Catherine Conner
Ph.D. Candidate
Major Field: US History
Other Fields: Urban History
Advisor: Fitz Brundage and Jerma Jackson
Research Interests:
"Moderate Progress: Remaking Political Culture and Civic
Identity in Post-Civil Rights Birmingham, Alabama, 1961-1991"
Abstract: “Moderate Progress” looks at the lives and
minds of white and black civic leaders who attempted to recast
“America’s most segregated city” as a racially harmonious and
economically prosperous place from 1961 to 1991. This interracial
alliance forged a new civic identity and political culture grounded in
a unifying notion of progress as a way to move Birmingham beyond the
civil rights movement. They performed and marketed their public acts of
interracial cooperation as signs of progress within a newly expanded
and re-designed downtown built on equality through the law. They also
invested this “new” Birmingham with their belief in individual
opportunity within a free market, a belief re-enforced by the rise of
the local professional service economy. This color-blind, meritocratic
political culture reaffirmed civic leaders’ belief in progress, but it
also changed how “race” looked and operated in post-civil rights
Birmingham. In doing so, civic leaders perpetuated inequality by
substituting artificial changes for concrete solutions in their
cultural and physical restructuring of the city. At the same time,
however, they ushered in a new generation of prosperity and progress as
part of their goal to unify the larger Birmingham community behind a
common purpose and vision.