Birmingham revisited Express-News Copyright 2013 Express-News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Updated 4:15 pm, Thursday, May 2, 2013 [...] Birmingham — about a two-hour drive west of Atlanta — has a complex history that includes post-Civil War industrialization, the corruption of an establishment that planned to carry out that industrialization with nonunionized and African-American labor and, decades later, its role as a staging ground in the fight for basic human rights.