This website will serve to educate the general public on Black people and the Stuff That Black People Don't Like. Black people have many interesting eccentricities, which include disliking a litany of everyday events, places, household objects and other aspects of their everyday life.
Black people are an interesting subject matter and this website will chronicle the many problems in life that agitate this group of people.
To suggest material, please contact sbpdl1@gmail.com
In 2007, The Birmingham News published a ground-breaking series that, for all intents and purposes, was a penetrating look at the legacy of the city since the Civil Rights victory and the consequences of Black-rule for Birmingham [Which Way Forward?, by Jeff Hansen, 3-11-2007]:
In the 80 years from 1890 to 1970,the city of Birmingham had a mix of people that was about 40 percent black and 60 percent white, with most black residents segregated into areas with poorer housing close to industrial sites. Beginning about 1970, the mix began to change as whites left the city. By 2005, Birmingham’s population had flipped — 76 percent black and 22 percent white.Some of Birmingham’s aging neighborhoods have become islands of the poor. A recent Brookings Institution study found that 28.9 percent of residents within the city limits live in poverty — the eighth highest percentage among America’s 100 largest cities.
What can we call this? White people abandoned Birmingham to Black majority rule, so perhaps we can call this "reverse colonialism".
It is this article from the "Which Way Forward?" series that showcases the frightening consequences (especially the financial consequences) of what the deeming of "Restrictive Covenants" as Unconstitutional meant for the long-term viability of neighborhoods that go majority Black [Blight: "It was a real nice neighborhood", Birmingham News, Thomas Spencer, 3-11-2007]:
In 1965, Virgia Wallace’s parents paid $10,000 for their piece of the American dream, a two-story, fourbedroom house in then-predominantly white Fountain Heights. Perched on the hill just north of downtown, the Wallace home had a view of the city skyline and beyond to Red Mountain. Wallace remembers her father walking to work at Loveman’s department store. “It was a real nice neighborhood,” Wallace said.
“Quiet.”
But the retail jobs left downtown, nearby industries shut down and the drain left holes in the community.
As years passed, Wallace, now 66 and an English teacher at Huffman High, watched families move away. Between 1980 and 2000, the census tract that includes her home lost 39 percent of its population. Paint peeled on the abandoned houses. Windows were broken. Porches slumped. The house across the street burned and wasn’t rebuilt, leaving a vacant lot of scraggly privet and tall winter-brown grass littered with wind blown paper and plastic bags.
An apartment complex up the street began renting to “a different kind of people,” Wallace said. They weren’t invested in the community. They sold drugs. The neighborhood became plagued with burglaries and violence.The older generation that stayed kept their houses neat, their yards trimmed, beds planted with flowers. But they also ornamented their windows and doors with burglar bars. In the early 1990s, Wallace fled the crime and blight that became the standard in neighborhoods across the inner city. She bought a house in Roebuck. After she left, the old home was broken into several times. Windows were broken, replaced with plywood. There didn’t seem any sense trying to sell it. “There wasn’t anyone interested in buying it,”she said.
Today, Wallace still owns the home. It has an assessed value of $11,300, just $1,300 above the price her parents paid 42 years ago.
Retail jobs left downtown Birmingham because the capital, white people, left the city. Since the remaining Black population had no purchasing power - or credit (thus the need and reliance for payday and Title Loan stores now instead of banks) - the commercial viability of the new, shiny, post-civil rights Black-run Birmingham was incapable of zilch.
Most shocking though is this: the author didn't take into account inflation. Since the majority-white Fountain Heights went all-Black, we are told the house only appreciated in value by $1,300. Because most journalist have no financial acumen, they can be forgiven for this transgression against the monetary literate among us.
What cost $10000 in 1965 would cost $65085.24 in 2007.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2007 and 1965,
they would cost you $10000 and $1553.07 respectively.
That same house would cost $65,000 today. You are looking at an 83 percent drop in value from the days when Birmingham was still under white control, as compared to the value of the home post-civil rights era and the institution of Black-control in The Magic City.
Factor that out across the whole neighborhood, and you begin to realize the enormity of the financial impact that Black people have had on property value. Now, think of areas of the city that once maintained high property values (when whites resided in the subdivisions) and that were capable of both appreciating on a yearly basis and generating tax-revenue for the city to grow.
Do you now understand the concept of "reverse colonialism?"
The true costs of the turning of Birmingham over to Black-rule are... demoralizing. [Can these neighborhoods be saved/The blight in our midst, Birmingham News, by Thomas Spencer, 8-19-2007]:
79 percent of the 20,997 homes in Jefferson County that are considered less than 50 percent good by the county Board of Equalization. Sixty percent of them lie within the city of Birmingham, where 1 in 5 homes is in poor condition.
79 percent of the 8,595 properties in Jefferson County that have been in the hands of the state — many of them essentially abandoned by owners with property taxes unpaid — since at least 2005. Sixty-eight percent are in Birmingham.
The exodus created a broken real estate market in depressed neighborhoods where sellers outnumber buyers — and a city where thousands of houses and apartments were left to decay. What’s more, the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham predicts urban blight will continue to swell.
The commission projects that by 2030 the number of households will decrease by 17 percent in East Lake and Woodlawn, 22 percent in the neighborhoods around the airport, 27 percent in North Birmingham, 13 percent in Pratt City and Ensley, and 17 percent in West End. Since 1990, the city of Birmingham has demolished 7,948 single-family houses. This year, the city plans to spend $750,000 tearing down 423 more. Even at that pace, a backlog of more than 200 homes will remain. And the list keeps growing.
Wealth has evaporated in Birmingham faster than a spilled glass of water in the hot Southern summer sun since the take-over of the city Black-political control.This is the legacy of what the civil right movements has done to one American city.
This is "reverse colonialism."
Factor that 83 percent depreciation in property value from the home highlighted in the story above across the whole city (Blight caused by the new Black majority) and you realize the importance of restrictive covenants in maintaining not just the financial integrity of a community, but actually maintaining a community with any social capital as well.
Bear Bryant at Legion Field, once the capital of football in a long dead America
Though the University of Alabama had already started recruiting Black athletes in the late 1960s to play on the famed Crimson Tide football team, coach by Paul "Bear" Bryant, the 1970 season would mark the final year an all-white team would be fielded. And it was on September 12 of that year in a game played at legendary Legion Field in Birmingham that an undersized Crimson Tide team (coming off of the two worst seasons since Bryant took over the team in 1958 -- largely due to changes in the rules that ended the era of "two-way" players and created the modern-era of specialized offensive and defensive units) would be soundly defeated by an integrated University of Southern California team:
On Sept. 12, 1970, a freshman basketball player named Wendell Hudson rode a bus packed with athletes to Birmingham, taking his seat at Legion Field. He watched as Sam Cunningham, the black USC fullback, torched the all-white Crimson Tide defense for 135 yards and two touchdowns in a 42-21 Trojans win. Hudson didn't like seeing his school embarrassed, but there was something sweet about a black player showing the holdovers from the Jim Crow South what they were missing. It was a loss for the Crimson Tide, but it represented something different, Hudson says, to the black community.
