Black History Month: The architecture of white supremacy still evokes pain

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Growing up in the 1950s, William Bell had to enter Birmingham's segregated Lyric Theatre though a side entrance, marked "COLORED," that was walled-off from the elegant lobby. He climbed a dimly lit stairwell to watch movies from the steep balcony where black patrons had to sit for generations.

Now the mayor of Birmingham, Bell recalls the Lyric's beauty, but also the way it isolated black people.

The inequity built into The Lyric Theatre's very architecture is a painful reminder of the city's ugly past as one of the most-segregated places in America. But it also serves as a living history lesson, a symbol of how the Deep South has changed since the courts ended discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

Preservationists had to decide whether to keep reminders of The Lyric's discarded color line before they unveiled an $11 million restoration of the 102-year-old theater, which had been closed for decades. In this case, they chose to highlight the history, installing a glass door etched with the words "Historic Colored Entrance" in the lobby wall, so that patrons can peer into the past.

Across the South, people are struggling with similar questions: What does a changing region do with the vestiges of back-alley service windows, segregated waiting rooms, dual water fountains and abandoned schools that once formed the skeleton of a society built on oppression?

Northern states have such reminders, too. A black heritage trail in Portsmouth, N.H., includes all-black burial grounds and a plaque explaining that blacks had to sit in designated pews in New England churches through the mid-1800s. In Detroit, murals decorate a 6-foot-tall concrete wall built in 1941 to separate a new development meant for whites from an existing black neighborhood.

But the issue has become particularly acute in the South, where millions still remember living through segregation. More so than in the past, many older people and younger generations feel a need now to discuss the legacy of Jim Crow, said Robert Weyeneth, a University of South Carolina history professor who specializes in preservation.