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As with most big schools, the highest-profile among UAB's sports teams are basketball and football, with the latter having achieved unexpected success after a two-season hiatus in 2015 and '16. As of the current 2023–24 school year, the Blazers play in NCAA Division I as one of the newest members of the American Athletic Conference (though a few teams in sports that their new conference doesn't play compete elsewhere). The football team moved into the brand-new Protective Stadium downtown next to the convention center in October 2021. The central ticket office for all UAB sports is at Bartow Arena, also home to the basketball and women's volleyball teams. Another notable venue is PNC Field, which hosts Blazers men's and women's soccer and also hosted Birmingham Legion FC before that team moved to Protective Stadium.
The UAB Blazers are the varsity intercollegiate athletic programs that represent the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) located in Birmingham, Alabama. The school is one of the fifteen member institutions of the American Conference and participates in Division I of the NCAA. The Blazers' colors are green and gold.
Interpretive museum and research center, where you can learn about the struggle for civil rights through such engaging exhibits as a mocked-up 1950s-era segregated city, a replica of a Freedom Riders bus from Mississippi, and even the actual door from the cell in Birmingham Jail where Dr. Martin Luther King was held (see below). Researchers have at their disposal an expansive archive of documents and recordings.
This four-acre park was named for a local World War I hero, but is best known as the place where the climactic confrontation between the attack dog- and firehose-wielding Birmingham police and fire departments, led by Public Works Commissioner "Bull" Connor, and the student demonstrators from the SCLC, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, took place. The park was rededicated in 1992 as a "place of revolution and reconciliation" in commemoration of these pivotal events, and now contains a number of sculptural exhibits. Notable among those is Four Spirits, unveiled in 2013 as a memorial to the young victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (read on).
On September 15, 1963, in the aftermath of the Birmingham campaign (and at the beginning of the first school year in which the city's public schools were integrated), four members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed this oldest African-American church in Birmingham with dynamite, killing four young girls at choir practice and further outraging the nation and solidifying support in Congress for civil rights legislation. The church was rebuilt and remains in operation today, welcoming visitors both to Sunday services (10:45AM) and to the basement exhibition space featuring historical photographs and displays related to the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham.
The home and office of Dr. Edward H. Ballard, an African-American physician who hosted meetings of local Civil Rights activists here beginning in 1959, and who offered medical treatment to victims of police violence during the Birmingham campaign of 1963. The not-for-profit Ballard House Project is hard at work restoring the building and hosting events and exhibitions related to local Civil Rights history and other cultural themes.
Dr. Martin Luther King spent eight days in April 1963 incarcerated here, from his arrest on the 12th for violating an injunction against the demonstrations he and the SCLC were leading in the streets of Birmingham through his release on the 20th under pressure from the Kennedy administration. While there, he wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, addressing various criticisms that had been leveled against him and his movement — both an essay written by a group of local white clergymen and published in the local newspaper the day before his arrest, and more broadly from white moderates nationwide as well as certain "opposing forces in the Negro community". The prison is still in operation as such, so no tours are offered, but there is a historic plaque and other interpretive material outside.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was agitating for racial justice in Birmingham for years before Dr. King came to town, and the church where he preached was a focal point of action in the period immediately previous to the Birmingham campaign: it was the designated point of contact in Alabama for the Freedom Riders, who in 1961 successfully forced the desegregation of interstate buses in the South, and was firebombed by white supremacists no fewer than three times, including on Christmas Day 1956.