The Alabama Experience; This Old Library

You Say you've got some time to kill. Sounds unlikely for many of you I know, but where would you go? What if you wanted to do some browsing that didn't involve a computer? Well, we're going to visit one of the best places in Alabama for browsing, a mecca for anybody interested in Alabama history and stories. And there's no agenda, no plan, so put aside your day timer. We're just going to explore and see what we find. And I've asked some experts to join us on this

adventure. Welcome to the Lin-Hinley Research Library in Birmingham, Alabama. This old library. This old library is just a stone's throw from this new library. Lin-Hinley is the home of the Birmingham Public Library's special collections. There are hundreds of thousands of books, documents, and photographs here. But the building makes the first impression. The main reading room features a mural with 16 scenes from some of the world's greatest stories. The mural was created in 1929 when the Lin-Hinley Library was constructed to serve as the city's main library. John Bertalon knows these images intimately. In 1983, he led a small team up on scaffolding to clean the mural one Q-tip at a time. So this is the first time you've been looking down on somebody from a perch in this room? No, it isn't. Often we look down on everyone sort of gathered around us as we spent 18 months on scaffolding, cleaning. It's interesting people tend to forget you're there. The

scaffolding tends to bleed into the background and when you're up there, it's only when you make a sharp noise that someone realizes that someone is up there. But normally we don't, we're not on scaffolding. Normally we're working front of a painting. And you never close the library here. It was open for business why you worked on the restoration. That's right. We were unscaffling the one from Florida ceiling and with internal stairs so it was safe to be able to leave that open like that and with the exception of the outriggers, which were a little bit of a problem, we pretty much kept everything moving for 18 months here. This is certainly one of the most striking public rooms in Alabama largely because of the murals. Yes, exactly. It's very important because I tend to think of murals like this as the equivalent of stained glass windows. They're a visual and graphic way of portraying what is in the library and what's available to the individual and what we what what things were important throughout history and important for the library in terms of its

holdings. So it was used to teach as much as a stained glass window and a cathedral was used to teach. Conservation is really only about two things. It's sticking together things which should stick but don't and unsticking things which have stuck but shouldn't. And this cleaning procedure is very much a matter of unsticking things that have stuck but shouldn't. So we're able to determine where the stable paintlay areas and what the artist delivered to them to the to the wall here to install and we knew that our cleaning would be done when we got down to that layer. How big an area were you working on at a time? Oh we tried to do about two feet at a time but we do two feet at a time with swabs and we use giant swabs in this case but cotton swabs about the size of my thumb. What kind of sense do you get when you walk in now and see the restored mural? Well I feel real proud and I can't believe that we I can't believe that this mural is so big. I can't believe that we have the nerve to stand on

scaffolding all that time to do that cleaning and sort of take it down and move it and it really was an awful lot of work and it's a good feeling to see how bright it is and how many people I who know this mural who are adults now were children when the mural was first installed say it's really really very proud that the mural is in such good shape and it's now they remember it today the way they remember it as a child. These murals were painted by Ezra Winter whom Bertalon suspects immortalized himself as Sancho Panza. Hundreds of murals were created during the Depression in public places by the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a government program that put thousands of people including artists to work on public projects. The Lin Henley mural was not a WPA project but the ceiling was. Everybody talks about the murals but equally astonishing I think is the treatment of the ceiling in here it's a perhaps even more intricate. The ceiling was originally done by the WPA back in

the 30s but our ceiling had deteriorated so so when they did the renovation of the building. Lanny Shapleyer came in he's a local artist and he traced off the designs went back to his office silk screen the designs on the wallpaper and came in and redid the ceilings totally. There's another WPA project down stairs that gave a job to a single Alabama artist. That's one of our most popular items and it was done in 1942 by a local artist named Hannah Elliott and she was best known for painting miniature portraits. The map is I don't know that we call it great art but it's an interesting piece and it's very much a reflection of its time especially in the way that the Ku Klux Klan is

the trade is the saviors of white government and the way Native Americans at the trade. Interested in the Klan's inner workings the archives has a Klan directory from the 1920s listing the members of this secretive organization. One gentleman gives his address as City Hall but much has changed. For three decades now City Hall has been the address of African American mayors. Jonathan Bass is interested in those changes and the Lynn Henley archives are indispensable to him. Bass teaches history and political science at Samford University. He's researching Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail. Why do you say it's the most important document of the civil rights movement? Well I think there's a variety of reasons I think most important is the fact that black culture is an oral culture and we're dealing with preachers and preachers that don't particularly write down a lot of their sermons so much of what they do is is extemporaneous. So I think any

