Birmingham Campaign

6 Key excerpts on "Birmingham Campaign"

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  Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement

  • Yohuru Williams(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although there were battles and skirmishes in cities, towns, and communities throughout the country, the major national battles, which involved most of the major Civil Rights organizations, played out in the previously mentioned campaigns. Each, directly or indirectly, helped to set the stage for the passage of momentous legislation or the significant tactical or strategic shifts within the movement itself. After the Albany campaign, for instance, Dr. King recognized that his organization would have to be less haphazard in the way that it engaged in protest activities.

  Civil Rights activists fought the major campaigns of the Second Civil War —for the most part in the former states of the Confederacy: Alabama (1955 and 1963) Arkansas (1957), Georgia (1962), and Mississippi (1964). The notable exception is Chicago, Illinois (1966).

  This did not mean there were not important campaigns taking place elsewhere in the nation. Dating back to the period just after World War II activists undertook significant protest initiatives in a variety of cities in the West and North including Oakland, California, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan, New York, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut. While these highly localized struggles may have failed to capture the nation’s attention in the same way the national movement identified with King did they nevertheless paved the way for substantive changes in the communities where they took place. They also helped to shape the national movement by helping to keep the pressure on politicians to deal with issues of Black inequality.6

  After 1955, however, many of these local struggles drew inspiration from a successful boycott of public transportation in the capital of Alabama that also served as the first capitol of the Confederacy. The Montgomery Bus Boycott ushered in a new phase of the Black Freedom Struggle with the widespread adoption of nonviolent direct action protest as a means of challenging racial apartheid.

  Montgomery Alabama, 1955–6

  As the first “major battle” of Taylor’s Second Civil War, Montgomery Alabama holds a unique place in history. Montgomery was not unlike many other cities in the South at this time. The system of segregation was no more, and no less, oppressive than in other cities. The frustration expressed by the Black community was also not unique. The protests began in support of local Civil Rights activist and NAACP chapter officer Rosa Parks after she refused to give up her seat in defiance of local segregation ordinances and soon transformed into a significant mass movement. Organizers called for boycotts, which had been used in the past to challenge southern apartheid and racial segregation. The unprecedented attention and support it drew not only in Alabama but throughout the nation made the protest singular. In the process of securing the first victory of the Second Civil War, events in Montgomery provided a blueprint for the nonviolent armies that secured a national victory for Civil Rights and an end to Jim Crow Segregation in America.

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  Martin Luther King Jr.

  • John A. Kirk(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 ___________________

  A Movement in Transition, 1965–6

     

  King and the SCLC’s 1965 Selma campaign marked the culmination of its southern-based Birmingham strategy, which it had developed since 1963. Working alongside SNCC and local people, King and the SCLC ran nonviolent, direct-action demonstrations that led to confrontation and conflict with Alabama state troopers. The violence used against the demonstrations prompted federal intervention in the form of troops on the ground and federal legislation with the introduction of the voting rights bill to Congress, which was later passed as the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Selma campaign brought more public sympathy, support from northern whites and action from the federal government than any other event in the civil rights movement.

  Yet Selma gave way to a period of transition that signalled the drawing to a close of one phase of the civil rights movement and the beginning of another. With two of the central demands of the movement met – the 1964 Civil Rights Act ending segregation in public facilities and accommodations, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act removing obstacles to black voting rights – King, the SCLC and others in the civil rights movement faced the question of what their future goals should be.

  As King and the SCLC reflected upon what to do next, it was developments elsewhere that shaped their response to that question. Just five days after President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one of the worst race riots of the post-war era broke out in Watts, Los Angeles. There had been racial disturbances in several cities the year before and Watts presaged a number of riots that rocked urban areas, particularly in the west and north of the United States, over the following years. Partly as a result of the Watts riot, King and the SCLC launched their first northern-based campaign in Chicago, where they attempted to modify their Birmingham strategy to address the multitudinous problems of the northern black ghetto. While the Chicago campaign was under way, the slogan of ‘Black Power’ was popularised by new SNCC chair Stokely Carmichael on the James Meredith-inspired March Against Fear through Mississippi. The slogan quickly gained currency, particularly among militant black youth groups. The outbreak of urban rioting and the emergence of black power highlighted black constituencies that King and the SCLC, by hitherto concentrating on southern small towns and cities, had largely left ignored: the black urban poor and powerless in America’s major cities and the black rural poor and powerless in isolated southern communities. Both these groups felt increasingly neglected by the civil rights movement. Indeed, many of those people began openly to question if the goals and tactics of the civil rights movement as King and the SCLC articulated them were, in fact, relevant to them at all.

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  The Civil Rights Movement

  A Documentary Reader

  • John A. Kirk(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9 The Selma Campaign and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

  9.1 William C. Sullivan (Anonymous), Letter to Martin Luther King, Jr, 1964

  Just as Martin Luther King, Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had used the 1963 Birmingham Campaign to highlight the brutality of segregation and to place pressure on the federal government to pass desegregation legislation, in 1965 they used the Selma campaign to highlight the brutality of disenfranchisement and to place pressure on the federal government to pass legislation to enforce and strengthen black voting rights. In Selma, approximately half the population was black, but 99% of registered voters were white. In contrast to the long‐term grassroots community organizing model of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), King and the SCLC’s trademark was the short‐term community mobilization model that sought to bring about dramatic conflict and a federal response. In no small part, this approach was driven by the resources that King and the SCLC had at their disposal. Without SNCC’s cadre of student volunteers, with limited funds, and with King’s national standing as its greatest asset, the SCLC saw its short‐term, intense burst of activism campaigns as its most effective instrument for change.