"I don't think there's any question," he says. "It was a win."
Later, it was suspected that Bryant brought the Trojans to Birmingham to show locals that it was time to desegregate his team. Was this all it took to be a contender again, five years after Alabama's most recent national title?
Bryant's actions, whether they were premeditated or not, prevented the Tide from falling behind -- despite resistance from boosters and even in the statehouse. Some say that game at Legion Field was the turning point; others say the story has been overblown, its significance mythologized.
Hudson says that, if nothing else, that fall Saturday helped to open minds and to ease the stress directed toward young black players.
"If Coach Bryant thought it was OK," Hudson says, "the state of Alabama thought it was OK."
Alabama was coming off of an 8-3 and 6-5 season (1969 and 1970) and though the Tide would field only two Black players in 1971 ( a virtually all-white team exacting revenge and beating heavily favored USC 17-10 en route to an 11-1 season - after going 6-5-1 in 1970 - thanks to the institution of the wishbone offensive attack),the idea that Black players were the key to winning national titles was set in the eyes of Bryant and his faithful -- the Crimson Tide Nation.
Starting the 2012 season, the University of Alabama football program is more than 70 percent Black: at a school whose enrollment is less than five percent Black male. And yes, Alabama has won two of the last three national titles; yes, Alabama won national title in 1992; and yes, Bryant would win 1973, 1978, and 1979 (teams that were overwhelmingly white), but the question of at what cost is never, ever asked.
The answer rests in the sorrowful state of what was once the south's greatest city, Birmingham, a veritable Black hole full of decaying memories of a storied past. The saddest building still standing that reminds those who look upon it of an era long dead is Legion Field, the 85-year old football stadium that played host to many of the Bear's most famous wins: (Alabama Forced to Abandon Unsafe Legion Field, NBC News, August 19, 2004)
So much for “The football capital of the South.”
Once proud to proclaim itself as the gridiron hub of an entire region, the city of Birmingham’s 77-year-old Legion Field is in such disrepair it’s no longer safe to use the 9,000-seat upper deck, which has structural problems. Its metal supports are dappled with peeling gray paint and rust.
With renovation or repair unlikely, the city and the University of Alabama on Thursday said they were ending their contract, meaning the Crimson Tide would no longer play any home games at the 81,000-seat stadium. The announcement marked the end of a long association between one of the South’s most storied football programs and the old field on Graymont Avenue.
“The Crimson Tide has played some of its greatest football at Legion Field, and Alabama fans will forever enjoy fond memories of those wonderful games,” athletic director Mal Moore said in a statement.
But none of those hold a candle to images of the stadium’s past: coach Paul “Bear” Bryant leaning on a goalpost during pregame warmups or Alabama vs. Tennessee on the third Saturday in October.
Legion Field was allowed to decay because the white tax-base fled Birmingham after the post-Civil Rights world made it untenable for white people to live safely and peacefully in the Magic City. Once Black people took control of City Hall, the precious little tax-revenue collected had to pay for basic services; maintaining a stadium that was but a symbol of the old "Jim Crow" was luxury that Black people couldn't afford.
At exactly the moment the University of Alabama football integrated (1971), the city of Birmingham died
In 1992, the inaugural Southeastern Conference Championship (SEC) game would be played at Legion Field. After one more game in 1993, it was announced that the game would be moving from Birmingham to Atlanta, largely because the Georgia Dome was a more adequate facility for hosting the game. Also, because the city hadn't gone as Black as Birmingham, Atlanta offered more attractions and safer streets for the alumni and fans who would attend the game.
Nothing captures the fall from grace of the self-proclaimed Football capital of the South better than this: As 85,214 fans were preparing last Saturday to go to Auburn's Jordan-Hare Stadium, where Alabama would defeat Auburn 28-17, only about 5,000 people, many of them mommies and daddies, were gathered at 83,000-seat Legion Field in Birmingham to watch 12 of the city's youth football teams play six games in the 32nd annual Shug-Bear Bowl. For much of the 20th century it was the games played at Legion Field that allowed Birmingham to adopt the aforementioned billing, which stretches in large, painted letters across the facade of sections 33 through 37 of the 72-year-old stadium. The slogan was particularly true on those Saturdays when the Crimson Tide and the Tigers engaged in the blood rivalry that brought all other activity in the state to a halt. But when Alabama made it official in February that beginning in 2000, as part of a new contract, it would host its renewals of the season-ending civil war on campus rather than at Legion—a change Auburn had made 10 years ago—big-time football at the House That Bear Built effectively came to an end. Ah, but it breathed once. It was at Legion in 1970, after Sam Cunningham led Southern Cal to a 42-21 rout of the Crimson Tide, that Bear Bryant finally became convinced that 'Bama needed a new kind of player—one with a black face. No doubt you've heard the line that emerged from that game: Sam Cunningham did more for integration in Alabama in three hours than Martin Luther King Jr. did in a decade. It was at Legion in '81 that Bryant passed Amos Alonzo Stagg's career victory mark of 314 with a 28-17 win over Auburn.
So whither Legion Field? Around Birmingham there seems to be little of the warm and fuzzy feeling attached to Legion that there is to Rickwood Field, the city's historic minor league baseball park, which is being lovingly restored. Art Clarkson, a Birminghamite who once owned the minor league Barons, has a plan for Legion: "Let's get 30,000 people lined up around the stadium, sing a few songs, make a few speeches and—wham!—blow the thing up."
Perhaps it was the sad story of losing the Alabama High School championship games to the campuses of Auburn University and the University of Alabama that illustrate the sad ability for those Black people in control of modern-day Birmingham for allocating money to keep the buildings and infrastructure they inherited from white flight in working conditions:
The Super 6, Alabama's annual high school football championship series, is leaving Birmingham and will be played in Auburn and Tuscaloosa for the next six years. The Alabama High School Athletic Association on Wednesday approved a six-year agreement to move the state football championship games from 83-year-old Legion Field. The series will alternate between stadiums at Auburn University and the University of Alabama.
Birmingham's Legion Field had hosted the football championships every year since 1996. The championship games for the state's biggest high schools have been at Legion Field for four decades. Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Smoot said she was stunned by the decision. "For me, it's a loss of sales tax once again in this county that we just can't afford. We're going to have to figure a way to replace not only this event but the money it generates," Smoot said.
Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford said the city's bid included doubling financial support for both events. The mayor's office said it had budgeted $50,000 in financial support for the basketball game playoffs and doubled its pledge to $100,000.
"I had sweated what the results would be," Langford said. "All and all, I'm delighted because, to be perfectly candid, we raised the offer so high because we knew what we were faced with -- inadequate facilities."
Langford said the city continues to risk losing events unless new venues are built. Both the BJCC and Legion Field are outdated and inadequate, he said.
"Had we moved on that domed stadium or just shown the intent, the football games would never have gone to Tuscaloosa," he said. "No matter how much paint we put on Legion Field, it is a stadium that has served the state well, but is outdated."
Legion Field: Won't be demolished because of its "Civil Rights" importance
Jordan-Hare Stadium at Auburn and Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa are both old stadiums as well, but the alumni of each school are able to engage in capital campaigns that bring revenue and donations in to the schools for improvements to both the stadium and to the campus. The 71 percent Black residents of modern-day Birmingham... lack that financial acumen and planning ability for ensuring the structural integrity of the buildings they inherited from white flight and long-term initiatives for building capital to pay for renovations.
In 2007, the Birmingham News published a special report called Birmingham at a Crossroads: the reality is the city of Birmingham crossed the Rubicon on September 12, 1970.
It is a dead city as long as Black people are in control of the city's destiny, and a recent story about the inhabitants of the neighborhood that surrounds Legion Field illustrates this point powerfully (Neighbors around Birmingham's Legion Field languishing with blight, Birmingham News, December 4, 2011):
Boarded-up houses, darkened storefronts and a gutted hotel line the path thousands took recently on their annual caravan to Legion Field, where vendors and spectators indulged in a weekend of entertainment, celebrity and football.
Long after the echoes of music and roaring crowds of the Magic City Classic drifted past her house and faded until next fall, Iris Billups remains in Legion Field's shadow, where blight and neglect are her closest neighbors.
"After a period of time, I guess nobody cared," said Billups, a retired New York schoolteacher who returned four years ago to her family home off Graymont Avenue, one of only a few occupied houses on her block. "People moved away, and the people who owned houses died.
"Their children didn't move back and it just deteriorated."
Residents, planners and development experts say that's a problem not just for residents of Birmingham's Smithfield community, but for anybody who wants to keep Legion Field viable and attract more events to the 84-year-old stadium. Its future is linked to the struggling neighborhood in which it sits, they say.
With longtime plans for a domed stadium in the city shelved and a proposed UAB on-campus stadium axed by University of Alabama trustees, Legion Field remains the sole venue for major football games in Birmingham. Mayor William Bell has said he's working on bringing more games to the stadium and has announced upgrades to be completed in time for next month's BBVA Compass Bowl.
But some say revitalizing the surrounding community is just as crucial a need as improvements to the stadium itself.
Redevelopment plans have been pitched over the years, most recently in 2003, with little action. But with work under way on the city's first all-new comprehensive plan in 50 years and Bell proposing a $75 million bond referendum for yet-to-be-named projects across the city, hopes have been rekindled for improvements to the area around the stadium.
"What do you have to offer the people to come into the neighborhood?" Billups said, citing the scarcity of retail, restaurant and other development in the area for both visitors and residents. "The city has to think in terms like that. Why would we want to lose Legion Field? That's the only thing we have going."
The marketability of facilities such as Legion Field depends on visitors' experiences both inside and outside, said David Fleming, president of Operation New Birmingham. "In general, it is clear from the trends of stadiums and sports facility development that people think about developing those facilities in context and not in isolation," he said.
Improving the condition of the area around the stadium is critical to the venue's marketability, said Arthur Allaway, a University of Alabama marketing professor.
"Some of it is just cleaning the streets and painting, because empty buildings that look good aren't dangerous-looking, while burned-out buildings don't look too attractive," Allaway said. "It will take private money in the long run, but in the short term, a commitment to the area from the city would go a long way."
Allaway said cosmetic improvements, along with incentives for redevelopment, should be the city's first steps.
Billups' father and uncle built the family house the same year she was born, 1950. After retiring, she returned to a street and community drastically different from the one she had left in 1972.
"You don't hear anything about this community until the next Classic comes," Billups said, sitting in the living room where black-and-white portraits of her mother and father still sit on the vintage furniture of her youth.
Back when the photos and furniture were new and Billups' house was filled with family, Legion Field was a premier sports destination hosting several Alabama football games a year, including the Iron Bowl matchup with Auburn. Those teams are long gone, and the statue of Paul "Bear" Bryant just past the resting lions at the gate stands as a memorial to Legion Field's place in sports history.
But Billups and others say the stadium and its neighborhood need not be consigned to sports manuals, yellowed newspaper clips and old television reels.
In 2003, the Graymont and College Hills neighborhood associations commissioned Auburn University's Center for Architecture and Urban Studies to canvass the area and draft a master plan for its rebirth.
The group led by Cheryl Morgan, director of Auburn's Birmingham-based urban studio, produced concepts that included preservation of historic homes, new neighborhood-based businesses and landscaping changes at Legion Field, making the area more park-like.
Morgan said she knows the drawings of trees at the stadium, and of fresh new homes mixed with renovated older ones near a new retail commercial district, are visionary. "We really believe that you should set the bar high," Morgan said. "Part of what we believe is that the neighborhoods really do have the most responsibility and opportunity to make things happen locally, but they need tools to help them build partnerships to attract economic development to their area."
Morgan said Smithfield's location just west of downtown and its long history are assets that could aid in a revitalization.
"I'm a stubborn optimist. I look around and see so many amazing things in the city," she said. "Neighborhoods are living, breathing things, and change happens incrementally. Managing the change is one of the things that good planning helps you do."
Allaway said the area, which includes Birmingham-Southern College to the west, has elements that could be marketed to developers, including a natural customer base of students, residents and stadium users in addition to a supply of cheap land.
"There's got to be a market, and if there's a market, then there's an opportunity," he said. "All the commercial real estate guys are pretty smart in knowing what an opportunity looks like. Every place goes down and comes back up eventually.
Somebody could get in and get in cheap, and bring in some retail."
Fleming -- the former director of Main Street Birmingham, a neighborhood revitalization agency -- said plans such as the Auburn study require extensive support to analyze what is doable and put it into action.
"Somebody's got to be focused on making that happen and in that specific place," he said. "That's one of the challenges with redevelopment, keeping a focus and sustained effort of what's truly going to work in the marketplace."
City Councilwoman Maxine Parker, chairwoman of the Parks and Recreation Board that oversees Legion Field, agreed that Smithfield redevelopment should be tied to any effort to promote the stadium.
