Lessons from Birmingham
"Birmingham, like any other city, is more than one thing, and its people, a combination of kind and calloused, beautiful and broken. Yet, the Magic City has an ace up its sleeve -- its undeniable heart -- one that, in just 15 years, allowed it to move from jailing MLK to electing an African American mayor, among other things.
It's the city that shaped Mary's life, who, in turn, shaped mine.
She once told me that for all its flaws, she both loved it and had been loved by it.
Looking back, I'm grateful to be able to say the same thing.
My beloved hometown, by its courageous confrontation of its past and its conscious commitment to be a Birmingham for all Birminghamians, has transformed itself. The Heart of Dixie, once synonymous with police dogs and fire hoses, now stands for something else entirely -- the City of Diversity. It stands as testament to what's possible, to what a "For All" society looks like.
And the people of Birmingham? By taking up the work, have done more than create for themselves a future. They show the rest of America how to do the same. That's why I'm forever proud to be a Birmingham Boy."
MMI Founder, Rodney David Moore
It's the city that shaped Mary's life, who, in turn, shaped mine.
She once told me that for all its flaws, she both loved it and had been loved by it.
Looking back, I'm grateful to be able to say the same thing.
My beloved hometown, by its courageous confrontation of its past and its conscious commitment to be a Birmingham for all Birminghamians, has transformed itself. The Heart of Dixie, once synonymous with police dogs and fire hoses, now stands for something else entirely -- the City of Diversity. It stands as testament to what's possible, to what a "For All" society looks like.
And the people of Birmingham? By taking up the work, have done more than create for themselves a future. They show the rest of America how to do the same. That's why I'm forever proud to be a Birmingham Boy."
MMI Founder, Rodney David Moore
"The Goodbye Girl", a first-hand telling of a young Rodney's adventure to downtown Birmingham to see his first on-screen film, is also a glimpse into the thriving city that Birmingham was in the 1970s, the subsequent damage redlining did to it, and what the legacy of segregation looked like. But more than anything, it's a story of transformation, and how the people of that great city turned their diversity, something long thought of as a liability, into its greatest asset. Read about it here.