by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.
This article should be everybody’s New Year Resolution. Down through the years the City of Birmingham has fought a lot of battles. In addition to refighting the Civil War, we also changed Birmingham from a coal mining town to a financial and medical research center. Birmingham is not only being looked at by major corporations from other cities, but world-wide. The door of opportunity has opened. It is now time for us to walk through the door. Here are some things we can do that require very little finance and lots of hard work.
Priority No. 1, is to fix our educational system. The timing is good because we are in the process of choosing the next superintendent. He/she must bring a different vision to the table. That vision should be academic excellence in every category needed to achieve excellence. Our school system should be designed so that in after pre-school, every kid who enters the first grade should have knowledge of a foreign language and one musical instrument. By the time they are in the third grade they should be accomplished in one musical instrument and have a working knowledge of one foreign language. The school system should open all year long so that there is special schooling for those who excel and those students, like me, who do not learn fast.
Would you believe that the District of Columbia has turned their school system around, so much so they are now in the Top Ten school systems in America? Incidentally, the superintendent they fired started all of this. Presently, enrollment is up from private and charter schools moving into the public schools. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; just look at what the Top Five school systems are doing and do that, whatever it is.
Priority No. 2, build a multi-purpose facility with seating capacity of at least 35,000 that can be used for all sports. Along with this we need a Five-Star hotel to be built in the Uptown District. Someone may say, we just built one, but we need to build another one.
Priority No. 3, fix The Fourth Avenue District. It would be an easy fix. This area served as the business, social and cultural center for Blacks with activities similar to those in the predominately white districts. The businesses located in the area included barber and beauty shops, mortuaries, saloons, restaurants, theaters, photographic studios and motels. These Black businesses and their successors continued to do well throughout the ’60s. We have more to offer on Fourth Avenue than Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. If I recall correctly, Beale Street has one blues joint and one B-B-Que joint, and they are packed every night.
The key to rebuilding Fourth Avenue is the Masonic Temple. Everything is in place. The Black business district was not only “alive” during the daylight hours but “thrived” throughout the night. Friday and Saturday nights, the streets were filled with crowds of people visiting bars or just out for a stroll. Live entertainment made the district “the place to be.” Performers such as Duke Ellington, Lucky Millender, Claude Hopkins, Jimmy Lunceford, Sonny Blount (Sun Ra), Fess Whatley (Southland Greatest Swing Band) and Louis Armstrong were known to frequent the Masonic Temple. Not only was the Masonic Temple used for entertainment, it housed Black professional offices and was the state headquarters for the Masons and Order of Eastern Stars.
Priority No. 4, building a sports mecca. All we have to do is put the Park & Recreation Board, Birmingham Housing Authority, and the City Board of Education together and utilize all the property that they own together, which includes Legion Field and the Crossplex, to turn out the best baseball and soccer players, basketball players, football players, golfers, swimmers and tennis stars.
It’s hard to believe that as athletic as Black people are, we have only one well-known Black professional male golfer and not one known female. My guess would be that there is not a white school in the SEC that has a tennis star, swimmer, golfer or soccer player and very few baseball players enrolled.
Priority No. 5, creating a downtown outlet mall. We have a lot of empty store buildings in downtown. It would be easy to take a five block square and build a shopping Center. In this five block square, there should be no traffic except for buses. All around the square there should be free parking and free bus rides if you shop in the district. Buses should run every five minutes to and from the mall.
I would like to add that we cannot afford to break any laws. No robbing, stealing and killing each other. The jail house and prison systems are packed with African-American women and men.