Birmingham is at a disadvantage in part because other cities have what is absent here, she said.
"When people go to other cities for games, when the game is over they want additional activities," she said. "Every time I went to a game I wanted to find the next place to have dinner and the next place to shop. You don't have it now, but if you make it a top priority you could have it soon."
City Councilman Johnathan Austin, whose district contains the neighborhood, agreed the city must shift more attention to the area.
"It's as if everybody has forgotten that there is a neighborhood around Legion Field that once was a thriving neighborhood," he said.
Change can occur gradually with city support, he said. Austin cites the recent vote to allow a Family Dollar store off Graymont. While that rezoning created a dispute between residents who backed it and members of a nearby church who opposed it, Austin said the store is an example of fledgling commercial interest in the area that must be championed.
"That may seem like something small, but in the large scheme of things, when is the last time we've had a new building built in Smithfield?" he said. "We don't have to go in and build huge grocery stores, but we can build neighborhood markets. We have an opportunity for neighborhood revitalization that we can mimic and replicate throughout the city."
Birmingham's project to develop a new city-wide master plan could shine new attention on the Auburn study, said Paul Neville, president of the College Hills neighborhood and Smithfield Community. "Moving from ideas to resources and implementation -- that's been our challenge," he said.
Neville said Legion Field, with its proposed green space and redesign of McLendon Park, could mimic the success of other neighborhoods where parks serve as anchors. Capital needed to begin any major overhaul could come in a proposed $75 million bond issue that Bell announced recently.
Bell, who lives in College Hills and represented the area for years as a councilman, wants a citywide vote by early 2012 to finance projects across the city. The mayor has not named specific projects but said he would meet with each council member to compile a list of needs.
Repeated efforts to reach Bell for comment on possibilities for the area around Legion Field were unsuccessful.
Billups can easily give city officials her own list of needs, pointing out the number of empty houses on her street. That includes the Parker House, the home of A.H. Parker, founder and principal of the high school bearing his name. That house, and others in the area, were designed by Wallace A. Rayfield, whose other work included Sixteenth Street Baptist Church downtown.
The late principal would have to look closely to recognize his former home past the boarded-up windows. The city bought the house in 2001 and has stabilized it, but efforts to reuse it remain stalled.
"There are plans that the city has had for Smithfield, and they need to blow the dust off of them," said Emanuel Ford, a Birmingham Board of Education member and former longtime neighborhood officer. "It's not that the citizens have not raised their voices and given their ideas. It's just that sometimes it takes a long time to get something done. When you ride through Smithfield and you see all the blight and lots where houses used to stand, you wonder what happened."
What happened, Ford said, was that city officials turned all their attention to downtown revitalization while the neighborhood just west of downtown declined.
After years of little progress, Ford admits his optimism has dimmed a bit.
"You still keep pushing; you don't give up," he said. "I guess as we get older we learn to keep working, but then we also learn to deal with reality."
Urban Blight? Declining property value? Virtually no legitimate economic activity? Crime and poverty? All hallmarks of a community that is all-Black. And not once in Joseph Bryant's article for the Birmingham News do you learn that the area around Legion Field has been all-Black for decades.
Once, the driveways of Black homeowners around Legion Field served as parking spots (and big-time money generators) for Alabama alumni and fans when they would attend games where the beloved Coach Bear Bryant would the Crimson Tide to victory. This all ended when Black political power took over Birmingham and completely neglected the infrastructure and public buildings they inherited from white flight, Legion Field included.
Now, the neighborhoods around Legion Field no longer accommodate University of Alabama alumni, students, and fans tailgating before a big game; they instead accommodate the camera crews of A&E's The First 48, with 71 percent Black Birmingham serving as one of the main cities for this show about murder and the police response to heinous crimes
Legion Field needs to be demolished, like all of Birmingham; bulldozed, razed and ultimately, rebuilt again. But it won't: it will sit, decaying (with echos of a glorious past haunting all who enter the stadium; if you close your eyes you can even see the shadows of the 1971 Iron Bowl participants, as undefeated Auburn and Alabama battled in the last true game between the schools -- when both schools only had two Black players each, who were recruited for both academics and their athleticism), with the "blight" created and sustained by the Black residents of the neighborhood surrounding the stadium a reminder of the type of community they can create.
This is the true legacy of that September 12, 1970 game; the destruction of an entire state, though people are still too busy yelling "Roll Tide" or "War Eagle" to notice.
Dogs protecting civility then; Black crime destroying civilization in Birmingham now
The Civil Rights movement, we are told, represents the watershed moment in world history where good triumphed over evil (read In Birmingham, They Love the Governor). Really, all the Civil Rights era represents the weaponization of equality (we'll just call it weaponized equality) -- meaning, every failure by Black people after the evil world of segregation was firmly supplanted can only be placed on the lingering vestiges of inequality, requiring the allocation of billions of federal tax dollars to remedy the problem.
That, and a radicalized Department of Justice and EEOC stalking the land for any sign - real, imaginary it doesn't matter - that Jim Crow might be trying to make a comeback.
Well, down in Birmingham, the only thing "coming back" is a vicious reminder of why Jim Crow was necessary to begin with, especially the allocating of law enforcement the ability to make examples of the criminal in very public manners as a way to deter crime.
Please remember that Birmingham is now 71 percent Black and Birmingham Public Schools have a student body population that is 98 percent (virtually every student receives a free/discounted lunch) Black, and enjoy this article from the dying Birmingham News - white people no longer read this paper, save for the Sports section, for it is a running tally of the Black crime and Black dysfunction they left behind for the safe suburbs of Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, and Hoover - illustrates why men like Bull Conner and George Wallace will one day be recognized as prophets, men who dared warn of what weaponized equality would produce
(Birmingham area teens' violent crimes alarming to law enforcement, July 29, 2012, Carol Robinson):
Artavius Underwood and Reginald Mims sit in the Jefferson County Jail charged with capital murder as adults along with their 17-year-old friend, Rashad Stoves.
Investigators say the three teens brutally murdered five people in an Ensley house in January, but they are not the only local youngsters locked up and awaiting trial for violent crimes most often linked to more seasoned suspects.
The number of teens charged with violent crimes is alarming, local law enforcement officials say. Forty-four teenagers -- kids between the ages of 13 and 17 -- were arrested in the first half of 2012 in Birmingham and unincorporated Jefferson County for the crime of robbery.
The acts and ages of the perpetrators are disturbing, says Jefferson County Chief Deputy Randy Christian.
"Combine a gun with lack of maturity, a devil-may-care attitude, lack of respect for life, and tragedy is what you get," Christian said. "We have to find a way to interrupt the cycle."
In the first six months of this year, Birmingham police arrested 39 teens ages 13 to 17 for robbery. Of those, 37 were robberies of people, and two of businesses.
