Take, for example, Birmingham.
There was one year--I believe it was 1912--when there was an average of
more than one murder a day, for every working day in the year, in the
county in which Birmingham is located. On one famous Saturday night
there were nineteen felonious assaults (sixteen by negroes and three by
whites), from which about a dozen deaths resulted, two of those killed
having been policemen.
All this has changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively
rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former
average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail,
which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands
almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from
120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population to 30 or
35.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
BUSY BIRMINGHAM
The fact that a man may shut off his motor and coast downhill from his
home to his office in the lower part of Birmingham, is not without
symbolism. Birmingham is all business. If I were to personify the place,
it would be in the likeness of a man I know--a big, powerful fellow with
an honest blue eye and an expression in which self-confidence, ambition,
and power are blended. Like Birmingham, this man is a little more than
forty years of age.
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