The Birmingham City Council has approved the rezoning of a downtown property that will allow for the construction of a five-story, multi-family apartment complex. The 4.75-acre property, located at 2420 First Ave. S., is currently a construction yard, but developers plan to “raze and redevelop” the property into an apartment complex that will include 273 units and 253 parking spaces. Read more.
Alabama added 544 cases of coronavirus to its total this morning and one death. Read more.
The FY 2021 budget passed Tuesday night by the Birmingham City Council contains a number of austerity measures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, which since March has stymied the local economy and caused the city’s business tax revenue to plunge. The budget, which was approved by the council with no changes to Mayor Randall Woodfin’s original proposal, is nearly $50 million smaller than last year’s and cuts the city’s contributions to schools, libraries and public transit, among other departments. Some of those changes have proven controversial, but other cuts — particularly those to external nonprofit organizations such as the Birmingham Zoo, Jones Valley Teaching Farm and Ruffner Mountain Nature Preserve — went largely unquestioned even by opponents of Woodfin’s budget. Leaders of those nonprofits say they were unsurprised by the cuts, and even before the budget’s passage they appeared resigned to the loss. Instead, faced with their own significant budget shortfalls, those organizations are adapting to survive a hostile, post-COVID landscape. Read more.
Remdesivir, the drug being used to treat President Trump for COVID-19, was developed at UAB several years ago under a federal drug-discovery grant. The drug proved tried as a method to fight Ebola but proved ineffective. In the spring, scientists tested it against the novel coronavirus, and it showed early positive results. It was approved for use in hospitalized patients being treated for COVID-19. The president was given his second dose of the five-day remdesivir protocol on Saturday. Read the story BirminghamWatch wrote about the drug when it began to show promise this spring.
“You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good.” Candidate Donald Trump, 2016 In a campaign speech in August 2016, the future president of the United States outlined his stark perception of the economic status of African Americans and particularly the state of Black schools. It was a statement many saw as oversimplified and glib — he bookended it with “What do you have to lose?” — and reflective of a view that “your schools” meant anything but “our schools.” The ugly fact is that the schools that serve mostly children of color have never been on a completely level playing field with schools that serve mostly white children. Separate and unequal schools have always been the American reality, even when the law mandates otherwise. “We just have to be honest with ourselves. We don’t have a uniform public education system in this country. I don’t think we ever had a uniform public education system in this country. We have very good schools and we have very bad schools. We have a lot in between those two poles,” said Dr. Derryn Moten, acting chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Alabama State University. As a rule, the most persistent metric by which those educational inequalities can be measured remains skin color. Read more. More from The Legacy of Race.
Alabama set a high for absentee ballots in 2012, when 89,000 were successfully cast. But Secretary of State John Merrill said the state is on pace to surpass that number. “For the Nov. 3 general election, we've actually had more than 125,000 ballot applications that have been submitted to us and more than 50,000 that have been successfully returned already,” he said. “As you can see,” Merrill said, “we're going to shatter that record.” But the secretary of state said election officials in the state’s 67 counties aren’t worried because they’re ready. “We've already made preparations for this, hiring additional people, enabling more than what we would perceive the necessary number of tabulators to be available on election day to process the ballots,” he said. Read more.
Health experts repeatedly have said the best ways to avoid the coronavirus are thorough handwashing, wearing a mask and social distancing. Here are reminders from UAB experts on how to do those things effectively.
Read BirminghamWatch’s coverage of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Redevelopment on Ensley’s Ramsay-McCormack Building is finally underway, Mayor Randall Woodfin announced Thursday. The 10-story structure will be deconstructed and replaced with a five-story building constructed using salvaged materials from the original. Woodfin’s announcement came the same day a city-run façade improvement pilot program was announced to target nine “priority redevelopment areas” in the city, including the Ensley Commercial Business District. Read more.
“Down Along With That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning With Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy,” by Connor Towne O’Neill (Algonquin Books) Earlier this year when the city of Birmingham removed the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument from Linn Park, the action was part of a broad nationwide discussion on the place of Confederate symbols in our culture and who decides how and where those symbols are displayed. Connor Towne O’Neill, who teaches in the English Department at Auburn University and produces the National Public Radio podcast White Lie, has achieved every nonfiction author’s dream. He began researching a book five years ago that is now being published and could not be more relevant to this moment. Race in America is too big a topic to take in a single bite. O’Neill chose to examine a more narrow but telling slice. “Down Along With That Devil’s Bones” is a travelogue of race and racial tensions that explores the topic through the life and legacy of one of the Confederacy’s most popular figures, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Read more.
