Civil Rights Movement

1. The Using Violence before 1965

But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle,
Book by Glenn T. Eskew; University of North Carolina Press, 1997 p.3

INTRODUCTION Stalemate

Civil order collapsed in Birmingham, Alabama, when Bull Connor's fire hoses and police dogs failed to control the thousands of African American activists and schoolchildren who converged on the downtown business district shortly after noon on May 7, 1963.

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CHAPTER ONE The National Movement

Birmingham transformed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Civil rights activists had organized the SCLC in the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott as a national movement to coordinate the efforts of local protest groups. They selected the charismatic spokesman of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as president. From 1957 until 1961 the SCLC drifted without much purpose, proposing voter registration drives and offering belated assistance to student activists following the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. With corporate foundation grants that funded the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) and the Voter Education Project (VEP), the SCLC conducted workshops to register black voters. The NAACP viewed the fledgling civil rights organization as a threat to its interests. Radical black youths thought the SCLC lacked initiative. In 1961 the Albany Movement offered the SCLC an opportunity to return to the direct action strategy that had succeeded in Montgomery.

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CHAPTER THREE

Bull's Birmingham

Years before the spring demonstrations of 1963, T. Eugene "Bull" Connor symbolized Birmingham. The popular commissioner of public safety had consistently won reelection since 1937 as a union-busting, segregating defender of public virtue. He received the electoral support of the white lower middle class that dominated local politics. Like his constituency, Connor felt threatened by the postwar changes occurring in Birmingham. Although the outcome of a series of police scandals persuaded him not to seek a fifth term ill 1953, lie responded to the emerging civil rights movement by riding the rising discontent of a frustrated lower-status white electorate back into office in 1957. His power base eroded, Connor nonetheless promised to resist the black demand for an end to racial discrimination in the marketplace.

CHAPTER FOUR The Local Movement

The formation of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in 1956 marked a clear departure from traditional black protest in Birmingham and foreshadowed the nonviolent direct action tactics of the student sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Heretofore, the traditional Negro leadership class had petitioned and patiently negotiated with white officials in an often vain attempt to secure the barest of public services. Generally directed by the NAACP, black protest occurred as a symbolic gesture against segregation. Under the leadership of the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights cast aside vocal protestations and rhetorical resolutions for dangerous physical contact with the white power structure. Though retaining the legalistic strategy of the NAACP, the ACMHR added an urgency evidenced by confrontational protest. The advent of nonviolent direct action radically altered race relations in Birmingham.

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CHAPTER FIVE Businessmen's Reform

It was Mother's Day, May 14, 1961. A white mob milled about the Birmingham Trailways station awaiting the arrival of integrationists from the Congress of Racial Equality. After the white man, James Peck, and his black associate, Charles Person, got off the bus and approached the segregated lunch counter, several Ku Klux Klansmen intervened, six of them grabbing Peck and another five hustling Person out a side door and into an alleyway beyond the view of the public. With iron bars, lead pipes, and chains, they brutally assaulted the civil rights activists. For fifteen minutes, the vigilantes kicked and clubbed everyone suspect, leaving bloodsplattered and crumpled bodies scattered about the station. Innocent black bystanders who had come to greet friends also were attacked. One witness watched the white men beat a Freedom Rider until "his face was a bloody, red pulp." Birmingham Post-Herald reporter Tom Langston photographed the attack on Peck. The next day's editions of the Post-Herald and Birmingham News printed the picture of the mob scene. Carried by the Associated Press across the world, the snapshot of the brutal treatment of the Freedom Riders confirmed Birmingham's national reputation as a racially intolerant Tom Langston's famous photograph of the Freedom Ride riot in the Birmingham Trailways station on Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, helped shift white elite opinion against Bull Connor. The man whose rear protrudes to the right is Gary Thomas Rowe...

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CHAPTER SIX Momentum

A stalemate over race relations in Birmingham had created a crisis months before Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived on the scene and exacerbated the problem. Indeed, for years Birmingham had been building toward just such a calamity. By the spring of 1963, the Consensus governing Birmingham since the Great Depression had collapsed. The industrial and financial elite split over the issue of desegregation. Most of the Big Mules and much of the lower middle class supported the belligerent commissioner of public safety Bull Connor in his defense of racial norms. A new renegade group oriented toward a service-consumer economy, headed by realtor Sidney W. Smyer, and tacitly supported by the white middle class evidenced a willingness to compromise on racial matters. The change in city government from the commission to the mayorcouncil system highlighted the division among the white elite. Likewise, factionalism prevented Birmingham's black community from speaking with one voice as the direct action against segregation waged by Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights

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CHAPTER SEVEN Another Albany?

Seven African American integrationists headed by the Reverend Abraham Woods Jr. entered Britling Cafeteria shortly after ten on the morning of April 3, 1963, sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter, and requested service. The Reverend Calvin Woods--Abraham's brother--led eight activists in a sit-in at Woolworth's. Similar demonstrations Occurred at the nearby Loveman's, Pizitz, and Kress stores. The volunteers for the protest were members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. The sit-ins marked the beginning of a major drive to force a resolution of the long-standing stalemate in local race relations.

Workers at Britling's refused to take the orders of Reverend Woods, James Armstrong, and the others who sat down in the cafeteria; instead, store officials asked the integrationists to leave and pressed charges against them when they demurred. Before noon police arrested thirteen at Britling's. The other four lunch counters responded to the sit-ins by shutting down the griddles and sending the cooks home. The five demonstrators with Calvin Woods and ACMHR choir director Carlton Reese waited at

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CHAPTER EIGHT The Children's Crusade

Just as the spring demonstrations appeared to collapse for want of volunteers, civil rights activists discovered an untapped resource with potential to tip the scale on behalf of the movement. For five weeks the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had waged a joint campaign against racial discrimination in an attempt to force a resolution of Birmingham's long-standing crisis in race relations. During April 1963 more than three hundred integrationists from the ACMHR and black student associations had faced arrest after participating in sit-ins at downtown lunch counters, picketing in department stores, and marching in illegal parades. Yet the local movement had given all it had and could offer little more. The image of Martin Luther King had failed to attract the needed new blood to keep the campaign in the public's eye. A divided black community further complicated matters as the traditional Negro leadership class publicly repudiated the authority of King and Fred Shuttlesworth. Nearly everything pointed to another Albany, another failure. As

p.299CHAPTER NINE But for Birmingham

Just as the children's crusade broke the stalemate in local race relations, so too it broke the stalemate on the national level as it forced the president and Congress to draft legislation that ended legal racial discrimination. Likewise, the Birmingham campaign transformed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference into a financially successful organization with a powerful strategy for social change and an internationally renown leader. At first it appeared that the ambiguous resolution had been achieved within the confines of federalism, but in the tumultuous months following Birmingham, as civil rights protests rocked cities across America, it became clear to the Kennedy administration that legislation was necessary to achieve desegregation in the South. Consequently, the victory in Birmingham evolved into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which opened the system to African Americans even in recalcitrant places such as the steel city. The SCLC rode the wave of international outrage over Birmingham, increasing its revenues tenfold and honing a new strategy of nonviolent coersion. The March on Washington was simply a celebration of the victory in Birmingham. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's selection for the Nobel Peace Prize was all endorsement of nonviolence in the anticolonial struggle in Alabama and elsewhere ill the world. Whereas realtor Sidney W. Smyer and the service economy faction agreed to the negotiations in Birmingham,...