Six teens were arrested for murder, one for attempted murder, 17 for felony assault and 11 for rape.
In May, three teens ages 14 and 15 were arrested in a violent holdup at a west Birmingham store. The teens, wearing masks and brandishing a gun, burst into Frank's Wireless on Bessemer Road and one of them almost immediately opened fire. No one was injured.
In June, two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old were charged in the deadly drive-by shooting of 16-year-old Brandon Dozier. Also in June, a Birmingham man was shot dead in the street. The 16-year-old who fired the shots was cleared when the district attorney said the shooting was clearly in self-defense.
"We are extremely concerned with what we have seen as a community regarding serious juvenile crime," said Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. "We've researched it, but interestingly enough, most experts cannot pin the cause on any single factor."
The white citizens of Birmingham once stood firmly opposed to Black-Run America (BRA), knowing that handing power over to Black people would unleash forces so indescribably destructive that the Black political class would refuse to try and stop wave after wave of Black crime and instead place the blame on whites who left (obviously so they could safely raise their children in suburbs with no Black people crime and no Black classmates good schools). By white people leaving Birmingham, they took the jobs away too (why Black people can't start business and maintain thriving economies is not up for debate); and the good schools; and the safe streets; and the working government; and the tax-base.
But wait: reading the piece above, you wouldn't know it was a Black crime problem that plagues Birmingham (unless you had taken a crash-course in unfortunate Black first names). Unless you watched The First 48, that A&;E TV show seemingly shooting exclusively in The Magic City.
When people are murdered in Jefferson County, chances are the killer was a male under 25 using a gun.
More than half of the accused killers in the county were 24 or younger, according to a Birmingham News analysis of homicides from 2006 through 2009.
Nine times out of 10, the victims were shot to death.
The percentage of homicides with defendants under age 25 who used guns in Jefferson County substantially exceeds the national average, statistics show.
In Birmingham, where nearly three-quarters of the county's murders occurred, the disparity was even worse from 2006-2009.
Ages 16 through 24 are the killing years here.
That age group comprised 56 percent of the accused killers in Birmingham and 54 percent across the county those four years.
"My wife's brother also was murdered in Birmingham," he said. "I don't know many cities where the chief and the chief's wife have both lost siblings to murder in that city." The toll was especially harsh on black families. A substantial number of young black men in the city and county wound up in prison or a coffin. Statistics show:
Black males were 80 percent of the homicide defendants in majority-white Jefferson County and 89 percent in majority-black Birmingham. The national average was 57 percent.
More than 70 percent of the victims in Birmingham were black males, versus 43 percent nationwide in 2007, the only year a comparison was possible.
Guns were used in 86 percent of Birmingham homicides, and 83 percent in the county as a whole, versus 68 percent nationwide. Birmingham's rate is higher among defendants ages 16 through 24.
What happened after the cameras left Birmingham, and the media packed its bags, heading back north after the photos and video damning the white southerners had been broadcast to the rest of the nation and the world, strategically showcasing snarling dogs and hoses?
Birmingham in 2012 represents the great victory of Civil Rights and weaponized equality; we get to see a great city fall completely apart with 100 percent Black political control and not one person may publicly state the problems in The Magic City are the results of that Black control (or, in the case of high crimes, lack of Black self-control).
What Happened When the Cameras Left: Birmingham will be available Christmas 2012. The next project of SBPDL is a look at what happened to those cities that were the first to fall to weaponized equality; the first to fall victim to the Civil Right's movement.
And this time, it won't just be a book: there will be a 20-minute documentary (videos are the future, or so I'm told).
In the book “Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America,” an important quote is attributed to Howell Raines, the editorial page director of paper.
On. p.29, we learn:
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Raines had sat on the sidelines during the mid-sixties civil rights demonstrations there, leaving him with a lifelong sense of Southern guilt and a determination never again to shrink from declaring his beliefs and opinions. Embracing a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision, he once declared that “Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.”
Birmingham tried white racism; then it went all Black. That failed too.
The road of racism or the road of brotherhood. The road less taken, or something like. Right Frost?
Birmingham was once the capital of the South, but then the combined forces of ABC/CBS/NBC and the New York Times worked to showcase the city as one on the verge of racial Armageddon, where police dogs and water hoses kept Black people in their place.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The Alabama Department of Education will take over the Birmingham school system on Wednesday after the Birmingham Board of Education tonight declined to pass a cost-cutting plan.After months of stalling and delaying a state financial plan that included mass layoffs, the Birmingham Board of Education officially rejected it tonight.State Superintendent Tommy Bice said during a telephone interview tonight -- after a more than three-hour Birmingham school board meeting -- that he will formally intervene in the district's operations Wednesday morning. The intervention will include the appointment of a chief executive officer and chief financial officer who will run the day-to-day operations of the district.
"Because of the resolution that was passed by the state Board of Education, we will begin full intervention tomorrow," Bice said. The state school board authorized Bice nearly two weeks ago to intervene in Birmingham's operations if it failed to pass a financial plan at tonight's board meeting.
It should be noted that the enrollment of Birmingham City School System is 98 percent Black; outside of a smattering of Teach for America overly-energetic white faces, an over-whelming tide of Blackness performs the task of educating, administrating, managing, and leading the system.
The road of racism attempted to keep Black people from assuming political control in Birmingham; now with Jefferson County (home to 71 percent Black Birmingham) declaring the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, one wonders what the road of brotherhood that was begrudgingly forced on the city actually achieved.
When compared to Atlanta, a city that purportedly walked hand in hand together down the path of brotherhood (though for those paying attention to SBPDL, the inverse of this is actually true), Birmingham seems stuck in 1st gear. When discussing why Charlotte was beginning to usurp Atlanta as the top city in the South, Atlanta’s Black Mayor Kasim Reed said:
Reed compared the situation to the early 1960s when Birmingham was the southern leader in commerce, but lost that title to Atlanta because of its attitude on civil rights. See: Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Birmingham police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor.
Atlanta, the mayor noted, was more progressive. “Birmingham has never caught up since,” Reed said.
Atlanta went down the road of brotherhood for as long as the road would take them; as we have repeatedly shown, that road was paved with good intentions, masked as a racial truce called “The Atlanta Way.”
Always remember: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Now, with Metro Atlanta drowning in sea of underwater mortgages (courtesy of the Black Gold Rush to The Black Mecca), the AJC publishes this dire story the same day Birmingham School System – 98 percent Black, mind you – gets taken over by the state of Alabama:
Atlanta is in crisis. That's not the message you'd expect to hear from the Metro Atlanta Chamber, the pro-business group that usually puts a cheerful face on the region's future. But it's at the heart of a plan the group unveiled Monday to jump-start the region's economy.The stark description is a focus of the "Forward Atlanta" initiative, a plan developed for the chamber to help the region regain its mojo. It puts more of an emphasis on fostering startups and developing businesses already here rather than luring companies to relocate.
