Murder Capital of the World
Murder Capital of the World is an appellation which has been sometimes used to describe Birmingham.
The phrase is often used in conjunction with the nickname "Bad Birmingham", which prevailed in the late 1800s as the booming workshop city earned a reputation for lawlessness and violence. Historian S. Jonathan Bass dates the "murder capital" description to the press of that era.
In his 1917 book, American Adventures A Second Trip "Abroad At Home", Julian Street related the following with regard to the effects of statewide prohibition:
There was one year—I believe it was 1912—when there was an average of more than one murder a day, for every working day in the year, in the county in which Birmingham is located. On one famous Saturday night there were nineteen felonious assaults (sixteen by negroes and three by whites), from which about a dozen deaths resulted, two of those killed having been policemen.
All this has changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail, which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from 120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population to 30 or 35.
The city's 148 homicides in 1931 were referenced in Irving Beiman's article "Birmingham: Steel Giant With a Glass Jaw".
Diane McWhorter cites an article in the December 20, 1934 edition of the Birmingham Post for the phrase.
George Leighton, in his 1937 article for Harpers Magazine places the time of that phrase as "not long ago".
Since 1995 an annual report entitled America's Safest and Most Dangerous Cities (first published by the Morgan Quitno Press of Lawrence, Kansas, but since acquired by CQ Press of Washington, D.C.) has ranked American cities based on rates of violent crime, as reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by local police departments. Though the FBI cautions against using its uniform crime reports to rank or compare cities, the release of each year's report is avidly followed in the mass media. Birmingham has routinely appeared high up on the "Most Dangerous" list (6th in 2007, 7th in 2009, 10th in 2010).
See also
References
- Street, Julian (1917) American Adventures: A Second Trip "Abroad at Home" New York: The Century Co.
- Leighton, George R. (August 1937) "Birmingham, Alabama: The City of Perpetual Promise". Harpers Magazine. No. 1407. pp. 225-242. Republished in Five Cities: The Story of their Youth and Old Age (also published as America's Growing Pains: The Romance, Comedy & Tragedy of Five Great Cities) New York: Harper & Brothers. pp. 100-139
- "Steel: Boom in Birmingham" (November 25, 1940) TIME magazine
- Beiman, Irving (1947) "Birmingham: Steel Giant with a Glass Jaw" in Robert S. Allen, ed. Our Fair City. New York, New York: Vanguard Press, pp. 99-122
- McWhorter, Diane (2001) Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0743226488
- Bass, S. Jonathan (2001) Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Baton Rouge: LSU Press. ISBN 0807126551