Treasures of Titusville:

Several years ago, Paula Stanton had visions of turning her home in the Birmingham community of Titusville into a bed and breakfast for people visiting the area. When she realized that Titusville didn’t have conventional attractions to draw visitors, she started looking for a nugget of history in the community.

That search yielded a treasure trove.

These treasures weren’t all stuffed away in some attic or cellar. Many were nestled in the hearts of Stanton’s neighbors who grew up and lived in a Titusville that was made to be a special place.

An Oasis for African Americans

Stanton chairs the Titusville Marker Committee, a group of current and former Titusville residents who aim to erect markers at historic locations in the community, including Memorial Park. She sought help from an archivist at the Birmingham Public Library, who provided her with documents that gave her a full understanding of the special nature of that park.

“It was the first park of its kind,” she says. “Memorial Park was created during Jim Crow Birmingham, when public facilities were separate for Blacks and whites. The city paid for and took care of municipal properties, so white people could go into parks and enjoy them.”

But Blacks were not afforded the same amenities. Instead, the city leased land from private property owners to provide services to Black people.

“Until 1941, Birmingham did not own a piece of land on which they allowed Black people to do recreation,” Stanton says. “And it was only because of Titusville and the people who got behind the effort to make the city provide those services, that Memorial Park was created. So I realized there must be – and there was – a treasure trove of information and history here that we had no idea about.”

Stanton found important information in the writings of Otis Dismuke and Jeff Norrell, researchers who studied the various ethnic communities across Birmingham.

A Center of Black Homeownership and Black Businesses

In 2001, Susan Weil, an assistant professor in the UAB Department of Communication Studies at the time, worked with students to produce a magazine-styled book, Historic Titusville: People & Places.

In “The Story Behind These Stories” section of the book, Weil wrote that Titusville was founded in the 1860s (before the founding of Birmingham) by formerly enslaved people. She added that many of their descendants still resided in the community, one of the first areas in Birmingham where Blacks could own land.

At publication of this UAB effort, many of the 5,000 residents of Titusville were struggling with issues of poverty, wrote Weil, now an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University. But she said that a spirit of integrity and pride still prevailed in Titusville, especially among the elderly.

Anne Ruisi wrote in a December 2001 edition of The Birmingham News about the UAB student study on Titusville. She wrote that North Titusville was one of the first communities in the City of Birmingham where Blacks could legally own residential and commercial land, and so it became home to many of the city’s first Black businesses.

Since the beginning, residents have worked for the common good and have earned a reputation for achieving their goals.

Linda Jean Nelson of the Jefferson County Historical Commission says that early Titusville had a lot of Italian landownership and development of businesses. But the community was originally promoted for Black residents.

Titusville was consciously marketed as a Black community, and most of the businesses were African American,” Nelson says. “But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any white people there at all. I’m sure that there were. I think a lot of the land ownership early on was Italian. So white people lived and worked there, even though it was developed for Black occupancy and Black businesses.

Nelson says the residential development for Blacks could have been an economic or commercial decision. “I guess it was because there was a big steel company over there.”

Bringing the Past to Life

More than a dozen longtime Titusville residents recently participated in a video-interviewing project, “Unheard Voices of Titusville,” about the community of their youth in the 1950s and ’60s. They recalled a Titusville that seemed to lack for little.

Some spoke of a movie theater, while others recalled not one but two bowling centers. There were doctors and dentists and other professionals. It wasn’t the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but it was a lively environment.

“I don’t know if (Titusville) was ever that prosperous,” Nelson says. “Nobody would have called it Wall Street, but it was a very happily vibrant community. It did have a very ‘village’ feeling to it. And, of course, there were lots and lots of churches. Birmingham is famous for having more churches per capita than any city in America.”

Stanton acknowledges that, early on, she was primarily familiar with the South Titusville Neighborhood where she lives. But, because of her research, that’s changing.

“I’m learning now so much about the industry and the amenities that the people in what we call North Titusville had back in the day,” she says. “I knew what was in South Titusville and knew what we had here. I didn’t know as much about North Titusville.”

Persons interviewed for Stanton’s Unheard Voices project talked extensively about the high quality of the education they received in Titusville, often citing the excellent teachers they had as they grew up in the community.

Stanton says the video interview of Dr. Thomasyne Hill Smith was among the more impactful for her.

“She shared that she was actually at 16th Street Baptist Church the day that it was bombed. As you recall, it was Youth Day. Dr. Hill was four years old and had gone to church there with her father that day. Her mother had not gone, but had stayed home with her ailing baby brother.

“Dr. Hill shared that she didn’t remember much about the bombing itself, but she did remember her mother’s reaction of relief when she and her father pulled up in the driveway,” Stanton says. “Obviously, the word had already gotten to Titusville and to her about what had happened there, and she knew that half of her family was there.”

Hope for New Vibrancy

Stanton also recounted the interview of Dr. John Cantelow, Jr. and his recollection of the early days of Memorial Park.