time we have a document from the civil rights movement that is actually composed and written by leaders in the movement that's when it is something that's very significant for historians. The letter was written by Martin Luther King upon his arrest and he was incarcerated in the Birmingham Jail and this is the actual record of that arrest. Right and and what does this tell us? So what can you as an historian or somebody researching the the movement find out by looking at a record like this? What you're going to see here is the the Jail Warden or someone that worked for him is is it's taking this information that's why that's all written in the same handwriting. This isn't Martin Luther King or Ralph Abinathy's signature and they they have violated a court injunction. They have parading without a permit and what I think is interesting about this is the civil rights movement is such a grassroots movement. It's grassroots volunteers and if you look through this you see the names of 50 some odd people

and Ralph Abinathy and Martin Luther King which were on the other page are the only two outsiders and outsiders in the sense that they are the only two residents non-residents of Birmingham. They're both listed from Atlanta, Georgia. So all the other folks that we're talking about here you see that they're listed in Huntsville Road 86th Street North 16th Avenue Southwest Alpha Street they're all local residents that have volunteered to go March with Martin Luther King and get arrested. A group of white clergymen criticized King calling the protests unwise and untimely. For years I have heard the word weight King wrote this weight has almost always meant never. King's letter said to be written on scraps of paper smuggled out of the jail no longer exists. Bass's research leads him to believe that while the letter was started in jail King finished it

later working with his colleagues. So the kind of notion that he writes this his inspire by this have been and writes it in the jail sale is probably not entirely accurate. Right it's it just sort of adds to the legend I think and the flavor of it and as we talked about before it's very appealing it was no coincidence that Martin Luther King marched and was arrested on Good Friday. Jesus Christ marched on Good Friday and was crucified. It's no coincidence that Martin Luther King is writing a letter from Birmingham jail. The Apostle Paul writes letters from jail and he almost always writes his letters you know he does always write his letters to other Christians and so that this these eight white ministers offered the the occasion to to write this document. This jail register is among the hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in

the Department of Archives and manuscripts at Lynn Hindley. Marvin Whiting who was the first archivist really sort of single-handedly built a remarkable archives collection here. Marvin was here for 20 years and the collection of the archives is really a testament in many ways to one person's effort ever check the employee picks when you're in a video ever asked a coffeehouse clerk for her favorite bean. We asked Jim Bagett for a couple of archive picks. He likes the 1871 Elyton Land Survey the original survey for Birmingham laid out when all this was cornfields and cattle pastures and Birmingham's turn-of-the-century martygross celebration is long gone except for what was preserved in this old scrapbook. Yes, scrapbooks are wonderful things for researchers because they often will pour together a lot of information like newspaper clippings on a

subject but they can just be a nightmare to try and preserve because the books themselves tend to be on very bad paper, very civic paper that the two rats fast. Quick then before it disintegrates one more scrapbook and one more expert. Birmingham's Anne George is a best-selling mystery writer. One of her cosies as they're called murder runs in the family is set at the Lynn Hindley Library where George used to work. She's killed lots of people in print that's why we asked her to investigate this 1920 scrapbook. Jacob Reeves was a politically ambitious streetcar conductor. He aspired to be Birmingham's corner and held that office briefly so he kept a scrapbook of suicides, murders and accidental deaths in the city. Elaine, you kind of make a living out of killing people in your industries but you've never killed anybody like this. Now woman drowned in water barrel. This leaves me with an elderly white woman who was found dead

yesterday morning in a water barrel near her residence. The corner thinks she had a heart attack. Yeah, but she had to be leaning way over to get water from the barrel. It's interesting. It's one of these articles that seems to raise more questions than it answers to me. Yeah, a lot of them in here like that. Some of these stories are outrageous. In other words, just break your heart like this one. The city paid a bounty for spare eggs. So, this little boy was trying to climb a tree and get them in field just yet. And you know, there's another article in here where a boy was doing that and he came in contact with an electrical wire. And this says it's the second serious accident within a week resulting from the youth of the city endeavoring to earn the money paid by the commissioners for bird's eggs. He broke his neck. This is the first in a string of articles about this strange incident of shooting on a street car. This

