One suggestion for the origin of the name is the itching welts left by the leg-irons used to bind workers in chain gangs.
In the early 20th century African-American men were often rounded up on minor charges and put to work in the state's "convict lease system" for long periods. This included children as well.
Bustling by day, the district became known for illicit activities at night. A well-known character in Scratch Ankle of the 1880s was MS.Jessie Belle. She was a madam who operated a brothel named “The Palace” with African-American and Mixed-race prostitutes , who were regularly called on by both black and white male solicitors.
In early 1899 one of the two locally white owned newspapers, "The Birmingham Age-Herald" embarked on a campaign to have the "dives and dens of infamy and vice" in Scratch Ankle and Buzzard Roost "broken up, root and branch" for, "the lasting benefit of the city." Scratch Ankle was still listed as a den of vice and a source of bad publicity in George Ward's calls for county-wide prohibition in the early 1900s. By 1906 the Birmingham Realty Company stated in an editorial that, whereas "Scratch Ankle" and its ilk were, fifteen years earlier, the, "squalid abodes of a shiftless, criminal an very dangerous class of people," the area "has become a part of the business district of the city and the old name is little more than a memory."
Nevertheless, the memory of the neighborhood's criminal reputation persisted. Diane McWhorter described the Scratch Ankle of the mid-20th century as a "subterrane" ruled by Charles "Rat Killer" Barnett, owner of the 17th Street Shine Parlor who organized the bootlegging and pimping activities in the district while enjoying immunity from prosecution as an informant to Bull Connor. The term continued to be used for a beat in Birmingham Police Department work lists in the 1960s.
In its December 12, 1888 edition,One of Birmingham's main newspapers, the Weekly Age-Herald published a purported proposed bill to be introduced the following day before the Alabama State Legislature, under the headline "Probably A Joke". It included this language: "Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That to aid in suppression of crime, all that portion of the county of Jefferson commonly known as Birmingham, Pratt Mines, Coalburg, Buzzard's Roost, Lakeview, Scratch Ankle, East Lake, South Highlands, Murder Flat, Pigeon Roost, Burnt Stump, Mule's Ear and Forty Room House be, and are hereby declared to be included within the police jurisdiction of of the city of Montgomery, and subject to all the criminal ordinances applicable to said city of Montgomery.
The everlasting racism of Birmingham Alabama, is exhaustive.
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