On a sultry September morning in 1955, a young African American man, the son of share corppers, boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham, Alabama, to leave his home state for the first time in his life. He was headed for the University of Detroit on a teaching scholarship from Miles College. Richard Arrington could not have guessed then that his future as a teacher would be postponed for decades by big-city politics--and that he would serve a record-setting five terms as chief executive of Alabama s largest city. Under Arrington s leadership, Birmingham rebuilt itself from a foundering,...
On a sultry September morning in 1955, a young African American man, the son of share corppers, boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham, Alabama, to lea...
