In his view, Birmingham was an ideal target for aggressive nonviolence, for there was no Chief Pritchett here to deflate protests with well-publicized kindness. In fact, the City Commission only aggravated the racial tensions that gripped the city. City Commissioner Arthur Haynes warned whites that even to integrate the parks would eventuate in “a nigger mayor…or a nigger police chief.” But the real scoundrel was Police Commissioner Connor, a white-haired, fleshy man of sixty-three, with a glass eye, jug ears, nagging sinuses, and a bullfrog voice. “An overgrown country boy,” as one reporter described him, he had made himself famous in Birmingham by the cornpone way he used to announce baseball games. Ole Bull, as whites called him, hated “junkateering journalists” and snorted that “the trouble with America is Communism, socialism, and journalism,” all of which were out to “inta-grate” America and destroy the white race. He cringed at the idea of blacks and whites mixing together. A newsman recalled him “running up and down the City Hall corridors exclaiming, ‘Long as I’m po-leece commissioner in Birmingham, the niggers and white folks ain’t gon’ segregate together in this man’s town.’” After the Brown decision, Ole Bull hurled epithets at the Supreme Court, offered to fight the Attorney General, and promised that “blood would run in the streets” before Birmingham would desegregate. If he remained in power, Bull Connor could probably be counted on to commit some dramatic blunder that would command national media attention.
That November, as it happened, Birmingham voted to replace its city commission form of government with a mayor-council system, the mayor to be chosen in a special election on March 5, 1963. As a consequence, a few white moderates broke their silence and urged Shuttlesworth to cease all civil-rights activities until a new government could be elected, after which meaningful change was bound to occur. But Shuttlesworth doubted that any white administration would alter Birmingham’s apartheid practices on its own. In any case, Connor announced that he was going to run for mayor himself, and he stood a good chance of winning, given his popularity and Negro-hating ways. If so, he would remain King’s chief adversary.
And beyond Connor loomed the specter of George Corley Wallace, who had recently won the Alabama governorship by the largest popular vote in Alabama gubernatorial history. An obstreperous, prancing little man, with a well-coiffed pompadour, he had attended the University of Alabama and had once been a racial moderate. But when a white supremacist trounced him in his first bid for governor, Wallace vowed never to be “out-niggered again.” In the 1962 contest, he campaigned up and down the state with a hillbilly singer, deriding the U.S. Supreme Court and pledging to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent desegregation. A writer for the Saturday Evening Post reported that he walked “with his back arched like a cavalry officer leading a charge against Yankee cannon at Shiloh.” Once Project C were under way, this feisty, ill-tempered man might well send in the Alabama highway patrol, with their billy clubs and Confederate insignias, and attract still more national attention.
As King and his colleagues made their final preparations at Dorchester, they adopted code names to confuse the state and local police, who often tapped the phones of Birmingham’s Negro leaders. Abernathy was “Dean Rusk,” Shuttlesworth was “Bull,” Walker was “RFK,” and King was “JFK.” Demonstrators were “baptismal candidates,” and going to jail was “going to get baptized.” There was a lot of merriment about the names and how they were certain to confound the police. But before the retreat ended, King gave his staff a solemn warning: “I want to make a point that I think everyone here should consider very carefully and decide if he wants to be with this campaign.” He said, “There are less than a dozen people here assessing the type of enemy we’re going to face. I have to tell you that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. And I want you to think about it.”
In January, 1963, King publicly announced that he was going to Birmingham and that he would lead demonstrations there until “Pharaoh lets God’s people go.” That same month, George Wallace was inaugurated as governor in Montgomery. He was standing, Wallace pointed out, on the same ground where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as president of the Confederacy. And now, Wallace cried, “from the cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
THROUGHOUT JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, King maintained a frenetic pace, speaking at fund-raising rallies in New York, California, and Texas, and working in another visit with President Kennedy. On the stump, he reminded his audiences—and the President—that the Birmingham campaign would commence in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, underscoring the dismal fact that a century later the Negro was still oppressed. “We have not seen the kind of action that the enormity of the situation demands,” he complained of Kennedy. “Our churches are bombed and burned, people are shot, the vote denied.” “Only a Negro understands the social leprosy that segregation inflicts upon him,” he said in Chicago. “Like a nagging hound of hell, it follows his every activity, leaving him tormented by day and haunted by night. The suppressed fears and resentments and the expressed anxieties and sensitivities make each day of life a turmoil. Every confrontation with the restrictions is another emotional battle in a never ending war. He is shackled in his waking moments to tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next. Nothing can be more diabolical than a deliberate attempt to destroy in any man his will to be a man.”
In February, King’s constant proddings seemed to arouse Kennedy at last to act. While he spurned a second Emancipation Proclamation, the President did submit a new civil-rights bill to Congress, as King had adjured him to do. And Kennedy spoke of the wrong of segregation with a moral fervor that sounded like King himself. King very much admired the President’s rhetoric, but found his bill a generally lusterless effort that ignored such critical problems as segregated schools and public accommodations. But no matter: the bill died in Congress anyway. “There wasn’t any interest in it,” said Robert Kennedy. “There was no public demand for it. There was no demand by the newspapers or radio or television…. Nobody paid any attention.”
