The first inmate to enter a penitentiary in Alabama entered the Wetumpka State Penitentiary (WSP) in 1842 with a twenty-year sentence for harboring a runaway enslaved person. WSP was called "The Walls of Alabama," more diminutively as the "Walls." Once established, the prison population during this period was composed of white immigrants (99%) and free blacks (1%). The laws of the time said that enslaved blacks had no freedom to infringe upon and were thus punished extralegally by their owners for alleged offenses. (Alabama Department of Corrections)

  Birmingham, Alabama

Name: The Sherrif’s Office: The Corrections Division of the Sheriff’s Office

Capacity: 1,000 inmates

Founded: N/A

Who Owns It and General Facts About the Area:

• The state owns the Corrections Division of the Sheriff’s Office. It is responsible for housing incarcerated offenders awaiting trial or transfer to the State of Alabama’s Department of Corrections.

• If you’re from inner-city Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a “99 percent chance” you have a loved one who has been incarcerated, according to Veronica Johnson, deputy director for the Alabama Justice Initiative, which has been fighting against the state’s plans to build three new prisons in the state.

Land History:

• The most unmistakable evidence of Native American tribes living in Alabama is the earthen mounds built by the Mississippian people throughout the Southeast. Moundville in Alabama is one of the most famous. (Blitz, John Howard, 35) By the time European colonialist explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, the native groups in the Southeast had merged into the cultural groups: the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws, and smaller groups such as the Alabama-Coushattas and the Yuchis. As more Europeans and then U.S. settlers (American Indians in Alabama | Encyclopedia of Alabama) engulfed the Southeast, these people were exposed to frequent assaults on their land and bodies, warfare, the spread of non-native diseases, and exploitation of every variety. In the 1830s, the majority of the Native Americans in Alabama were forced from their land to make way for cotton plantations and European American expansion. (Lankford, George E., 136)

• The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a terrorist attack in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, at the predominantly Black house of worship. The attack was led by local members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The explosion resulted in the injury of 14 people and the death of four girls. The bombing was looked at years later by director Spike Lee in the Oscar-nominated documentary 4 Little Girls (1997). In the film, Lee interviews witnesses to the bombing and family members of the victims. He also explores segregation and white violence central to the time.
  

Unusual Facts:

• Angela Davis is a political activist, academic, and author who has been highly involved in the civil rights movement in the U.S. She is well known for her work and influence on racial justice, women's rights, criminal justice reform, and prison abolition. Angela Davis was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama.
  

Here is a transcription of an interview featured in Black Power Mixtape where Angela talks about her experience with the 16th Street Baptist Church:

And when you live under a situation like that constantly, and tying in, and then you ask me, you know whether I approve of violence… and whether I approve of guns..

I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense at all. 

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

Some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs- bombs that were planted by racists!

I remember from the time I was very small, I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking... 

I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times, because the fact that any money, someone.. we might be attacked!

The man who was at the time in complete control of the city government, his name was Bull Connor, and he’d get on the radio and make statements like, “N-----rs have moved into a white neighborhood. We better expect some bloodshed tonight! Sure enough, there would be bloodshed. 

After the four young girls, who were, who lived one of them lived next door to me. I was very good friends with the sister of another one. My sister was very good friends with all of them. My mother taught one of them in her class.

In fact, when the bombing occurred, of the mothers of the young girls called my mother and said, “Can you take me down to church to pick up Carol? We heard about the bombing, and I don’t have a car.”

And when they went down, and what did they find?

They found limbs and heads strewn all over the place.

And then after that, in my neighborhood, all of the men organized themselves into an armed patrol. 

 

They had to take their guns and patrol our community every night because they did not want that to happen again. 

 

And that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible. 

What it means is that the person who is asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa. 

Watch the clip below:

• Margaret Walker was from Birmingham. She was an American novelist and poet who was one of the leading Black female authors of the mid-20th century.

For Malcolm X

By Margaret Walker

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;

You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;

Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,

And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.

All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums


Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,


Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,

Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.


Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.

You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.

When and Where will another come to take your holy place?

Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?