“Central City’s Joy and Pain: Solidarity, Survival, and Soul in a Birmingham Housing Project”: (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Jerome E. Morris

<Jerome Morris has written a book about home.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in the Central City housing project on the northeast edge of downtown Birmingham, Morris came of age in a community that could be by turns brutal and nurturing.

It was, he writes, a place of “Block parties, freeze cups, shooting marbles … kissing in the hallways, fighting, borrowing butter and eggs, Powell School, my mama, five older brothers and a younger sister, the free summer lunch program, the Double Dutch Bus, Mr. Hook’s store, the Electric Poppers and the CC Poppers, free school breakfast and lunch, due bills, and the music of Frankie Beverly and Maze.”

Central City was a world of extremes — a world where many men were in prison, out of prison, or on the road to prison. But also it was a world where older people mentored and watched protectively over young people. It was a world where siblings fought over food, where boys and young men defended their honor with their fists, and where single mothers like Morris’ struggled to support their families on a maid’s wages and food stamps. A place where people competed for limited resources but also supported one another.

Morris describes a very public fist fight between his mother and a neighbor woman, apparently over a man. The altercation drew the attention of the community and landed the neighbor, briefly, in the Birmingham jail. But the next day, when Morris’ mother realized she had no food for her children, the neighbor she had traded blows with spooned up a meal for the kids out of her own meager supply.

Central City was also a place where people pushed back against a social structure that saw little value in them or their community. In 1974, when the federal government announced plans to route the Red Mountain Expressway through Central City, residents and local business owners marched on city hall and filed a federal lawsuit, and in a campaign that took years, they succeeded in having the route of the highway moved a few blocks to the east (and was that really so hard?) to spare Central City residents’ homes. The campaign, Morris writes, “led to some sweeping changes around public housing throughout the United States,” including giving residents input “about housing replacement.”

The residents of Central City (renamed Metropolitan Gardens) were finally displaced when the community was razed between 1999 and 2002 to make way for new, mixed-income housing. The residents, including Morris’ mother, were relocated to other housing projects and most were not able to return. Change, Morris reminds us, is both constructive and destructive.

Now a professor of urban education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a published author, Morris is the kind of African American man that some white people might cite as proof that anyone who works hard can succeed, and people trapped in poverty have chosen that life. But Jerome Morris is having none of that. He celebrates the joy of Central City as a community, but understands the obstacles — drugs, violence, police brutality, lack of employment and intergenerational wealth — that every resident faced to survive, let alone thrive.

A few months ago in this space, I reviewed Julie Buckner Armstrong’s book “Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home.” In many ways, Armstrong’s book and “Central City’s Joy and Pain” are companion pieces. Both books are biographies of a place and memoirs of the authors’ experiences growing up in mid to late 20^th century Birmingham. Armstrong was a white girl who grew into a young woman while trying to understand the place of race in her world. Morris was a black boy who grew into a young man with a raw and deeply felt understanding of how the idea of race shaped his world.

James L. Baggett is a writer and historian. From 1997 until his retirement in 2023, he served as archivist for the Birmingham Public Library and archivist for the city of Birmingham. He lives with his wife and daughter in Birmingham and Mentone. He can be reached at BirminghamBaggett@gmail.com.