So on we went to the actual cultural part of our last day of Alabama and visited the
Sloss Furnaces and the
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. I had seen Sloss when we passed it on our way into the city and thought it was really beautiful. How can an old factory be really beautiful? I don't know, but to me, it just is. I assumed it was a working factory but it was abandoned in the 1970s and has since been designated an American National Historical Landmark. When I found out that this building was open to the public, I knew I had to go. When I was a kid, living in two-channel land and watching
Bosco, whenever one of the presenters went through the
Magic Door, I would always hope they'd be going into a factory with footage of the machines making biscuits, or icepops, or bottling milk. More normal children
were probably hoping for Dublin zoo. But I love factories. We have hardly any in Ireland as the British kept Ireland mainly agricultural so as to be the 'breadbasket' of the British Isles.
Anyway, we arrived just as a tour for boy scouts was starting, so we joined in, starting with a short educational video. I used to think that the Simpsons would be cheesing it up when Bart and Lisa had to watch these types of videos at school, but no, they are actually that dumb. We continued with a walking tour of the premises, which I found fascinating, for a couple of reasons. First of all was just the fact that the place had been preserved as was, through neglect at first, which meant that many of the tools and so on were exactly as the workers had left them when the gates closed in 1971. The machinery had rusted up or just seized up, and many of the pressure/heat clockfaces had been broken, but I still felt a strong sense of what it must have been like as a living factory.
The guide showed us around the coolers, brought us through the underground parts where the men loaded up vats and sent them up the line, and brought us around the furnace, where the men laboured to cut the still-molten pig iron into shapes capable of being transported and sold. It was deadly work, and physically taxing. The guide kept reminding us (and the little boys in particular) that it took
men to work in this factory. Talk about the construction of gender...Interestingly, she seemed a bit defensive about the working conditions of the men, and told us that they at least always had money in their pocket as a result of their labour, and lived in lodgings on-site. The race issue was raised only briefly and there's a tablet with the words of more recent African-American former workers who talked about how the higher jobs were simply not open to the black workers and how pointless it would have been to apply for anything better than a labourer's position. 'White folks been white folks all their lives'. All in all, not particularly shocking or surprising, insofar as we are well-used to the idea that the colour of your skin can determine your station in life. It wasn't until we got the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute that we saw the more malign aspects of Sloss's history.
The Civil Rights Institute is a kind of interactive museum. We weren't allowed to take photos alas, which is a real pity as the displays are really good. There's a lot of bitterness, it must be said. Many of them focus on recreating facilities that black people weren't allowed access to, such as whites-only ice-cream parlours and diners, poorer toilet facilities, restricted areas of public transport and so on. There were recreations of the typical black house, typical black school in the 1950s, and so on, with comparisons on the state spending on health and education. It also showed positive aspects of black cultural achievement such as music and dance, while noting that this was pretty much what African Americans were restricted to. Also it showed a successful middle class home and some notes and photos about a black millionaire from Birmingham from the same period. Some black Americans were able to make a financial success of their lives even under an oppressive system, which is amazing, and I'd bet you anything that some segregationists tried to use this success against them by claiming that the suc
cess of such people showed that segregation
wasn't actually an obstacle if you were willing to work, etc. The civil rights movement is a major part of the exhibition, and there's lots of footage of the peaceful protests, including some awful footage of protestors being attacked by police baton-charges and police dogs, and the bombing of churches and 'freedom buses' used to transport activists. A lot of it is very uplifting though, including the 'I Have A Dream' speech by MLK. I visited the Lincoln Memorial in 2005 and looked down over the Mall and imagined what it must have been like on the day. What amazes me about the American Civil Rights movement is that, despite the justifiable anger and frustration felt by its members, it was a largely peaceful movement, and that's probably testimony to the quality of leadership that the African American community produced, plus American political culture and its focus on democracy and personal responsibility, and the respect of African Americans for this aspect of American political culture despite their exclusion from it. The latter probably has more to do with the organising influence of the Baptist church than anything else I can think of. It made me wonder what happened? Why is the lot of black people in America still a fairly shitty one? Why are other, and even comparatively new, ethnic groups more successful than they are? Did slavery really eviscerate the culture to that degree that African Americans are going to be largely stuck in the ghettoes for good? Where are today's Martin Luther Kings?
Ah well. I was really glad to have visited Sloss before visiting the Institute because it threw some things into sharp relief. What would have been just another horrible fact became way more real, having just seen Sloss's somewhat unreliable side of the story. First of all, the Sloss guide implied that although the men worked hard and long hours, they had a decent wage and lodgings. However, the BCRI made it clear that for some of its existence at least, the Sloss Furnace engaged in debt bondage; the workers, in the lines of the old
song, owed their souls to the company store. They were not paid in cash, but given vouchers ('scrip') for the company-owned shop, which sold goods at inflated prices, and rent for their lodgings was automatically deducted from their pay. So basically it was, during some of its history at the very least, a form of indentured slavery for both white and black workers. Of course, it gets worse.
Many black men were arrested under dubious laws for vagrancy and other petty crimes, and the Sloss Furnace management had a deal with the local prisons to use prison labour in the factory. Race-driven slavery by another name. It was interesting that the official historiographers of Sloss were willing to admit to the lesser crime of discrimination, but not to this. Nuff said.
seven ounce steak, with veg. It still seemed unfeasibly large, and when we got the bill, all became clear. Because we hadn't specified the smaller steak, we got the bigger one by default! Eleven fecking ounces of meat! We couldn't even manage dessert, despite really wanting one. :(
seven ounce steak, with veg. It still seemed unfeasibly large, and when we got the bill, all became clear. Because we hadn't specified the smaller steak, we got the bigger one by default! Eleven fecking ounces of meat! We couldn't even manage dessert, despite really wanting one. :(