"Part of the problem is because we grew so fast for so long that even when we settled down, it doesn't feel normal," said Roger Tutterow, a Mercer University economics professor who said "crisis" is an exaggeration. "Once you go from being toward the top of the heap toward more middle of the pack it feels like unfamiliar territory."
Sam Williams, the chamber's president, said, "It's very simple: This is the worst economic downturn in our lifetime and Atlanta is lagging in the recovery. If you're in a crisis, the first thing you've got to do is admit you have a crisis. And that's what we're doing. If you don't have a big and bold plan to get out of it, then our economy won't recover until 2020 or beyond."
The business leaders come armed with daunting figures. Metro Atlanta is only expected to recover about 19 percent of the jobs it lost during the recession by the year's end, the chamber said, far behind many of its regional and national rivals. And the region has lost almost as many jobs as it created since 2000, growing only about 50,000 jobs during the decade. It's a far cry from the booming 1990s, when Atlanta added 70,000 jobs to 80,000 jobs a year.(Business boosters admit Atlanta in 'crisis' amid effort to boost city's economy,Greg Bluestein, June 25, 2012)
Metro Atlanta was once home to white flight communities, which fueled economic growth in the suburbs of The City too Busy to Hate that became the envy of the nation; now, it is increasingly home to Black refugees, descendants of those who partook in the Great Migration of Southern Blacks out of the South, who now return back South because they have helped destroy the economic vitality of cities like Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cleveland, and parts of Chicago.
If you’re visiting Atlanta and aren’t looking to be shot in the face, swarmed by smack dealers, stopped by cops merely for being white, or set ablaze by an HIV-positive crackhead squatter, stay away from the area known as “The Bluff.” There are several more wholesome attractions only a few blocks southwest in downtown: At tourist traps such as the World of Coca-Cola, the CNN Studio, and the Georgia Aquarium, the thrills are more benign than being slit in the throat with a box-cutter.
“The Bluff” covers two Atlanta neighborhoods officially known as English Avenue and Vine City. Part of Vine City was designated in 2010 as America’s fifth-most-dangerous area. Some say The Bluff got its name because its narrow, hilly, one-way streets give it a fortress-like sense of isolation, but locals now boast that BLUFF means Better Leave U Fucking Fool. It is bounded on the east by Northside Drive and on its three other sides by roads named after black Georgia civil-rights leaders: Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard, and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. It is therefore a testament to the, er, accomplishments of black Georgia civil-rights leaders.
“Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.”
So said Howell Raines.
The road of brotherhood in Atlanta birthed the Black Hole; based on the fact that Birmingham is now a majority Black city, strangely resembling 90 % Black Detroit in its decrepit state, one can realize that not just Southerners, but every American needs another road to go down.
Left to their own devices, Black people become an economic burden to productive people (primarily, white tax payers), who must forever work and see their wealth redistributed as punishment for their white guilt.
The world is nothing more than all the tiny things you left behind.
- Gran Torino
In reading the powerful essay on Highland Park, Michigan (Return to a Darker Age) that HW put together, the whole concept of the Visible Black Hand governing economics came to me in a moment of clarity rivaling the epiphany the esteemed Dr. Emmett Brown had when he visualized the flux capacitor.
A movie set where the Visible Black Hand of Economics is on its finest display
By a strange twist of fate, the Clint Eastwood-directed film Gran Torino was set in Highland Park. Odd, the population of the actual city is 93 percent Black; watching Eastwood's insipid movie, you'd have never known this fact.
If you've been a regular reader of Stuff Black People Don't Like, then you are aware that some key terms for understanding life in Black-Run America (BRA) originated here: Climate Change; the Black Undertow; Man-Made Climate Change; Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs); Black Fictional Heroes; and now, we give you the reality of the Visible Black Hand governing economics.
While reading about the nearly all-Black inhabitants of Highland Park and their inability to create, innovate and even maintain an economy (with the telltale remains of a long-gone civilization providing them shelter, signs of structural inequality built by a people who fled for a safer city), my mind drifted to the city envisioned by Henry Ford once his Highland Park Ford Plant was built and thriving roughly 100 years ago.
Is 2012 Highland Park, where the Highland Park Schools recently failed an Emergency Manager Review, the vision Ford had as he looked upon plant back in 1912 is dead. Between 1910 - 1920, Highland Park would expand more than an order of magnitude in its population (from 4,000 to 46,000). Now, the population of Highland Park is around 11,000 and the last inhabitant to leave won't have to be reminded to turn the lights off: just as 42,000 home owners in Wayne County could soon lose their homes because they can't pay the taxes, Highland Park recently turned off 66 percent of its streetlights:
Highland Park, Michigan, a city in the greater Detroit area, is the latest town to implement dramatic austerity measures, according to the Associated Press.
How many millions of people worked in Detroit, punched their card, worked long-shifts at the factory,all the while hoping that their children would one day live in a better city than they did? How many thousands of people raised families in Highland Park, walking their children down the same sidewalks that are now bathed in the silent darkness where laughter once preceded it?
White people left Highland Park - well, they abandoned it really - to the current Black inhabitants of the city. Just like thousands of other cities across the nation, the fate of Highland Park was sealed when the whites left. No formal surrender took place nor was a ceremony commemorating the transfer of power necessary.
In economics, invisible hand or invisible hand of the market is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace... individual ambition benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions.
In Black-Run America, the ultimate aim of the government, the church, the media, the entertainment industry, combined with the academic sector and the private sector is the enhancement of the quality of life for Black people to the expense of everyone else.
Worse still, it all comes off the dime of everyone else through a redistribution of tax-revenue that flows to Black people via TANF/Welfare, EBT/Food Stamps, Section 8 housing, and the prison industry with the attendant costs of police protection, incarceration, probation, and court system maintenance, all of which disproportionately incur against whites.
It has been official government policy for some time that the collective needs of Black people trump individual ambitions in America, negating the entire concept of Smith's invisible hand. DWLs understand, hence their desire to live in Whitopia's like Portland, San Francisco, Boulder, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. (where DWLs priced Blacks out of the housing market and drove them into Prince George's County) where the nullifying presence of visible Black Hand governing economics has been minimized.
[It] illustrate[s] why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is actually not a net-benefit to society.The parable, also known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy, demonstrates how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are "unseen" or ignored.
The Climate Change in major metropolitan areas like Detroit, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Milwaukee is a form of destruction. Knowing that the Black people who inherit the city will face structural inequality because they lack the ability to collectively sustain an economy - whether it's a major city like Detroit or a small one like Highland Park - the destruction of that city's tax base is foreordained.
