Welcome To Birmingham SAFeDATA

Birmingham is home to EWTN, the world`s largest Catholic media outlet and largest religious network of any kind broadcasting to approximately 118 1,000,000 homes world-wide.

Birmingham was founded in 1871, just after the U.S. Civil War, as an industrial enterprise. It was named after Birmingham, the major industrial city of England. Through the middle of the twentieth century, Birmingham was the primary industrial center of the Southern US. The astonishing pace of Birmingham`s growth through the turn of the century earned it the nicknames "The Magic City" and "The Pittsburgh of the South". Much like Pittsburgh in the N, Birmingham`s major industries centered around iron and steel production.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the city`s economy diversified. Though the manufacturing industry maintains a strong presence in Birmingham, other industries such as banking, insurance, medicine, publishing, and Biotechnologynology have risen in stature. Birmingham has been recognized as the top city for income growth in the US with nearly a one-hundred percent increase in per capita income since 1990.

The turn of the century brought the substantial growth that gave Birmingham the nickname "The Magic City" as the downtown area developed from a low-rise commercial and residential district into a busy grid of neoclassical mid-rise and high-rise buildings and busy streetcar lines. Between 1902 and 1912 four large office buildings were constructed at the intersection of twentieth Street, the central N-south spine of the city, and 1st Avenue North, which connected the warehouses and industrial facilities stretching along the east-west railroad corridor. This impressive group of early skyscrapers was nicknamed "The Heaviest Corner on Earth".

The wartime demand for steel and the post-war building boom gave Birmingham a rapid return to prosperity. Manufacturing diversified beyond the production of raw materials and several major cultural institutions, such as the Birmingham Museum of Art, were able to enlarge their scope.

A watershed in the civil rights movement occurred in 1963 when Birmingham Civil Rights Movement leader Fred Shuttlesworth requested that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come to Birmingham to help end segregation. Together they launched "Project C" (for "Confrontation"), a massive assault on the Jim Crow system. During April and May daily sit-ins and mass marches were met with police repression, tear gas, attack dogs, and arrests. More than 3,000 people were arrested during these protests, many of the children. These protests were finally successful, leading not only to desegregation of public accommodations in Birmingham but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964.