Day: May 3, 2018

unhistorical:

May 3, 1963: In Birmingham, Alabama, city authorities begin to deploy violent force against black protestors.

Fifty-five years ago today, in schools across Jefferson County, Alabama, thousands of students dropped their pencils, laced their shoes, and walked out of their classrooms. Some would march together ten miles, and all were headed for the county seat of Birmingham. For a month, a mass nonviolent campaign against segregation had been underway there, under the cooperative leadership of the local Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Even among Southern cities, Birmingham was afflicted by a racism so stubborn on the systemic level, and so bitter and violent on the personal, that it was nicknamed ‘Bombingham’ and described as “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States” by Dr. King. Here there was no pretense of genteel Southern hierarchy. For a month black protestors had gathered at city hall, launched boycotts, organized lunch counter sit-ins, stood in the doorways of white churches. In the course of the demonstrations Martin Luther King, Jr. had been jailed for a week (during which he published his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”). 

James Bevel, the SCLC’s direct action mastermind, came up with the idea to organize the children and students of Jefferson County. They came from elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. (The plan was later dubbed the ‘Children’s Crusade’ by Newsweek.) As the students arrived in Birmingham in the direction of City Hall, the hardline segregationist Commissioner of Public Safety, “Bull” Connor, directed police attack dogs, hoses, and mass arrests against the protesters.

The shocking images (people huddled on the ground and against buildings; snarling dogs; cruel water and crueler men) splashed onto the pages of Life and Time, and into the national discourse. The Life magazine spread, famously photographed by Alabama native Charles Moore, depicted the scene in terms at least as explicit as much of mainstream America outside the South had hitherto ever heard. 

Its coverage struck a cynical tone: Connor was playing right into the hands of the organizers; that a man having his pant leg ripped off by a police dog was “the attention-getting jack pot of… provocation” and a woman knocked down by a “hose blast… like a battering ram” had been struck in the act of “[taunting] the police.” Mobilizing children was low, nearly as low as sending grown men with clubs out to beat them. But people saw, and at least some listened.

On May 4, Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, arrived in Birmingham. Between bad publicity for the city and bad economics for white business leaders, Marshall was sure that they would give a little. The next week, the City of Birmingham agreed to desegregate lunch counters and drinking fountains, and to hire some black employees.

Robert and John F. Kennedy entreated dialogue between the North and South, between black and white. Both publicly lauded Dr. King, but the attorney general also observed: “If King loses… worse leaders are going to take his place. Look at the Black Muslims.” If Americans were fed up with Dr. King’s nonviolence, they would not be able to imagine the alternative. Privately, Robert Kennedy was more critical of the campaign as a whole. “Many in the Negro leadership didn’t know what they were demonstrating about,” Kennedy remarked, and “none of the white community would get near… because they felt that they were being disorderly.” The violence in Birmingham had shocked both Kennedys. Both also feared what else might come – from the whites, but even moreso from black communities with little faith in white leaders. It seemed to Robert Kennedy that “the Negroes are all mad for no reason at all, and they want to fight.” 

In September 1963, for no reason at all, a Ku Klux Klan bomb injured twenty-two churchgoers and killed four girls at the same 16th Street Baptist Church where the Children’s Crusade had gathered. In June 1963, President Kennedy called for legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.