In February 1944—D-Day was four months away, the outcome of World War II still in doubt, resting on the success of massive Allied offensives in Europe and the Pacific—a special committee appointed by Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks made a momentous decision. After several months of deliberation over where the University of Alabama would expand its two-year program in medicine into a four-year medical school, the committee announced its selection of Birmingham.
As Alabama’s largest city and its business and industrial hub, Birmingham had much to recommend it as an ideal location for the Medical College of the University of Alabama. Moreover, the university, located just 50 miles away in Tuscaloosa, had offered extension classes in Birmingham since the early 1930s. That did not prevent Tuscaloosa, as well as Mobile and Montgomery, from entering what was an extremely stiff competition for the medical school—nor did it prevent ill feelings toward Birmingham, especially from the direction of Tuscaloosa, that have persisted and continue to manifest themselves in various ways.
The effort to win the medical school for Birmingham was spearheaded by the Chamber of Commerce, which assembled two dozen local business leaders, anointed them as the Birmingham Citizens Committee, and charged them with bringing home the prize. Among other things, the committee put together a package of incentives that helped carry the day, including an endowment of $160,000 (roughly $2 million in current dollars). Committee members also persuaded the Jefferson County Commission to give the school the city block on which Hillman Hospital was situated to facilitate its future growth.
If you’ve been anywhere in the vicinity of the historic hospital on 20th Street South lately, you know how that turned out. Birmingham became a viable city because of iron and steel, but it has remained one largely due to the fateful decision to put the medical school here. Over nearly seven decades, that decision has spawned a campus that encompasses most of the city’s Southside west of 20th and made Birmingham a global center for healthcare and medical research.
As happens in Birmingham, however, it would take years before city leaders began to recognize the full potential of the medical school and the institution known then and now as University Hospital as engines for economic development. That’s not to say that the Medical College wasn’t growing; it was, but its growth was fueled mostly by federal research funding. By the mid-1960s, the University of Alabama medical complex was quietly attracting patients and medical and scientific talent to Birmingham from around the world. It did so with little in the way of interest, let alone interference, from city government or corporate leaders.
Again the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce stepped into the breach. In 1963, the organization had taken the lead in persuading university officials to establish a branch of Alabama’s engineering school in Birmingham, offering an undergraduate degree and post-graduate courses.
Over the following two years, Chamber leaders cultivated the powerful Alabama board of trustees and the university’s executive leadership, and in 1965 Chamber Chairman Crawford Johnson III—president of the local Coca-Cola Bottling operation—laid out for university officials the formal case for establishing a four-year, degree-granting college (the “University of Alabama-Birmingham”) to share a campus with the medical complex.
Four more years passed before that vision became reality when UAB received its charter from the State of Alabama in 1969. Another fateful decision, made at the behest of strong leadership from both public and private sources, had altered the history of Birmingham. And, like the 1944 decision on the medical school, this one engendered bad feelings toward Birmingham, this time from three primary sources: Officials of other colleges in the state, who resented the competition for funding, resources and students; state legislators who represented rural constituencies; and legislators and other powerful individuals with strong ties to the University of Alabama.
And the rest is a demonstration in how history divides itself from itself, how historical narrative proceeds not as a march along a monolithic timeline, but as an infinitely variable network of circumstances and contingencies that occasionally converge in transformational ways. This has happened in Birmingham any number of times in its richly checkered existence to date.
On one narrative track, there is UAB, the largest employer in Alabama and generator of billions of dollars in economic impact each and every year. It has been the bellwether of the local economy for at least 30 years now (even as it too often has been willfully aloof or otherwise disengaged from the life of the city around it).
On another track is UAB, the economic titan weighted down by the burden signified in the first two letters of its acronym. Birmingham’s university is shackled, inextricably it seems, to the “main” UA campus in Tuscaloosa, governed by a board of trustees comprised of a grossly disproportionate number of members who matriculated in T-Town and have collectively displayed nothing resembling interest in doing anything that might raise the profile of the Birmingham school. This is particularly true as it relates to athletic programs, and even more particularly true as it relates to football.
I am not interested at this point in weighing in on the relative merits of building a new football stadium for UAB, or even whether big-time college football can ever be a moneymaker for the school. My concern is with the deeper issues implicit in the fact that the largest employer in Alabama cannot make such decisions for itself. With UAB in thrall to the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, Birmingham remains as it has been throughout its history—bound by the very things that make it strong, its potential for transformation thwarted by people for whom the fate of Birmingham and its university is never going to be a high priority.
Mark Kelly is publisher of Weld. He also is the author of A Powerful Presence, an acclaimed history of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and its role in the development of the city and region.
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