You can see the visible Black Hand of economics at work when you drive into areas of city where commerce was once prevalent. Be it a mall, a shopping center, a restaurant, a strip mall, or an autonomous car dealership, an infallible indicator you have drifted into a Black Undertow city is the sign that civilization once flourished there but has since been replaced with hair accessory stores, liquor stores, pawn shops, and title-loan lenders.
Unless you plan on removing the population that was instrumental in a city's decline, we have no reason to rebuild these cities (The population that was instrumental in its ascent left because of the influx of the Black Undertow, anyway). Thus, the money spent to try and bring recovery to Detroit or Birmingham is of no net-benefit to society. The visible Black Hand of economics is at work in these cities, just as Bastiat's parable.
Black people had nothing to do with building Detroit into a world-class city; they had everything to do with its removal from that select list of world-class destinations, though. The same goes for Highland Park, a city that Dirty Harry himself couldn't save now.
Aren't convinced of the awesome power that the visible Black Hand of economics has over our lives? Let's take a look at a city that experienced an unhealthy dose of Climate Change in a span of just 20 years. Spanish Lake (outside St. Louis) was 99 percent white in 1970; it is now 77 percent Black. It's a safe bet that when it was an all-white city, the police primarily dealt with ticketing teenagers driving too fast or drinking underage. Now, they are forced to deal with the Black Undertow which preys upon everyone:
County police have responded so many times to calls from Countryside Townhomes that they are now posting officers at the 787-unit apartment complex that has become synonymous with trouble in the Spanish Lake area.
Of the 6,525 calls for police help logged by the 1st Precinct since the start of 2009, more than 3,600 were from that area — for a murder, robberies, assaults, burglaries and other crimes, officials said.
Beginning Sept. 1, officers have been pushing back with foot patrols aimed at protecting the good residents and visitors — and routing out the bad. They made 18 arrests on just the first day.
Commanders said if they don't act aggressively and swiftly, the problems at the complex, along Rosado Drive off Bellefontaine Road, will just spill into the surrounding neighborhoods. The effort includes code enforcement and sobriety checkpoints. Capt. Troy Doyle, the precinct commander, said he expects the tactics to continue as long as necessary. "Hopefully, until the problems get rectified," he said.
The Visible Black Hand of Economics on display. Phillip Andrew Morton, who grew up in Spanish Lake when it was that quintessential American city Norman Rockwell once celebrated, decided to make a movie about the changes there:
Phillip Andrew Morton has made two trips since 2007 to the house at 1238 Maple Street where he grew up.
On both occasions, he was shocked at the profound changes the little frame house had undergone in a matter of a few years.
Morton, 32, is now an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles. The rapid transformation of the north St. Louis County community he calls his hometown, though it has never been incorporated, forms the basis of his documentary, "Spanish Lake."
The movie combines the warm feelings that Morton has for the area with a case-study of what many feel was governmental action — or inaction — that changed its bucolic nature into one that, in some sections, is more befitting of an urban ghetto.
"I really wanted to research all the dynamics that went into the phenomenon of white flight in Spanish Lake," Morton said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. "I came away convinced that this is not an issue of race but of class and opportunities.
As recently as 1970, Spanish Lake was 99 percent white and 1 percent black. But the 1970s also marked the beginning of a mass migration of African-Americans from the city of St. Louis. Many left failed housing complexes such as Pruitt-Igoe to settle in government-subsidized Section 8 housing in North County.
The city of Black Jack, which abuts Spanish Lake, feared that the poverty and crime that plagued the St. Louis complexes could recur in apartment complexes planned for their city. To thwart that possibility, Black Jack officials enacted zoning ordinances that prohibited multi-family housing.
In 1975, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Black Jack's zoning ordinance, ruling that it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act.
The construction of apartment complexes in North County proliferated during that period. Many were upscale, designed to attract well-heeled singles.
But as they lost their luster, they were transformed into Section 8 housing.
RISE IN BLACK POPULATION
By 1990, 17 percent of Spanish Lake's residents were African-American. By 2010, with the population at 19,650, the percentage of blacks had soared to 77 percent, with many living in Section 8 apartments.
Among the biggest of these Section 8 complexes is the Countryside Townhomes in Spanish Lake, built in 1971. In recent years, it has become a hotbed of crime.
Section 8 is the same as saying Man-made Climate Change. Just like Highland Park, Spanish Lake has been destroyed; having studied Basitat, you already know that any money spent trying to restore it is folly, because those responsible for the economic ruin of the city still reside there.
It's the economy! It's all about class! It's about the De-industriliazation of the country!
No.
Pittsburgh never experienced Climate Change, so the visible Black Hand governing economics never destroyed that city. Instead, the invisible hand of economics flourished there, with primarily white citizens trying to find new ways to a make a living as the steel industry collapsed. Through innovation and via the free market, Pittsburgh is now even attracting DWLs from Portland.
Black people in Detroit can't be expected to maintain its infrastructure, study finds
Climate Change, courtesy of the Black Undertow. The Visible Black Hand governing economics (this is why majority Black cities and counties can't sustain a local economy, save Check Cashing, Pawn Shops, Liquor Stores, Fast Food joints, and Hair Salon/Barbershops) that Adam Smith could never have foreseen.
There are those who would blame white people for every problem in this nation. Even white flight itself. White flight is just a natural defensive mechanism to escape the Black Undertow and the crime, property value drop, dereliction of infrastructure, and the decimation of the business district that follows this group.
In the coming weeks, Detroit will be taken over by the state of Michigan. Even though white people built a world-class city, full of architectural marvels that rivaled those found anywhere else on the planet, the Black people who inherited Detroit after the calamitous race war of 1967 (and the subsequent white abandonment of the city) have been unable to maintain a modicum of what they were unceremoniously bequeathed. The Los Angeles Times bashed white people for the failure of the city, when it was white people ingenuity that was responsible for the greatness of Detroit in the first place.
2011 Detroit is a direct representation of its majority population, which happens to be 82 percent Black. The ruins of the city, neglected and rotting monuments courtesy of a people who then rebuilt what they abandoned in the white suburbs surrounding Detroit, are to the Black inhabitants of the town what those strange heads on Easter Island where to the Europeans who first encountered them.
Your average Black inhabitant of Detroit has no understanding for how these architectural marvels were ever erected, nor could they - if trained by the top mechanical, industrial, electrical engineers and architects - ever hope to reproduce them. They can't even sustain them.