“He shared that an old preacher in Titusville … had built this wooden swing and put it in the new park,” Stanton recounts. “He said the children would line up for blocks to have an opportunity to swing on that swing, so much so that the city took notice”—and over time, the city brought used equipment from white parks when new equipment was installed there and sent the used equipment to Memorial Park.

“Our children here in Titusville got playground equipment as a result of that preacher’s act of kindness,” Stanton says.

The Unheard Voices project correctly points out that there are Titusville voices that have been heard—and heard widely. Those voices include architect Wallace Rayfield, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, University of Maryland Baltimore County President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, former Birmingham mayors William Bell and Larry Langford, municipal court judge and form Birmingham city council member Carole Smitherman, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Harold Jackson.

“All of this is really rounding out the picture for me,” Stanton says. “It was really just a matter of trying to get a richer, deeper understanding of who we have been historically, and how we came to be who we are now.”

After taking a look back, Stanton is hopeful for a future Titusville that is as vibrant as the Titusville of her youth. Her dream is that it will become a multicultural, international community.

“I would love for that to be the case,” she says.

Titusville: Where Dreams Come True

Solomon Crenshaw Jr

In a journalism career that has stretched beyond 40 years, I’ve told many stories.

Few of those stories have connected so closely to my own.

During 2023, I interviewed about a dozen people for the Unheard Voices of Titusville project. These are people for whom Titusville is or has been a big part of their lives.

Some have lived most of their lives there. Others grew up in the community before moving away as adults.

Count me in the latter number. I grew up in Woodland Park, the southernmost of the three neighborhoods in the Titusville Community. And while I am now 66 years old, the neighborhood of my youth seems like a mere child compared to its older siblings North Titusville and South Titusville.

People 10 to 30 years my senior spoke vividly about their recollections of their lives in the community. They recalled a Titusville of their youth that was a treasured haven, a place where everyone knew everyone. It was a village where mothers and fathers had neighbors as partners in parenting their children.

It was a community that lacked for little when it came to role models. From storeowners to TV repairmen, to teachers to preachers and businessmen of all sorts.

It was a neighborhood that didn’t lack for wholesome activity – from the Joy Theater, about which I never knew, to a pair of bowling alleys that I knew well.

Titusville was my home. My first education – after the one I got from my parents – came less than a block from our house. I’d walk across the street and through a neighbor’s yard to attend Carrie Gayles’ basement kindergarten. (I vividly remember missing “school” to get my tonsils removed. That event was around the time of my sixth birthday, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.)

Years later, I’d begin my formal education in my neighborhood, walking sixth-tenths of a mile to West Center Street School. It was a good school, a quality school. It was a school that put me on my career path.

Sarah Stewart was my English teacher in sixth grade. I remember her telling our class to not worry about speaking “proper” grammar all the time. “Nobody does that,” she said.

The skinny kid seated at a desk in the middle of the room decided he would follow her advice. That, and being a preacher’s kid, gave me a fondness for words.

Two years later, Mrs. Stewart was my eighth-grade English teacher, and she brought journalism within my grasp, creating a student newspaper. The requirement was simple: If you made an A in English, you got to be an editor. If you made a B, you got to be a reporter.

Throughout that school year, I made A’s in English every grading period, except that one. I made a B, the best B I ever made. It made me a reporter. More important, it gave me a license to ask questions and write stories based on the responses.

That planted a seed that yielded my career as a journalist. It’s been an amazing journey because back then, I had never seen people who look like me doing the job to which I aspired.

But no one told me I couldn’t. Not my parents. Not Mrs. Stewart. Not my principal, Bessie Estelle. (Yes, the Black woman who would follow a career in education by serving on the Birmingham City Council. The same woman for whom a Southside park is named.)

My “village” didn’t dissuade me from following the path that led me to working for The Birmingham News for 38 years. It is a path that I followed beyond being laid off by Alabama Media Group, the company that followed The News, to an extended career as a freelance journalist.

Perhaps that is why I asked some of the persons I interviewed in the Unheard Voices project what their Titusville parents would have told them if they told their parents they aspired to be president of the United States.

At first, I thought they were being unrealistic when many said their parents would have encouraged them. The thought of a Black person being president was about as farfetched back then as a Black man someday being mayor of Birmingham.

On second thought, I realized that level of encouragement was part of being in and part of Titusville. This was a place of hope for Blacks, a place where what had not been before wasn’t destined to never be.

I would not be the first journalist to rise from Titusville. I was blessed to work with two – Nathan Turner Jr., the first Black to earn an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Alabama, and Harold Jackson, who along with fellow editorial writers Ron Casey and Joey Kennedy earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1991.

My village certainly couldn’t foresee the day when these events would happen any more than it could clearly envision the day that I would have an award-winning career in the field.

I think they exhibited faith – the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. They didn’t let having only a few examples of Blacks in journalism keep them from encouraging me to follow my dream.

That, I think, is the true nature of Titusville. It is a place where dreams are made.

Mine certainly was.

—Solomon Crenshaw, Jr.

The Bending the Arc Project is deeply grateful to the Carver Theatre, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the Titusville Development Corporation for their generosity in allowing our film team to interview people in their facilities for our films and for the Unheard Voices of Titusville project.