  The increasing efforts by the federal government to prevent such campaigns from taking place were testimony to their effectiveness. The FBI in particular took an interest in King’s activities. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover early on decided that King was “no good” and made a number of public criticisms about him. With the approval of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the FBI began wiretapping King’s phones. Then, moving beyond their legal mandate, they began planting illegal bugging devices in King’s hotel rooms. In November 1964, the white FBI assistant director William C. Sullivan sent a taped collection of such illicitly obtained recordings that allegedly contained dirty jokes, bawdy remarks, and the sound of people engaging in sexual intercourse, to SCLC headquarters. The letter that accompanied it, below, appeared to ask King to commit suicide or to withdraw from public life to prevent him from being exposed as a “fraud.” The move seems to have been an attempt to prevent the Selma campaign from taking place. The package finally made it to King’s home address in early January 1965, where King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, listened to the tape. She dismissed its contents as “just a lot of mumbo jumbo.” A 1977 lawsuit by one of King’s associates led to a court decision to seal the contents of the recordings until 2027.

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  Protest Nation

  Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism

  • Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • The New Press

    (Publisher)

  Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001).

  April 16, 1963 My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

  While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

  I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff [and] educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent directaction program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

  But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

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  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • Peter J. Ling(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The White House announced on the Sunday evening of May 12 that army units had been moved to Fort McClellan, some eighty miles from Birmingham, for rapid deployment, if necessary. President Kennedy endorsed the Birmingham agreement and declared that he would “not permit it to be sabotaged by a few extremists on either side” (Branch 1988: 800). King had returned from Atlanta earlier in the day to quell the understandable anger of black Birmingham. Instead of demanding more of the administration in the wake of what were essentially failed assassination attempts against both himself and his brother, King urged restraint on his own followers. “We must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship,” he declared, “but we must not use second-class methods to gain it” (McWhorter 2001: 440). Complicating his task but inspired in part by a desire to calm feelings in their own community, white leaders were trying to minimize the terms of the Birmingham accord. Sidney Smyer pointedly insisted that no white representatives had ever dealt with King or other outsiders and that the commitment on employment amounted to one black sales clerk in a downtown store. Fred Shuttlesworth countered that the agreement had spoken of “clerks,” which obviously implied more than one.

  After a week of uneasy calm, movement leaders faced further provocation on May 20 when school authorities expelled 1,100 black students for truancy during the demonstrations. As angry local leaders called for a total boycott of schools and white businesses, King hurried back and urged them to reconsider. This was just another attempt to undermine the agreement, he warned. At his recommendation, the movement cancelled the protests and sought instead to secure a federal court order reinstating the students. Chief Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted their petition the next day (Garrow 1988: 262-63). King displayed considerable leadership during this period, when successive crises threatened to destroy the local agreement. However, it was a responsible style of leadership more readily appreciated in Washington and among whites in the nation at large than in Birmingham itself. Among African Americans, Malcolm X’s charge – “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line” - triggered a reflex nod of assent (McWhorter 2001: 442).

  Birmingham’s Significance

  When King committed the SCLC to Birmingham in January 1963, he had been ambiguous about both his aims and his methods. He had joined Fred Shuttlesworth in the goal of breaking the back of segregation in one of its most infamous citadels and had believed at the outset that economic pressure on the city’s commercial elite could secure a breakthrough. At the same time, having noted how the Kennedy administration intervened in the Freedom Rides after widely reported violent confrontations but stayed aloof in Albany so long as Chief Pritchett maintained both order and good public relations, King went to Birmingham eager to secure federal action on civil rights, and expectant that confronting Bull Connor would produce embarrassing headlines for the Kennedys around the nation and the world.

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  Betrayal

  How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

  • Houston Baker Jr.(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Then he’d arrest them. By acting civilly, Pritchett’s police department provided few photo-ops and scant spectacle for TV. The cameras stayed away. And without national media attention, the Albany Civil Rights campaign couldn’t gain any traction. Sheriff Pritchett headed on over to Birmingham to instruct Bull Connor.

  The critical difference between Birmingham and Albany, however, was that Dr. King had settled into Birmingham for the long haul. (In Albany, King just swept through, rallied the troops to action, and moved on.) Still, during Easter week in Birmingham in 1963, King was mighty discouraged. Civil rights leaders were at each other’s throats; internal politics and competition for the front seat were escalating; and, worst of all, no mass support seemed forthcoming from the black citizenry. It was a “movement” in name only.

  Further complicating matters, key members of the Birmingham black community were strongly opposed to disturbing the status quo. Arthur G. Gaston, the city’s only black millionaire, admitted he “didn’t want to go against the good white folks in Birmingham.”4 Funds for the struggle were scarce, and black folks in general were terrified of the consequences of resistance. They knew all too well what racist whites in Alabama were capable of when it came to retribution. (Birmingham’s nickname among blacks was “Bombingham.”)

  King soon realized that only a real crisis would motivate blacks in Birmingham. It would take something serious to stir the passions of the masses. And without that vital black energy and mass participation, the Birmingham Campaign was doomed. The status quo would prevail. Bull would win the day.

  So, on the evening of April 10, at the Saint James AME church, King spoke to a mass meeting: “We are not here to do something for you, but to do something with you. . . . Everyone in the movement must live a sacrificial life.” King would lead a march to confront the Birmingham authorities. “I can’t think of a better day than Good Friday for a move for freedom.”5

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