Some of My Best Friends Are Black Read Online Free Page A

sharecroppers from across the cotton belt left the land in hopes of finding better jobs in the mines and steel mills. But even if the wages were a touch better than sharecropping, the working conditions were not. Blacks were relegated to the lowliest and most dangerous jobs. As one Northern observer noted, if horses and mules had been subjected to the same treatment as blacks, the Humane Society would have come in and shut everything down. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Birmingham was little more than a polluted mining colony. Ward turned it into a thriving city of industry. He modernized the water system, paved the roads, added hundreds of acres of parkland; he even created a red-light district with legalized prostitution to control the spread of venereal disease.
    In 1910, Birmingham annexed several of its surrounding municipalities, tripling its population and bringing the outlying areas—semirural, mostly white, and very Protestant—into a growing metropolis with a large population of blacks and Catholic immigrants. Among Southern Protestant fundamentalists at the time, prejudice against Catholics was often as virulent as that against blacks; the Church of Rome and its foreign-born, papist followers were a scourge, a threat to real American values. When Ward ran for reelection in 1917, his chances hung on the fact that his chief of police was Catholic and, despite growing protests, Ward refused to fire him. A local Baptist minister organized the Protestant opposition under the banner of the True American Society. They ran a smear campaign, calling Ward a leading conspirator of the Catholic menace—never mind that he was an Episcopalian. On the eve of the election, Ward stood by his principles, declaring that he would rather lose his office than terminate a man “merely upon religious grounds.”
    He lost.
    The “True Americans” took hold of Birmingham, consolidating power on the side of those who would seek to crush the civil rights movement four decades later. The extractive policies of U.S. Steel and the stifling politics of Jim Crow began to slow the material progress of the city. As the 1920s began, the moneyed elites began their exodus, quietly slipping out and resettling in what would become the blue-blooded enclave of Mountain Brook. In 1925, George Ward left Birmingham and its politics behind for good, choosing for himself a very different retreat.
    The area now occupied by Vestavia Hills has always been “a place apart.” It was once so isolated that Native Americans lived there unmolested long after being routed from the rest of the region. Only four miles from downtown Birmingham, it sits high atop Shades Mountain, the north face of which had always been too rocky and steep for large-scale settlement to reach the top. Before the Highway 31 expressway cut through in the early 1950s, the only way up was a winding, switchback road that climbed slowly around the side.
    George Ward was what we in the South politely term “an eccentric.” During a trip to Rome as a young man, he’d fallen in love with the temple of Vesta. He gave a replica of it to his architect, pointed at the crest of Shades Mountain, and said to build him one. And lo, “Vestavia,” a four-story temple/mansion ringed by imposing Doric columns, gilded with Italianate scrollwork, and bedecked with marble statuary. Imagine Graceland crossed with the Parthenon. Ward carved twenty acres out of the mountaintop and cultivated them into gardens of international renown. On Sundays, he opened them to the public free of charge—even, once a year, to people of color.
    So, yes, there was a building called Vestavia and it was a home and it probably had a hearth, but that’s where any similarity with the real estate brochures ends. Ward threw lavish, fabulous theme parties, bacchanals of wild abandon; one year an airplane showered guests with rose petals from the sky. The former mayor “loved a parade,” it is said, and he “was often