BirminghamWatch's weekly rundown of public meetings and agendas in the city of Birmingham and Jefferson County for the week of February 3, 2025. Our goal is to help you keep your elected officials accountable.
After a string of murders and mass murders, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin presented a plan to the City Council on Tuesday to expand community safety and violence reduction efforts. Read more.
Millions of visitors to Birmingham can now be welcomed at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport International Airport in the city by one of its most renowned Civil Rights icons. A new mural honoring the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth recently was unveiled in Concourse B of the airport that bears his name. Read more.
Kay Ivey’s 2024 State of the State Address
Segregation in the New South: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1901 (Louisiana State University Press, 2023) by Carl V. Harris Birmingham is known around the world as a place where African Americans fought and sometimes died to secure their rights as citizens and dismantle Jim Crow segregation. But Jim Crow did not spring up fully formed, nor was it a system that had always existed. It was the product of a long and tortuous push and pull between blacks seeking justice and whites seeking control. At its birth in 1871, Birmingham was a Reconstruction-era city, and Birmingham came of age in a time when white Southerners and African American Southerners, many only a few years removed from enslavement, were struggling to find their places in a new post-war racial order. This is the story, and the stories of early African American activists who are largely unknown today, that Carl V. Harris tells in his new book Segregation in the New South: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1901. Harris, who taught history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, died before completing this book. His colleague, W. Elliott Brownlee, edited and finished the manuscript. Harris’ earlier book, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (University of Tennessee Press, 1977), was the first scholarly book on Birmingham’s history and it is still indispensable for anyone wanting to understand the political dynamics of Birmingham’s early decades. Read more.
The Birmingham City Council has nixed a church’s request to build a car wash in the city’s Huffman neighborhood proposed to help pay for church ministries. Read more.
The number of COVID-19 patients in Alabama hospitals has fallen below 1,000 for the first time since mid-July as case numbers continue to tumble since the peak from a summer surge of the delta variant. There were 970 patients being treated for the coronavirus in hospitals around the state on Friday, according to the Alabama Hospital Association. That is the lowest since a total of 957 on July 16, and down by about 66% since the inpatient count reached a peak of 2,890 on Sept. 1. The Alabama Department of Public Health reported 919 new cases of COVID in its daily update on Saturday. The state averaged 1,097 new cases a day over the past week, almost 77% below the average of 3,962 cases per day on Sept. 8. ADPH has reported 807,479 cases since the pandemic began in March 2020. Read more.
At the very end of the Alabama Legislature’s 2021 Regular Session in May, a slate of four criminal justice bills died before getting a vote in the Senate. The bills, sponsored by Rep. Jim Hill, R-Moody, received bi-partisan support in the House and looked to be a lock to go to the governor’s desk. But things can get testy between the chambers on the final days of session and they never came up for a final vote. “Sometimes with these things, you just run out of time,” Hill told Alabama Daily News on Monday. Now, Hill is prepared to file the bills again in the special session on prison construction, should they fit into Gov. Kay Ivey’s special session plan. Read more.
After restricted public access the past two regular legislative sessions, next week’s special session of the Alabama Legislature will largely be free of COVID-19 protocols. Secretary of the Senate Pat Harris said that people who aren’t vaccinated are asked to wear masks, as is the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but there will be no enforcement of that request. “We’re asking people to use common sense,” Harris said. The Senate gallery will again be open to the public, Harris said, but distancing in committee rooms will still be in place. “We’re not going to pack the hearing rooms,” Harris said. Read more.
UPDATED — Gov. Kay Ivey plans to call lawmakers to Montgomery for a special session on prison construction Sept. 27, she told them in a letter today. “As I have stated before, this is our moment — this Legislature and this administration — to lead our state in a bipartisan manner to solve a problem that has plagued us for decades and that, if not properly addressed, will continue to set us back for decades to come,” Ivey wrote in the letter. Read more.
