The Fourth Avenue District, A City Within the City
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Before nineteen hundred, Black-owned businesses in Birmingham were distributed throughout the downtown area, operating alongside white-owned firms in the ordinary geography of commerce. The passage of Jim Crow ordinances after the turn of the century changed that. Segregation laws required strict separation, and what followed was not the destruction of Black commerce but its consolidation.
The Fourth Avenue District grew up between Fifteenth and Eighteenth Streets along Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues North, becoming Birmingham's Black business center through the first half of the twentieth century. Because Black residents were excluded from white-owned restaurants, theaters, hotels, and professional offices, the district developed its own complete commercial ecosystem: law firms, medical and dental practices, insurance companies, barbershops, restaurants, a hotel, and the theaters that brought touring entertainers from the national Black entertainment circuit.
The Carver Theatre opened here in nineteen thirty-five as one of the few movie houses in Birmingham showing first-run films to Black audiences. A renovation in nineteen forty-five upgraded it to fourteen hundred seats with air conditioning and modern projection equipment. The theater brought the world of American film to a community that had no access to the segregated theaters elsewhere in the city.
The Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, founded in nineteen seventy-eight, eventually took over the Carver's operations in nineteen ninety-three and still maintains the building today. Among the musicians celebrated in its collection: Sun Ra, born Herman Blount in Birmingham in nineteen fourteen. Ella Fitzgerald. Nat King Cole. Duke Ellington. Alabama produced more jazz talent than the rest of the country gave it credit for.
The Fourth Avenue Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two.
