Birmingham was once known as “The Johannesburg of America”
for its water cannons and other particularly harsh police responses to Civil
Rights demonstrators and KKK bombings of black churches in the 1960s . The
nickname also related to the coal and iron mining area in the region and the
city’s large steel industry. Birmingham’s had a black majority and black mayors
for a few decades, a major Civil Rights Memorial Center, and enough downtown
office highrises and big hospitals to almost look like a real city.

National Geographic Traveler featured Birmingham in an
article earlier this year and it looks like there’s actually a fair amount of
interest to occupy a visitor for a couple days or a weekend. I had committed
myself to being at my friend’s house in Huntsville in northern Alabama so
limited myself to a visit to the Birmingham Art Museum.

Birmingham’s art museum is noted in some guidebooks as being
one of the biggest and best in the South. Although small in comparison with
those of Midwestern or Northeastern cities, the museum lived up to my
expectations with a pretty good collection that includes a little bit of this
and a little bit of that but covers art from most regions and eras with some
Asian, African, and pre-Columbian Native American stuff . There’s actually a
fair amount of European paintings from the Renaissance through Impressionism
and an impressive collection of European porcelain. The American collection is
very good with many paintings by well-known artists and a significant amount of
regional Alabama art. The Birmingham Museum of Art is what I’d expect of a
regional art museum in a state outside the mainstream of art patronage for most
of American history. Bravo, Birmingham!

Afterwards, I spent two nights and a day with my high school
friend Toni-Ann and her family. They live in Huntsville because much of her
husband’s family used to live there, even though he’s an IT geek who has quite
broad leeway on where to live. I’ve posted a couple pictures from our morning
visit to the Huntsville Botanical Garden. Husband Jesse was away at a
convention in Las Vegas and Toni Ann says she doesn’t do pictures, but Little
Jesse and Jen were eager to be photographed. Toni Ann presents a picture of
life in the South for a New Yorker as purgatory in the South and (armed with a
degree in elementary education) home schools her children rather than let them
be exposed to public schools in Alabama. She’s hoping they may have to
opportunity to move to England next year.

I also had lunch with my buddy Doug Wells, a
Huntsville-based engineer for NASA and fellow world traveler. We traveled together
in East Africa for a few weeks in 2001, crossed travel paths in Xian, China in
2006 and keep open the possibility of future world travels together, schedules
willing.