That Time Allen Ginsberg Came to Birmingham

In one of my online wanderings recently I found this photograph of Allen Ginsberg. Birmingham News photographer Ed Jones took this shot of the poet in the Colonial Room of the original Tutwiler Hotel on January 6, 1970. Constructed in 1914, the hotel sat on the corner of 5th Avenue North and 20th Street until it closed in 1972. The hotel was demolished two years later. 

Ginsberg was one of many well-known people who passed through the old Tutwiler. President Warren G. Harding, Charles Lindbergh, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Babe Ruth and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey were among them. In 1937 Tallulah Bankhead and her new husband actor John Emery held their after-wedding party in the Continental Room on August 31, 1937. 

By the time of his visit to Birmingham and until his death in 1997, Ginsberg was one of the best known literary figures in the United States, if not the world. Along with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, he was a core member of the Beat Generation of writers. Kerouac's On the Road and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Ginsberg's long poem "Howl" are basic texts of that literary movement. The poem made him famous--and for a while notorious in the wake of a 1957 trial over the work's supposed obscenity. Ginsberg was a prolific poet and activist in the 1960s and 1970s as he participated in protests over the Vietnam War and environmental issues. His association with major cultural figures, ranging from Bob Dylan to Timothy Leary, continued. 

So what was Allen Ginsberg doing in Birmingham in early January 1970? Good question. He might have been invited for a poetry reading. Since he's sitting next to a microphone, maybe he was interviewed by a radio or TV station. 

You can read more about Ginsberg here and here. 

UPDATE 3 April 2025

My friend Bill Plott has sent me this bit of info about his visit to the Magic City:

"Allen Ginsberg was in Birmingham as a participant in the Encounter Symposium at Birmingham-Southern College. There was an unbylined interview with him in the Jan. 6, 1970 Birmingham News. Wonder why the writer did not receive credit for an interesting story?"

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives & History

The original Tutwiler Hotel in July 1949