ABSTRACT
Back to Birmingham is a biographical account of the rise of Richard Arrington, Jr., from a humble upbringing in rural Alabama to become one of the most powerful local public officials in the United States. The author, Jimmy Lewis Franklin, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has produced a well-researched chronicle of the life of the thrice-elected mayor of Birmingham, Alabama. Franklin tells a masterful story of Arrington's life, a feat that is greatly facilitated by the absence of the heavy documentation of traditional scholarship. While Back to Birmingham is an account of the rise of Richard Arrington, Jr., to a position of political authority in Birmingham, it is more than that. It also represents the general reincorporation of southern blacks into the political process and their development as a substantial component of the political process in the South.