The haunting pictures of the empty Michigan Central Station; the staggering details on the facade of the Metropolitan Building still apparent despite the graffiti and trash found on the inside; Lee Plaza, once home to the elite of Detroit, now home to the elite of homeless Detroit; the Grand Army of the Republic Building, a castle erected in 1900 for veterans of the Civil War, now sits boarded up to keep out the descendants of Black people whose freedom has failed Detroit; the Broderick Tower, built in 1927, is the tallest skyscraper in America that has been deserted.
Like the post-apocalyptic world found in the book The Earth Abides, the Black people in Detroit show precious little concern for sustaining any of the city's former marvels. They find it hard to believe that people actually built them. Like the Sphinx in Egypt, Black people in Detroit sit in wonderment, gazing at some of the aesthetically - unequaled in the world for their majesty, even in their depressing state - magnificent buildings and wonder what they were once used for. Why were they even built?
It wouldn't be so bad if Detroit was the only city in America like this, but any city or county that the Black Undertow overwhelms inevitable fails.
In the south, you have Birmingham (72 percent Black), which was once one of the world's great cities. It has been rebuilt in the white suburbs surrounding the city. With Vulcan looking on, the Black Undertow which inherited Birmingham has decimated the hopes and dreams of the city founders and helped lead to the bankruptcy of Jefferson County. Mind you, it's the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
Well, two researchers at Michigan State just published a study that blames, you guessed it, white flight for the demoralizing results of the Black Undertow's leadership over cities and counties they inherit. In ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS & CASE STUDIES: More Cost per Drop: Water Rates, Structural Inequality, and Race in the United States—The Case of Michigan (published in the Cambridge Journal) we learn that white people will always shoulder the blame for the problems befalling Black people:
White flight from urban centers often means minority residents are left to pay to maintain aging water and sewer systems, a new study finds.
This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, but does mean that racial minorities pay systematically more than white people for basic municipal services.
“This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services,” says Stephen Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. “People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era.”
For the study, reported in the journal Environmental Practice, researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan and found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, a finding that refutes conventional wisdom.
Perhaps more importantly, water and sewer services cost more in areas with greater proportions of racial minorities.
Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer says. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.
“A fair proportion of Detroit’s large low-income population cannot afford the burden of rate increases meant to offset infrastructure repairs, leading to tens of thousands of customers getting their water turned off every year,” Gasteyer says.
Water and sewer lines are aging throughout the country. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to repair deteriorating systems over the next 20 years.
Paying for those upgrades likely will be a major issue in shrinking cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Birmingham, Ala., Gasteyer says.
“Everything is wearing out, and we are going to have to grapple with how we pay for these so-called liquid assets that need to be upgraded. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of who may be paying an unsustainable burden as those rates go up.”
Wow. What an amazing study! By the way, Pittsburgh has been rated the nicest place in America to live. It's not shrinking. Detroit and the other cities Gasteyer mentioned are, but not Pittsburgh.
Structural inequality? This is getting pretty embarrassing, considering that the most impressive structure your average Black person could erect comes in a Lego box with a "for children six or under" sticker on it. White people have abandoned world class cities across this nation to the Black Undertow. Inevitably, Black people lack the ability to sustain the infrastructure they are handed over in the transition of power.
Why can't the Black engineers just fix these water pipes? Why can't the elected officials set aside money to pay outside engineering firms to do this? Oh, because Black people can't sustain an economy to raise revenue to pay for upgrades to public utilities.
However, it is this line that smells fishy:
“This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services,” says Stephen Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. “People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era.”
Gasteyer obviously hasn't looked at what happened when white people left Africa, specifically the Congo, or what happened to Rhodesia after the capitulation to Actual Black Run Zimbabwe (ABRZ) or in South Africa. Black people can't sustain the basic services that white people created worldwide. White people (and even Black people in Detroit) flee the Black Undertow in the Motor City because of the crumbling effect that Black people have on the the urban center.
People of Color (PoC) in urban centers can only go so far as public transportation will take them, hence the decision by city leaders in Whitopia's to keep out bus systems and light-rail into their towns.
Black people can't sustain a city swimming pool, let alone plan to maintain a city's infrastructure that they have no part in building nor paying for. So those members of the Black Undertow shouldn't be forced to pay for their basic services either:
“These people are going to end up rioting about this,” says Sheila Tyson, a community activist in Jefferson County, Ala. “If they let this stuff happen they are going to get the biggest riot the South has ever seen . . . I can see it coming.”
That’s a pretty serious prediction. What could possibly start a riot that big?
She’s talking about the likelihood of Jefferson County increasing its water and sewage bill rates.
Oh. Is it really all that bad?
“If the sewer bill gets higher, my light might get cut off and if I try to catch up the light, my water might get cut off. So we’re in between. We can’t make it like this,” says Tammy Lucas, a Birmingham resident who has been affected by a “financial and political scandal that has brought one of the most deprived communities in America’s south to the point of what some local people believe is collapse,” reports the BBC.
Lucas’ monthly water and sewage rate has managed to quadruple in the past 15 years. Currently, her bill is $150 a month, which she pays for by using her $600 social security check.
When a federal judge forced Jefferson County to upgrade its outdated sewer system, officials decided to finance the project with bonds.
“Outside advisers suggested a series of complex deals with variable-rate interest . . . Loan payments rose quickly because of increasing interest rates as global credit markets struggled, and the county could no longer afford its payments,” Bloomberg reports. That’s why Jefferson County residents have seen a 329 percent increase in their rates over the past decade and a half–the county has been trying to finance these new facilities.
The sewage system was supposed to cost $300 million. However, since the project started in 1996, the costs have risen to $3.1 billion after various problems and a series of bond and derivatives deals fell through in 2008.
"This is not even a race issue, if I’m telling the truth,” said Tyson. “It‘s just so happens that it’s affecting black people. It’s a class issue. They don’t give a doo-doo about poor people period.”
So what does the “community activist” think should be done to fix the problem?
“Somebody from Washington D.C. needs to come down here and take these sewer bills to where they are affordable for the people in these districts. Injustice – that’s all this is. They need to come down here and fix it,” Tyson said.
Riots? Black people already riot in Birmingham. It's a well-known fact that tens of thousands of Black people in Fulton County (home to Atlanta) never had to pay their water bills. They never have their water turned off either and rack up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills that the Black political elite never have these model citizens pay.
And why should they, when the cost can be redistributed to the white taxpayers in Buckhead and other white enclaves through higher property taxes?
by Richard Arrington and Jimmie Lewis Franklin's hagiography of the same, Back To Birmingham: Richard Arrington, Jr. and His Times
one thing became stunningly obvious: any history after the victories of the Civil Rights movement cannot be debated or discussed, the merit of the rewarding of full legal protection to Black people (and the creation of Black-Run America) far outweigh any of the negative ramifications of ceding whole cities to Black control.
