Photo courtesy of Eddie Griffith.
The Hollywood Town Hall in 1927.
Six votes to end a city.
In 1964, Homewood voters went to the polls to decide whether to dissolve their city into Birmingham. Annexation won by six votes.
Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Homewood Mayor Jennifer Andress.
Current Homewood Mayor Jennifer Andress points to the importance of voting.
“It is vitally important for Homewood citizens to show up at the polls, whether it is a municipal election or a special called election, like the one we had in 2024 to change our form of government to a Council-Manager form of government. It is a privilege to exercise our right to be heard through our votes, and our city is stronger with an engaged and informed citizenry,” Mayor Andress said.
Since the 1950s, Birmingham had been courting the over-the-mountain suburbs. The families who moved south of Red Mountain still worked downtown, shopped downtown and built their prosperity on Birmingham’s economy, while paying their taxes to Homewood, Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills. Annexation would recapture the tax base. Seen from Homewood, the same arithmetic ran in reverse. An earlier Birmingham bid in 1959 had been turned back, and everyone understood there would be another.
The 1964 attempt moved fast. Within weeks, a petition signed by more than 50 qualified Homewood electors reached the City Council. The council called the election a month before the ballots were cast.
That notice would matter more than anyone expected.
Morris N. Bouldin was a Homewood resident and taxpayer, and by his own account, he was mostly worried about his tax bill. Homewood’s rate was lower than Birmingham’s, which also levied a sales tax that Homewood did not.
Bouldin sued to void the election, and his argument had nothing to do with how anyone voted. State law required 60 days’ notice before a special election of this kind. Homewood had given roughly half that.
Birmingham’s answer was, in effect, that everybody already knew. The merger had been argued in the newspapers for months; formal notice was a technicality. The Alabama Supreme Court did not agree. General publicity through the news media could not substitute for the notice the statute demanded. The requirement was mandatory, not a suggestion.
The trial court declared the election void within a year, and the state supreme court affirmed shortly after.
For a little more than two years, the city of Homewood existed mainly as an argument.
Birmingham had not waited for the courts. After the 1964 vote, the city began collecting taxes in Homewood at Birmingham’s higher rate. When the courts finally ruled, a companion decision ordered that money returned to the people who paid it.
For two years, in other words, Homewood was a city whose existence depended on which document you were reading. But the court’s ruling did not settle the question; it reset it. A new election was called, and this time the campaign ran with the full legal notice and no ambiguity about what was at stake.
Homewood voters rejected annexation decisively — roughly 65% chose to remain independent. Turnout climbed significantly, more than a quarter higher than in 1964.
Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Eddie Griffith at his home in Hollywood.
Eddie Griffith, chairman of the Homewood Historic Preservation Commission, moved to Homewood in 1986, and he lives on Hollywood Boulevard. The commission is working on an app with TravelStorys that will offer a walking tour of Homewood.
“That vote was two decades before we moved to Homewood. I was 34 when we moved here, and we loved everything about this unique place,” Griffith said. “You knew your neighbors back then, but today, everyone’s in a hurry. We also love the diversity. We wanted our kids to grow up in a diverse community.”
Historians still argue about what drove over-the-mountain independence — civic identity, local control, taxes and the racial politics of the era were braided together in ways residents themselves described differently at the time.
Griffith, an architect, reads the appeal in the housing stock itself.
“There were many reasons for Homewood wanting independence,” Griffith said. “Speaking as an architect, these reasons included houses built to the same scale and lot size. Welcoming front porches. Sidewalks. Front porches invite a friendlier neighborhood, which in turn makes a community prosper and grow.”
Photo courtesy of Eddie Griffith.
Despite the battle for independence, downtown Homewood has thrived throughout the centuries.
What is not in dispute is the outcome. The second vote hardened Homewood’s sense of itself as a city that had chosen its own name. When Homewood built its own school system years later, the confidence to do it traced straight back to the annexation fight. A city that had voted to exist felt some obligation to act like one.
Every centennial invites a counterfactual, and Homewood’s is unusually sharp. Flip a few ballots in 1964, let the result stand, and this town would not exist. The school system would not exist. Homewood would be a neighborhood inside Birmingham.
Griffith describes the appeal in the terms many residents do.
“Everything is a few minutes away, the grocery store, the community center, the schools. You still see kids walking home from school. Not many places can say that. It’s like the fifties when I was growing up.”
Six votes held the line in 1964.
A hundred years on, Homewood is still walking home from school.