is a street car from hell that you would not want to be on. This is wow. And it says here a writing as they did the time, a Negro man got out of the section reserved for Negroes in the rear of the street car and went to sit in the white section and wouldn't move and started shooting. And that makes me wonder was this just a man tired of subservience of lifetime of subservience and probably just had enough. And so he he starts firing and one of the passengers hands the conductor an automatic, but the conductor evidently unfamiliar with that class of weapons struggled to cock it all the time. The Negro was shooting at the conductor. I know it's what's here. This is this is they a version of it, but does it make sense that the guys out there shooting at the conductor totally misses the conductor. Misses him several times. So now it says the street car is in an uproar. People are bailing out the windows and now

other passengers apparently have guns and they've come up behind the conductor and they shoot. Wait a minute. After the shooting was over, investigators showed that the Negro had been hit three times and each wound was made by a different caliber bullet. Apparently you had to have a gun to ride a street car and Birmingham. Sounds like it. In any of the wounds would have been fatal. This this is the one I was talking about a while ago. It was Morgan's pharmacy, which was still around until not too long ago. Where the woman went into the pharmacy and shot us after the head, down five minutes later with that. Oh, she said, Jesus, I've done all I could and then she shot herself. We look at the past. We think of the past. I think we always think of those times of being better as they were, but there's a lot of people just distressed and lost and hopeless as I guess we

think people are today. And you know, they didn't have the help that we have now. That's that's true. You know, you're kind of an expert on mysterious death. Now this you're looking for a sidelight or you know another career. If the writing thing doesn't work out and you might want to keep something like this in mind. Right. Right in Bacana. Yeah. Just my thing. You've read my books. I'm I'd be no corner. And George, the cozy corner. The cozy corner. Yeah. They had me in town. I'll tell you what they do. Thanks. This has been fun. It's been fun for me. I appreciate you bringing me home here. Former librarians can go home again. If you've lost your way, visit the Rucker AG map collection. These maps date from the 1500s and what they like and accuracy they make up for in beauty and imagination. So the focus of the collection is on the

southeastern United States and Alabama in particular. And I think the AG collection is one of the finest collections for the southeastern United States that you'll find. Not everyone's browsing like us. Riders, editors and researchers use this facility. In 1998, about 71,000 people from every state and six foreign countries came to Lynn Hindley. Every day 30 to 40 people kind of move into the main reading room. Most of them are interested in genealogy. Jonathan Bass discovered this library long before beginning his civil rights movement research. He first came here as a child with his grandfather to explore his family's roots. There was a there was a woman by the name of Mary Gordon Duffy who apparently before the Civil War had traveled around Jefferson County and visited with a variety of folks that lived here. And she happened to stop in on the farm where my great-great-grandfather on two sides of my family.

And it was really interesting. I couldn't believe how history came alive. It wasn't just a just a name and a census record. Here was somebody that had actually stopped it had driven a wagon and had stopped and talked with my great-great-grandfather. Talked about how is what his personality was like. What do you look like? Said he was a portly gentleman with a with a scraggly facial hair and and and it really made we didn't have any pictures of him and it just really made the history come alive for me. It was so exciting and I guess that was probably one of the reasons I got so interested in history and and get excited even today about finding new stuff and finding documents like that. People outside of Alabama know more about us and this collection than the people live right here in Birmingham. They see it as a real treasure then. Yes. We're considered a gold mine as it were to the genealogists that come in.

Lynn Henley could also be a gold mine if you're studying in Alabama business or industry. Howard Johnson is working on a history of African-American funeral homes. Well we're using periodicals, newspapers, come to the library and looking at Jones and books, sit at directors, whatever that can give us some information. Dr. Parker there in the center there. There are a lot of a lot of jewels over here in the archives division. I learned about the archives division. The archive also has hundreds of thousands of photographs. Robert Dawson and Henry De Bartolayben supervise a crew shooting photos for a documentary about the strong marching band tradition at historically black universities and colleges. We have just found a wealth of information here that we thought we were going to have to travel halfway across the country to find and locate but we came here and it's all in this one place. It's it's really

a godsend to have this facility here in Birmingham. One of the most outstanding collections of photographs here provides a visual record of the growth of Birmingham when it was a young, vibrant, industrial city. O.V. Hunt was a commercial photographer who made thousands of pictures at local businesses and industries. We asked photo historian Francis Rob to pick out some favorites. What's this photograph to you about Hunt and about Birmingham? Well what it tells me about Hunt was he was a pretty young and pretty daring fellow about this time. He's actually 31 years old. He'd come to Birmingham as a boy from 19 from a very small Georgia town obviously attracted by the economic potential and obviously by the the bustle and home of a big city. Birmingham was transforming itself rapidly at this time. There were people pouring into the city from all over the place all over the world actually and Hunt was part of that great migration of people who wanted to find themselves in the city.

