1979 Birmingham inaugural address

The 1979 Birmingham inaugural address was the first speech delivered by Mayor Richard Arrington, Jr upon being sworn into office as the city's first African-American mayor on November 14, 1979.

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Four years ago, at the inauguration ceremonies for City Council members, I briefly related the story of my parents' decision to come to Birmingham. I want to repeat that story here today because of what I see as its relevance to this occasion.
Sometime in 1940 my father, who had spent his adult life as a sharecropper in Southwest Alabama, decided that better fortunes for his family lay in coming to Birmingham.
He had no money to pay the bus fare for the 110-mile trip from Livingston, Ala. to Birmingham. So he asked his brother, who had already come to Birmingham to work, to send him bus fare for the trip.
He came to this city and found a job in the steel mill and immediately moved his family to a duplex house in the western section of the city. It seems now like not only an interested but a unique story when seen in the light of today's historic occasion.
But on reflection, it's not a unique event, for in the history of this city it has been repeated many times by family after family.