A SETTLEMENT HOUSE IN ENSLEY'S ITALIAN DISTRICT

Alabama Heritage, Winter 2005 by Hubbs, G Ward

LOCATED IN THE HEART OF BIRMINGHAM'S ITALIAN DISTRICT, THE ENSLEY COMMUNITY HOUSE SOUGHT TO ALLEVIATE THE PROBLEMS MANY IMMIGRANT WORKERS FACED-ESPECIALLY THE SENSE OF ALIENATION AND ISOLATION FROM MAINSTREAM AMERICAN CULTURE. BY G. WARD HUBBS

IN THE EARLY 187Os a new city was born as two railroad lines pushed into central Alabama's Jones Valley, where limestone, iron ore, and coal-the raw ingredients for making iron-all lay adjacent to each other. Birmingham came to represent the industrialism that many believed would establish a prosperous New South shorn of its ties to slavery and agriculture. Though Alabama's population was still overwhelmingly rural, farming was in decline. Thousands left their homes and familiar small communities for jobs in Birmingham's furnaces and mills. Alabama's iron industry also attracted tens of thousands of immigrants who had just disembarked at Ellis Island, especially those from southern and eastern Europe.

The migration of rural people, both native and immigrant, to industrial cities created unprecedented problems. Skilled artisans lost out as customers turned to cheaper, mass-produced substitutes for their goods. Urban workers in immense factories joined radical labor unions to fight the corporate forces that seemed to be running their lives, and extremes of wealth and poverty caused many to wonder what America's promise of equality really meant. Just as the railroads were tying the country together economically, new social forces seemed to be pulling it apart.

Birmingham was in many ways typical of cities caught up in this revolution. Walking down some streets one was as likely to hear Italian or Greek as English. To the city's native-born population, the religious and cultural heritage of these new immigrants could hardly have seemed more alien. For many of the immigrants who worked long hours in the hot iron furnaces, Birmingham was just as foreign. Most of them had grown up in small villages where their families had lived for countless generations before them. Life had been simpler then-direct and intimate. Now they were strangers in a city only a few decades old, a city that spewed black soot from its chimneys and consumed workers like it consumed the iron ore from Red Mountain. They tended to cluster together with friends and families in their own neighborhoods where they could support each other and speak their native language. While such arrangements eased their sense of loneliness, it kept them alienated from the English-speaking mainstream, an alienation that only increased when Italian workers crossed picket lines during the frequent strikes.

"Are Our Immigrants Dangerous to Our Government and Our Protestant Christianity?" read the headline of a 1910 article published in the Alabama Christian Advocate, a Methodist weekly newspaper. The author, Mrs. S. A. Tyson, acknowledged that immigrant labor had contributed to the country's material success, but she worried about the price at which this prosperity had been purchased. "The introduction of about twenty millions of immigrants during the last fifty years, who were wholly ignorant of our political principles, has lowered the average political intelligence of the country," she noted. These widespread anxieties were the foundation of growing anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide. But while others would have preferred to send the latest arrivals back to their homelands, Tyson's solution to the immigrant problem was for America's Christians to extend their hands to help raise up the less fortunate. These new immigrants came from areas of poverty, ignorance, and poor sanitation. Once here, they crowded together in city slums. "They come with license being their only idea of political and civic liberty-anarchy instead of law," Tyson continued, "and with minds filled with enslaving superstitions to which they cling." It was not simple charity to provide them with good health, good working conditions, and an education in the American virtues-it was a Christian's duty, and a necessity if America were to survive.

ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, women like Tyson were trying to solve the social problems of urban America. In 1889 Jane Addams, a woman of education and privilege, opened Hull House in Chicago, the prototypical settlement house-a sanctuary and learning center for the victims of industrialization. In the midst of slums, Addams and her assistants eased the burden of the urban poor by providing services, usually educational or recreational, and by pushing for larger social reforms. Hull House established a precedent, and other single, well-educated women from comfortable backgrounds began to establish settlement houses in other large cities.

As early as 1897, the Home Missionary Society of Birmingham's First Methodist Church began conducting an industrial school for children in "difficult homes." Within a few years the Methodists expanded this initiative by organi/jng the Birmingham Board of City Missions. Their first act was to procure a small cottage at Third Avenue and Ninth Street to be used as a Wesley House, as Methodist settlement houses were called. Although this first house failed, the Board established a second Wesley House in 1908 to minister to "streetcar families"-working-class families strained by long commutes across town to transient jobs. Three years later the house was moved to the Avondale Mills Village, where the company gradually took over its maintenance-a common fate for settlement houses located in industrial communities.