This is how a 1930s Birmingham city map ranked its neighborhoods:

Best

Still Desirable

Definitely Declining

Hazardous

Negro Concentrations

The last item needed no further explanation. Everyone knew what "negro" meant: Poor, uneducated, unskilled and an all-around bad bet for the banks and insurance companies that would use the map to dismiss entire neighborhoods.

The practice is called "redlining," a term coined when cities across the country carved up their communities with proverbial or literal lines. Live on a redlined block, and you found it harder to find health insurance, apply for loans, even buy liquor. You might see more police on the streets, but less attention from the city when they needed repaving.

Birmingham's earliest redlining ordinances had more to do with keeping brothels and saloons in check, said Alabama historian Dr. Wayne Flynt, but they quickly became synonymous with institutional racism that sustained a cycle of poverty that still grips the city's black communities.

"At that point, it morphs from moral redlining where you don't want people who are prostitutes in your neighborhood...to where it's all about apartheid, it's all about separating blacks," Flynt says.

The map is a glimpse into a small window between formal segregation and its own breakdown. Soon black soldiers began to return from WWII and a new middle class emerged. They began to buck the system and move into white parts of town.

"Then you get Dynamite Hill," Flynt says. "Then you get 33 bombings between the 1940s and 1963."

The rest of the story contains integration, White Flight, and a series of federal laws designed to snuff out redlining--or at least, push it into the shadows.

But the ghost of redlining still haunts the city's black neighborhoods.

"We take that map today and overlay it over the blight and deteriorated communities in our city, and they're in the exact same places," says John Colon, director of the Department of Community Development.

Redlining not only kept populations divided, but kept black residents from acquiring personal capital. Many couldn't get mortgages or borrow off their equity to make home improvements, laying the groundwork for today's slumlords who allow their properties to rot around impoverished tenants.

"There's a history of this," Colon continues. "And now because of the depreciation of property values and lack of equity, borrowing is still a challenge, and some neighborhoods are still considered high risk."

Colon believes recognizing these century-old roots is key for reversing the damage. The Bell administration has recently launched its comprehensive RISE initiative to restore city neighborhoods. A key directive will be catalyzing market value in areas sucked dry long ago.

"It's really about providing access to capital...Not just any capital, but low cost capital. So when we're talking about borrowing money, we're talking about borrowing money at a low interest rate so it's affordable, so a homeowner can make the repairs that will bring their property up to code."

But while the old Negro Concentrations like Ensley are still decayed, so are once fashionable spots such as north Birmingham and parts of West End abandoned by white families in the 60s and 70s. Today, they host some of the city's worst crime, blight and slumlording.

The redlining map is simply a small part of a much larger picture, says Charles Ball, director of the Regional Planning Commission. He cautions against reading too much into it.

"First, because we don't know the condition of the neighborhoods of color when this map was prepared. We probably had neighborhoods that were already slums by then, and we had nice, well-maintained working class neighborhoods, often side-by-side."

Ball points out that while redlining certainly harmed black communities, so did the decline of the city's industrial jobs, white flight, and even the interstate system. Furthermore, the city still saw an emergence of black middle class communities even despite redlining ordinances.

Ball's point isn't that we should dismiss redlining, but that: "It's a lot more complicated than redlining. There are a lot of other moving parts."

Institutional racism is just one facet of the long, complicated story of Birmingham's decline. Restoring it won't be black and white.