People come to Birmingham carrying a heavy script. They arrive expecting the gravity of the place to crush them. They expect the brick, the blood, the sermons and the steel. They treat the city like a crime scene or a classroom, a place you visit to pay respects to the struggle, to touch the scars of 1963.
They are not wrong. That spirit is there. But often, the visitors miss the point of venerating it. They forget what the struggle was actually for.
The fight wasn’t just for a seat on a bus or a lever in a voting booth. It was for the right to the city’s beauty. It was for the right to be at ease, to access the romance and the pleasure that had been hoarded for so long.
To truly understand Birmingham, one cannot just study the battle; one has to taste the victory. Here is our weekend guide.
Friday: Be held by the city
Check into the Elyton. It’s a handsome old pile of rock, polished into the present. Decades ago, this kind of elegance was a fortress. Now, the lobby feels like a handshake — firm, unpretentious. Drop your bags. Shed the armor of the work week. You aren’t just relaxing here; you are occupying a space that was fought for. The city won’t rush you. It offers you the luxury of belonging. Take it.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Start your Friday night with a meal that forces you to slow down, at The Essential. The light is warm, the room humming with the low-level frequency of people simply enjoying each other. Start with the beef carpaccio with the crisp shallots. Order the rigatoni with chorizo. End with the tiramisu that smells of strawberries and wine.
It seems like a simple dinner, but in this city, leisure is a radical act. The ability to sit in a beautiful room, to be served with care, to let a conversation unspool without looking over your shoulder — this is the “good life” that the marches were meant to secure.
Amina Price understands that shift in her bones. A 30-year-old creative who has spent most of her life in Birmingham, she grew up inside the city’s history: Her father is the pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
“I’ve lived in New York. I’ve lived in other cities,” she told me. “But down here, there are places where people are just friendly — you end up talking, meeting, connecting. It’s more organic.”
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
In a country where so many urban pleasures are gated by speed, money and anonymity, Birmingham offers something rarer: ease. You are not consuming the city here. You are being held by it.
Then, slide into the night. Visit Adiõs. It’s a love letter to Mexico City, glowing with color. Drink the mezcal with ginger and lime. Lean in. Let the room embrace you.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Then go play. Head to Up-Down or Paramount arcade bars. Scream over skee-ball. Miss shots on Punch-Out. Share cheap pizza like a teenager. It is frivolous. It is silly. And that is the point.
Saturday: Look closely at things of beauty
Saturday morning, wake up slowly. The light hits differently here — softer, filtered through the humidity. Go to Pink Lantern Café. Drink the ube cold foam latte. Linger. Wander the quiet rooms of the always-free Birmingham Museum of Art and look closely at things of beauty. This, too, is part of the inheritance: the right to art, to silence, to a Saturday morning that belongs to no one but you.
For lunch, make the pilgrimage to SAW’s Soul Kitchen in Avondale. Eat the fried green tomatoes with crusts that shatter when you bite them. Eat the sweet heat chicken sandwich that makes a mess. It is communal and loud and messy. It is the culture that sustained the struggle now celebrated as the city’s culinary heartbeat.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Spend your afternoon digging. Flip through vinyl at Renaissance Records. Try on past lives at D’Trespa Vintage. Find global goods and vintage products at Sozo Trading. Fall into the unhurried rhythm of a weekend.
Price describes Birmingham not as a monolith but as “smaller communities creating their own thing.” She points to poetry collectives, grassroots arts programs and a quietly powerful music scene.
“We have producers here who’ve been nominated for Grammys, who’ve worked with major artists,” she said, “but who aren’t really known yet.” Even the food follows that logic. The city’s Black-owned food trucks, she noted, “have really blossomed over the past few years.” You don’t just eat well here — you eat locally, communally, in ways that feel intimate rather than extractive. Culture in Birmingham isn’t staged. It is practiced.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
As the sun dips, climb the hill to Vulcan Park. The big man — the iron statue — watches over the sprawl. Stand there. Look out over the city. Enjoy a view that belongs to whoever can make the climb.
Sunday: Gentleness, hospitality, ease
Sunday brings the reckoning, but it also brings the connection. Go to the A.G. Gaston Motel, built by African American businessman and entrepreneur, Arthur George Gaston. It provided lodging to Black travelers in the days of segregation and was a headquarters for the local Civil Rights Movement. It’s now part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.
At Alicia’s, drink a “Room 30” latte, named for the war room where Dr. King stayed. The drink — espresso with raspberry and white chocolate, made with oat milk — has become a local favorite. But the point of ordering it isn’t only flavor. According to Naimah Elmore, the 41-year-old co-owner of Alicia’s Coffee, a portion of its sales goes back into the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
Elmore started the business during the pandemic after she and her partner were laid off. “I looked down at my coffee cup and I said, man, we’re going to invest in coffee,” she told me. She laughed — then went home and started researching why coffee shops fail and why they succeed. “They succeed because it’s a pillar of the community,” she said. “So for me, it is a coffee shop. But I also call it a healing place.”
That philosophy feels native to Birmingham. Elmore calls the city’s small businesses its heartbeat. “When you enter these businesses,” she said, “you just feel the sense of being at home.” Every neighborhood has its own texture, its own way of seasoning the same basic warmth.
On one Birmingham podcast she listened to, a host was asked what food the city would be, and she picked collard greens “because everybody has their own way of making it,” Elmore recalled. “But it goes back to the warmth of home.”
Walk from Alicia’s to the historic 16th Street Baptist Church, famous as the site where four young girls attending Sunday School were killed from a bombing carried out by the Ku Klux Klan. Hear a sermon. Fellowship. Carry the weight of the sorrow and the courage. But while you stand there, let your realization shift.
Credit: Bob Miller
Credit: Bob Miller
They didn’t organize in these rooms just to survive. They organized so that one day, you could wake up, walk down the street without fear, and have brunch, if you want to.
So go do exactly that, at Ruby Sunshine. Eat the shrimp and grits with rosemary butter. Pull apart the warm biscuits. It is abundant. It is tender. It is one tangible, edible proof of progress.
Before you leave, stop at Woodlawn Marketplace for a sweet treat. Take a minute to appreciate the surprise of it all — the gentleness, the hospitality, the ease.
Come to Birmingham expecting to learn what people were fighting against. But stay long enough to let the city embrace you, and you will leave understanding what people were fighting for.
It wasn’t just for policy. It was for access to all of the beauty and romance of this city. It was for the right to walk into a room, order a drink, look at a painting, hold a hand, and finally, fully, exhale.
Donovan X. Ramsey is a journalist and author of When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era. His work on race, politics, and the criminal legal system has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, and WSJ Magazine.
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