Birmingham, Birmingham... the Greatest City in Alabam

To get to Atlanta for the wedding, we flew to Birmingham. The costs to get to fly into the Pittsburgh of the South was about $500 cheaper for the family, and the rental car was another $150 less as well!
Birmingham is "only" 140 miles from Atlanta and since I have never been to Alabama, I thought it was worth the cost savings.
The Alabama Theater is in downtown and makes a strong statement for where you are. The size of the sign is like the street widths in downtown, pretty big. The size of the City population is about 250,000 and the entire metro area is only 1.2 Million. The population inside Birmingham's city limits has fallen over the past few decades, due in large part to "white flight" from the city of Birmingham proper to surrounding suburbs. From 340,887 in 1960, the population was down to 242,820 in 2000, a loss of about 29 percent.

Outside the Alabama Theater, is the Alabama Walk of Fame, which has some of the famous Alabamans (not sure this is what they're called, but hey we were only there for a couple of hours!). The City was founded after the Civil War, which I wouldn't have guessed before reading up on the City.

Birmingham is home to several notable historic moments including early incarceration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963, he attended a conference to help end segregation. Together with local leaders, he helped launch "Project C" (for "Confrontation"), a massive assault on the Jim Crow system. During April and May daily sit-ins and mass marches organized were met with police repression and arrests. These protests were ultimately successful, leading not only to desegregation of public accommodations in Birmingham but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964