I grew up in small towns in the far north—Vermont until I was 5 and northern Wisconsin for the rest of my childhood. In the 1950s and 1960s, such towns were usually lily white. The town in northern Wisconsin where I spent most of my childhood had been settled by Scandinavians in the 19th century. Until I was in junior high, I was the only kid in my class with brown eyes. No black people lived in town. To even see black people, you had to travel over 100 miles to Madison or Milwaukee.

With such a childhood, you might think my threshold moment about race would come later in life. But I was raised as a Quaker. My parents made sure that, even in our white environment, we were aware of racial injustice. The growing civil rights movement was like Sunday school to us. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and King’s adviser, Quaker Bayard Rustin, were constant lessons in commitment to justice.

I moved to Birmingham in 1982, when I was nearly 30, and started making friends with Birmingham locals. I often asked them what it had been like being a kid in the turbulent 1960s. After all, the four little girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing were close to my age, and in faraway Wisconsin, I was devastated at the time. So I was surprised—actually, I was shocked—when most local white people I asked said, “Oh, when I was a kid, I really wasn’t aware of it. I guess I was just busy being a kid.”  I was busy being a kid in the 50s and 60s too—ice skating on the school playground which they flooded to make a rink in the winter, roller skating to school in the warmer months, and riding my bike to the large lake and river or riding out in the country through cornfields and past dairy farms with their slow moving cows. But being a kid didn’t make me blind to the news photographs of white people, their faces clenched in ugly hatred, screaming at small black children trying to enter school in places like Birmingham Alabama. Maybe, I thought, my parents had had the luxury of distance when they taught us about racial injustice and violence in Wisconsin during First Day school lessons or around the dinner table. Perhaps parents raising children in the midst of the violence sheltered their children, somehow, from the news happening around them.

But my awareness of racial injustice hadn’t come only from my parents’ lessons. My father grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, and every few summers, we would make the long drive to see my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins. The first such trip I remember was in 1959 when I was six years old. Petersburg was hotter than anything I could possibly imagine and my cousins insisted on taking us to Civil War museums that glorified the Confederacy and demonized the Union—the United States, I had thought. One afternoon, I was walking in downtown Petersburg with my cousins and my sisters. It must have been at least 100 degrees. I saw a public drinking fountain. As I walked toward it, hoping I could reach the water, I saw a sign attached to it that said “Whites Only.” I looked around for a second fountain, but there wasn’t one. Unlike my home town, there were many black people in Petersburg. Didn’t black people get thirsty too on hot days? After I stretched up and got my drink of water, we walked on. Looking down an alley, I saw a black man dressed in neat work clothes. He was on his hands and knees drinking water from a spigot meant for a hose. I felt like I had witnessed a crime. I didn’t want to ask my cousins about it. They’d just take us back to a Confederate museum. Later that night, I was alone with my father and I told him about it. “Why?” I asked.

My father never really told me why. He shook his head. He looked like he was going to cry. I was afraid that he really was crying. Finally, he just said, “I could never raise a family here. Never.” He continued shaking his head.

Growing up in entirely white communities is something southerners have a hard time imagining. When I tell them, they say, “Oh, our communities were all-white too. We really didn’t have contact with black people.” But they didn’t live at least 100 miles from the nearest black person. They at least saw them at a distance. Even the evils of segregation implied interaction. Schooled by my parents and my own sense of justice, I looked forward to befriending black fellow students when I went away to college. By that time, however, race riots had devastated many American cities, starting in 1965. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 reignited the violence. The Black Power movement replaced King’s nonviolent direct action. The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 in response to the assassination of Malcolm X, sent armed patrols of black men out into the streets of cities to protect residents from police violence. The Black Panthers seemed heroic to me. They provided free breakfasts for children, healthcare for underprivileged people, legal representation, help with transportation, and many other social services. But law enforcement saw them as an enemy of the United States government. In 1969, Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader in Chicago, was killed by police. In 1970, Birmingham native Angela Davis was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list because a gun registered to her was used in a violent attempt to free three inmates at Soledad Prison.

That year, I started college. Black students were not friendly. The atmosphere was militant and angry. My efforts to interact with black fellow students were rebuffed. One time, I was in the elevator of the high-rise student apartment building I lived in. Three black girls got on. They didn’t respond to my attempt at a friendly greeting. My hair, as it always has been, was long and straight. The girls started fingering it, not looking at me. Talking about me in the third person, they said dismissively, “She has baby hair.” I understood that they had to suffer the pain of hot combs or chemical straighteners for their hair to be considered acceptable in many contexts. I had shampoo-commercial hair straight out of the shower. I understood their anger, but I wished we could be friends.

