston, as it turned out to be.
I am good friends with many people who, unlike myself, live in the city of Birmingham, not the suburbs, which continue to thrive. And I am not unsympathetic to Birmingham boosters, but feel deeply ambivalent.
Unlike Washington, DC, where I lived for eight years, gentrification to a large scale has not taken place. It exists here in a few small pockets, but I predict Birmingham's heyday is in its past. Birmingham made a series of fatal mistakes. One of them was declining to take on the building of a major airport, which Atlanta was glad to take off our hands. Another was to tear down our beautiful train station. Another one was to believe that well-paying, unionized US Steel jobs would always exist, and that we had no need to diversify our economy. Those steel jobs quickly went overseas, much as they did in the Rust Belt states. And, even more tragically, old racial wounds that have never truly healed have made substantial damage to the city's psyche.
We may be known soon mainly for our draconian Civil Rights history, which with a few notable exceptions, is, to many, much of what the city of Birmingham has to offer. If only...if only. I have mentioned here before that I am a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) graduate, spent four years on the Southside to achieve my degree, appreciated my education, and am grateful that a new stadium to showcase a winning football team has been completed. But aside from sporting events, a few venues for live music, a modest tourist district, a few fancy restaurants, and a few other points of pride, Birmingham has never had stable city government in decades. Mayoral elections are soon to be held, but many candidates are currently running and no real favorite has yet emerged.
And now we entertain, for the first time, the specter of playing second fiddle in population for the first time in a century and a half. No one is sure what this will mean for the time to come, but I am reminded of the truism that the only constant in life is change.
“The numbers released today by the Census Bureau are not surprising and reflect what we’ve known for a long time – the Rocket City is on the move,” Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said in a statement to AL.com Thursday. “The investments we’ve made in our infrastructure, public safety and quality-of-life make us attractive to job creators, from the largest industries to the smallest retail startups. Jobs bring people. We’re happy they’ve chosen to make Huntsville their home, and together we’ll build on our strong foundation in the years to come.”
“The numbers validate predictions we’ve heard for a while. And while we may be the biggest city in the state, we’re not going to stop striving to be the best in everything we do.”
Birmingham city is now essentially tied with Montgomery (Alabama’s capital city) in size - both are just below 201,000 people. Mobile (South, on the Gulf Coast), the smallest of Alabama’s “Big Four” cities, shrank slightly to 187,000. Huntsville, which was the smallest of the four in 2010, is the only one trending up.
As a native Alabamian, I am glad that the state grew enough to maintain its Congressional Districts, even though all but one of them are held by Republicans.
Alabama is home to roughly 5,024,000 people now, making it the 24th most populous state. The state as a whole beat expectations by about 100,000 people when statewide population totals were released earlier this year. Alabama grew by 5.1% since 2010.
But the fact remains, regardless of which city has the highest rate of population and growth, we are an impoverished, ill-educated, working class state. Once a part of the New Deal coalition, we have voted for a Republican for President every year since 1976, and that was only because Jimmy Carter was a native Southerner, who lived in Georgia, a state over. I don’t see that pattern changing any time soon. But I will also say that Alabamians are a uniformly polite, pleasant, and deferent people. We are, if anything, heavily underrated in areas like natural beauty, particularly the beautiful Gulf Coast and the awe-inspiring foothills of the Appalachians. Perhaps you can understand the love/hate relationship I have with my state of birth and current residence.
Enough liberals live in cities that I can find people who share my views, even if we are a minority. Should I travel into rural parts of the state (which are currently shrinking, but that’s another post for another time), I know I’ll be okay so long as I don’t talk about religion or politics. I will conclude here, stating as so many of us have as to why many residents of this state have confused cynicism with wisdom to such a degree that they have not chosen to get themselves vaccinated. But before I head down that rabbit hole, I will gracefully yield the balance of my time.