But I see him here in his his hat his pork pie hat and his celluloid collar and his tie and a shirt sleaze as a person who's really on the move active and again that's the picture he conveys of Birmingham as well and his photographs. But to wrestle that huge heavy camera expensive too on top of that I beam and then hover there to take his picture poised above the city of Birmingham and about 12 stories up from the ground. It tells me he's a he's a pretty brave character pretty cool and I think that's the image he liked to convey of a cool cat who really understood how the city hummed and was at available at any time night or day to take pictures of it. Hunt's activities took him all over Jefferson County and even further afield but in particular I'm impressed by the pictures that he took of miners at the mines this is sipsy mine not far from Birmingham and certainly a vivid reminder when you look at this area of coal

strata around the entrance to the mine that Birmingham was was built in an area where coal was plentiful in the limestone and the iron ore were there in place to create a big industrial city and I think it's important to remember Birmingham's industrial roots because they make it very different from cities like like Atlanta with its white collar insurance businesses and educational infrastructure. This tan started out as a real gritty type of place but because of that there was opportunity for people like these black fellows who are standing in front of the mine outings. This one is really interesting this season. I can hold my finger on it. This is another view of what people used to call black Birmingham. Birmingham had a thriving African American business district at the in from the early 20th century right on into the 1940s and 50s on 4th Avenue and Tom's real shine was probably on on a very

near 4th Avenue and what you get to see here I think is business people presenting themselves at their absolute best. This is again a real optimism picture. We're on our way up and that fell as in the fancy suits with the the best that match in their hats and this young fellow at the right who's going to actually do the shoe shining in his totally immaculate outfit. You know that's not going to last very long but this kind of picture presents an ideal of how people wanted their businesses to be. It doesn't necessarily present the dirty actuality at five or six in the evening after everyone was dirty from the day. How important resources is this library for people interested not only in photography but in history and what those photographs can tell them about Alabama. This is a major collection. It's a major national collection that has a lot of international users as well. Anyone who wants to understand the growth of an industrial city like Birmingham you have to come

here. There's nowhere else you can get this sort of information. No way you could get it on the internet. Ah the internet. Will it one day replace this facility? Will we be just virtual browsers looking at photographs and documents on a computer screen? You're talking about tens of millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Our philosophy now is to use the internet to give information about the collections. You can look at a document on a screen but that's not the same as holding it in your hand and you know there is something about holding a letter that Bull Connor wrote and signed that there's really nothing tangible you can take away from that I don't guess but it gives you a connection and it gives you a feel for your research that you're not going to get in the other way. I'd think about a sense of touch mattering in a library but this library's made an impression on thousands of

people and thousands of people have made their impression on this library. You can see it here. It seems like every Alabama school kid who visits can't resist touching home. This library's kind of a home for writer Dennis Covington. Dennis I've heard a story about a personal milestone that you celebrated here. I want you to tell that story to us. Right. Well I grew up in Eastlake and when I was a kid I used to ride my bicycle to the branch of the Birmingham Public Library in Eastlake. When I finally got my driver's license the very first place I came was downtown to this beautiful building. That's because it's a special place I guess you recognize that even as a teenager. Oh for me it was Marvel. There's no racist. It had books by the Russian novelist. It had books about science, natural science and geography and everything. It was a treasure for me. Well there's some talk about libraries being replaced by websites that we'd visit them virtually but but since it's here that they're always going to be here and we're always going to be able to touch these

documents and see the photographs and books and from what I can tell that suits most people just fine. I think it's very important this place be here for people to escape from the world outside and to touch the wood and take the books off the shelves, dump through the pages and immerse themselves in the knowledge that's contained here. Video tape copies of this program may be purchased by calling 1-800-463-8825. Learn more about this and other programs from the Alabama experience on the World Wide Web at www.albumitv.org