Several months after I graduated from college, I was still looking for a good job. I cobbled together a living with waitressing and retail jobs. Finally, I signed up to take the state civil service exam. The day I took it, almost all the other test-takers were middle aged. There was one other person my age: a clean cut black boy. We started talking during the break in the morning portion of the exam. During the lunch break, we got sandwiches together. He was friendly without hitting on me. He was smart and humorous. We took the afternoon break together as well. I learned that he was a math whiz. I had been struggling with the math sections and was impressed and a little jealous. At the end of the day of testing, I wished him luck as we parted. “Your math skills are going to be your ticket to a great job,” I said. His friendly face fell. “They won’t care about my math scores,” he said. “When I go to an interview, all they’ll think is ‘spade’.” I had been trying to encourage him, but I was afraid he was right.

My experiences with black people in other northern cities I lived in were similarly distant and alienated. Buffalo, New York, where I lived the longest before finally arriving in Birmingham, was populated by Polish people, Italian people, Irish people, and black people. There was very little interaction between white and black people. Neighborhoods were largely segregated. No one talked about race.

When I moved to Birmingham in 1982, I imagined it could only be worse. The horror and guilt I’d felt looking at a thirsty black man on his hands and knees in a Petersburg alley had been more deeply inscribed by other images—in newspapers, in Life magazine, on television—of people in Birmingham. A police dog tore at a black man’s leg. White people screamed at the camera or at black people, their faces distorted with hatred. Maybe if I hadn’t seen that thirsty black man in Virginia; maybe if the four girls killed in the church hadn’t been so close to my own age; maybe then these images of Birmingham and what it stood for would not have haunted me as I drove south from my graduate school on the Canadian border to take my first professional job.

But Birmingham, I soon learned, had a black mayor. As I ran the necessary errands to get settled in my new home, I had friendly, respectful interactions with many black people. Black people I passed on the street gave me the southern smile, just as the white people did. Birmingham is majority black, and it was even more so when I arrived in the city. I have always lived within the city, never in the suburbs, often called “white flight suburbs.” It was the most comfortable contact between white and black I had ever experienced. Nonetheless, the extreme poverty in Birmingham was obvious. The violence and neglect in majority black schools was impossible to ignore. And when I first moved to Birmingham in 1982, there were still some black adults who would treat me with a cringing respect that I neither deserved nor asked for—a cowering politeness that didn’t cover up the hatred. I am happy to see fewer black elders behave in this way now in 2017. Instead, for instance, I enter a grocery store exhausted from a day at work. I take my items to the checkout lane and the black woman checking me out is polite but exhausted as well. We treat each other gently, honoring each other’s fatigue. We both sing-song the southern “thank you ma’am” as I leave. We are two working women giving each other a little care at the end of a long day.

Martin Luther King saw something in Birmingham—both great evil and great potential. He wrote:  “In the entire country there was no place to compare to Birmingham. The largest industrial city in the South, Birmingham had become, in the thirties, a symbol of bloodshed when trade unions sought to organize. It was a community in which human rights had been trampled for so long that fear and oppression were as thick in its atmosphere as the smog from its factories.”

Birmingham, said King, was the perfect proving ground for nonviolent direct action. If such action could succeed in a violent place, the success would energize the movement toward change. Taking his metaphor from Birmingham’s steel industry, King wrote, “Nonviolence had passed the test of its steel in the fires of turmoil. The united power of southern segregation was the hammer. Birmingham was the anvil.”

Though the city has a lot to expiate, it has also been cast as the scapegoat for a national crime.  Its troubling history is crucial to change within the United States as a whole. And present day Birmingham, though still struggling with poverty and poor education in areas of the community, is a city in which white people and black people work together comfortably, interact with friendly ease, and show more progress in race relations than I’ve seen in many northern cities.  Ironically, in those cities, many people still think of the racially violent images of the 1960s when they think of Birmingham. But Martin Luther King, Jr. knew where to seek metaphors for the change that gripped Birmingham like a spasm in the sixties.  The forge, the hammer, the anvil, the tempering of steel may not be romantic images, but they are images that are true to the city’s strength.

Jane Archer, Birmingham, Alabama