Birmingham
As early at May 1962 Birmingham minister and SCLC member
Fred Shuttlesworth had suggested that the SCLC ally with his own
organization, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights,
to protest conditions in Birmingham. Birmingham was the wealthiest city
in Alabama, and a bastion of segregation. The mayor was a segregationist
and the police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Conner was known for
his hostile and sometimes violent treatment of blacks. The Governor
of the state was George Wallace, who had won office with promises
of "segregation forever."
In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962 seventeen black churches
and homes had been bombed, including the home of Shuttlesworth,
who campaigned actively for civil rights. Although the population
of Birmingham was 40% African American, there seemed little hope
for a political solution to the racial divide: of 80,000 registered
voters, only 10,000 were black.
King did not adopt Shuttlesworth's suggestion until early
1963, but once he did, he treated it as a major campaign. In March
King, along with Ralph Abernathy and a few other SCLC organizers,
set up headquarters in a room at a motel in one of Birmingham's
black neighborhoods. They began recruiting volunteers for protest
rallies and giving workshops in nonviolent techniques. Initially
King head scheduled the protests to begin in time to disrupt Easter
season shopping, giving them economic bite. He postponed his plans,
however, to prevent them from affecting the local mayoral election,
in which Bull Conner was a candidate.
The campaign began on 3 April with lunch-counter sit-ins.
On 6 April, protestors marched on City Hall, and forty-two people
were arrested. Demonstrations occurred each day thereafter. While
the jails filled with peaceful blacks, King negotiated with white
businessmen, whose stores were losing business due to the protests.
Although some of these businessmen were willing to consider desegregating
their facilities and hiring African Americans, City officials held
fast to segregationist policies. On 10 April, these officials
obtained an injunction prohibiting the demonstrations. Unlike the
injunction in Albany, Georgia, however, this one came from a state
court, not a federal one. King felt comfortable violating such an
injunction, on the grounds of adhering to the federal laws with which
it was at odds.
Getting the other leaders of the campaign to violate the
injunction, however, took some convincing by King, especially as
many of the clergy felt bound to be in the pulpit–and not in jail–on
the following Sunday, which was Easter. But King succeeded in
persuading them to his cause, and personally led a march on Good
Friday, 12 April. All protestors were quickly arrested. Birmingham
police separated King and Abernathy, placing each in solitary confinement,
and denying each man his rightful phone-calls to the outside world.
Disturbed by the unprecedented silence from her husband,
Coretta Scott King called the White House. Her call was returned
by Robert Kennedy and then by the President himself. The Kennedy Administration
sent FBI agents to Birmingham, and King promptly received more
hospitable treatment. Moreover, this intervention by Kennedy gave
the movement greater momentum.
King spent eight days in his cell. During that time he
composed his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." The letter was ostensibly
conceived in response to a letter that had recently run in a local
newspaper, which had claimed that the protests were "unwise and untimely";
however, King also quite deliberately wrote his letter for a national
audience. The letter reveals King's strength as a rhetorician
and his breadth of learning. It alludes to numerous secular thinkers,
as well as to the Bible. It is passionate and controlled, and was
subsequently appropriated by many writing textbooks as a model
of persuasive writing. At the time, it gave a singular, eloquent
voice to a massive, jumbled movement.
Once King was released from jail, the protests assumed
a larger scale and a more confrontational character. At the suggestion
of SCLC member Jim Bevel, the organizers began to recruit younger protestors.
They visited high schools, training youth in nonviolent tactics.
The method was dangerous–kids could get hurt–but also potentially
very symbolically powerful: children were the beneficiaries of
the movement; they represented the movement's hope for the future.
On 2 May King addressed a young crowd at the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church. Afterward they marched downtown, singing
"We Shall Overcome," and nearly a thousand youths were arrested.
The next day, more young people had arrived to replenish the ranks,
and another march occurred. By this point, the situation had become overwhelming
for Bull Conner, whose jails were full. On 3 May he had his forces
blast the young protestors with fire-hoses, and released attack
dogs against them. It was these acts of violence–broadcast on
national television– that pricked the national conscience, and marked
a turning point not only in Birmingham but also in the Civil Rights
Movement as a whole. Telegrams flooded the White House conveying
outrage, and it became clear that the Kennedy Administration would
have to confront civil rights issues more directly.
In a day or two the protests had become so massive and
volatile that the City was willing to negotiate. It listened to
the demands of the SCLC, and set a schedule for the desegregation
of lunch counters and other facilities. It also promised to confront
the issue of inequality in hiring practices, to grant amnesty to
arrested demonstrators, and to create a bi-racial committee for
the reconciliation of differences.
As had happened in Montgomery, violence followed the concessions.
Whites bombed black homes and churches, and blacks retaliated
with mob violence. King's activities in Birmingham, therefore,
included a final stage, during which he patrolled the city, speaking
wherever people had gathered; he implored African Americans to
answer violence only with peace.
While changes in local policies constituted the Birmingham
campaign's immediate outcome, the effort's long-term effects were
felt nation-wide. In the weeks that followed, tensions flared,
and protests commenced in scores of Southern cities. King's fame
as a civil rights leader was redoubled. And on 11 June, President
Kennedy voiced his commitment to federal civil rights legislation.
He had been holding off, preoccupied by the Cold War, but Birmingham had
pressed the issue. Kennedy's commitment culminated in the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson
after Kennedy's assassination. The act mandated federally what
had in Birmingham been won locally: a white commitment to desegregation
and equal employment opportunities. It also gave the federal government
power to enforce desegregation laws in schools by withholding funds
from noncompliant districts.