Maybe nobody cared now. But King intended to awaken the moral conscience of America in the streets of Birmingham.
SOMETIME THAT FEBRUARY, King arrived in Birmingham with his advance staff and installed SCLC’s command post in Room 30 of the Gaston Motel, situated near Kelly Ingram Park in the Negro section. King’s timetable called for the campaign to begin in the first week of March and then build to a peak of intensity at Eastertime, the second biggest buying season of the year. But in a secret meeting at the Gas-ton Motel, local Negro leaders objected to King’s strategy, reminding him that Birmingham would elect its new mayor on March 5, with Connor and mild-mannered Albert Boutwell now leading the list of candidates. For the Negroes, Boutwell seemed the lesser of two evils, and they wanted nothing to happen that would help Bull Connor. To keep the campaign from becoming “a political football,” King agreed to postpone demonstrations until two weeks after the election. Meanwhile Wyatt Walker, a skilled organizer, set about forming committees and enlisting recruits.
As luck would have it, the election produced no winner, forcing Boutwell and Connor into a run-off election, scheduled for April 2, and throwing King’s entire timetable awry. By now, Walker had some 250 volunteers ready to go to jail. But under strong local pressure King delayed the campaign a second time, lest Connor use it to whip up racial fears and propel himself into city hall. At that, King pulled his staff out of Birmingham, with plans to return on the night of the runoff election and launch Project C the following day.
In the meantime he hastened to New York to consult with lawyers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund about state-court injunctions and other legal barriers Birmingham’s power structure might erect against him. In Harry Belafonte’s “palatial”
New York apartment, King explained the purpose of the campaign to seventy-five celebrities, activists, and politicos, who agreed to help raise funds for bail bonds. A committee under Belafonte was to maintain close contact with King’s Birmingham headquarters and send him money as he needed it. By then, he had alerted SCLC affiliates, religious organizations, and labor friends across the land, and they too were busily getting up funds for the campaign.
Then King hurried home, where Coretta was nine months pregnant with their fourth child. On March 28 he was at the hospital when she gave birth to a daughter, whom they christened Bernice Albertine but called Bunny. Meanwhile Atlanta’s Lovett School, which had Episcopalian connections, had rejected little Marty because of his race, and King was angry and eager for battle. At SCLC headquarters, he and his staff tended to final details of Confrontation Birmingham and by April 2 all was in readiness.
In Birmingham’s mayoral election that day, Boutwell whipped Connor by almost 8,000 votes, prompting a local paper to headline, “NEW DAY DAWNS FOR BIRMINGHAM.” But King and his colleagues regarded Boutwell as “just a dignified Bull Connor” and pointed out that as a state senator he had authored legislation that thwarted the Brown decision. That night King flew to Birmingham with his staff and flashed word out to Walker’s volunteers that demonstrations would begin on the morrow. But because of all the delays, only sixtyfive people responded to his call. “With this modest task force,” King ruefully noted, “we launched the direct-action campaign in Birmingham.”
It began in a vortex of confusion. On April 3 Connor and the other two commissioners, contending that they had been elected to serve until 1965, refused to vacate their offices and took legal action to prevent Boutwell from taking over the city. Until the courts decided the issue, Birmingham foundered under rival city governments, leaving Police Commissioner Connor with unchecked power to deal with “nigger troublemakers.” That same day, King issued a “Birmingham Manifesto,” which demanded that all lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains in downtown department and variety stores be desegregated, that Negroes be hired in local business and industry, and that a biracial committee be established to work out a schedule for desegregation in other areas of city life. Directed at the economic power structure rather than either city government, the manifesto warned that demonstrations and boycotts would continue until these demands were met.
With that, “the battle for the soul of Birmingham” was on, as sixtyfive Negroes staged sit-ins at five downtown department stores, and Connor’s cops dragged twenty of them away to jail. At command center in the Gaston Motel, King orchestrated the sit-ins and made plans to go to jail himself, as a dramatic symbol of the Negro’s plight in Birmingham. By now, a veritable army of national and foreign newsmen was in the city to cover King’s campaign. “Go where the Mahatma goes,” a prominent American newspaper instructed its southern correspondent. “He might get killed.” Still, King was glad to see so many reporters. He wanted the drama of Birmingham to play on television sets and in the front pages of newspapers around the world.
On the first day, however, the campaign provoked a storm of adverse criticism. In Birmingham, Mayor-elect Bout well blamed the sit-ins on outsiders “whose sole purpose is to stir strife and discord here,” and he urged everyone, white and Negro alike, to ignore what was happening in his city. In Washington, Robert Kennedy bemoaned the campaign as “ill-timed” and pressured King to postpone it and give Boutwell a chance. Was it not ridiculous, King retorted, to speak of timing when “the.Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay”? But as he angrily noted, the Washington Post and most of the national press echoed Kennedy’s argument, portraying King and his lieutenants as irresponsible hotspurs invading Birmingham just as it “was getting ready to change overnight into Paradise.”
But in truth many local Negroes impugned the campaign, too, and insisted that “we ought to give Boutwell more of a chance.” Some Negroes even voiced the “outsider” argument about King and SCLC. And some even opposed the campaign because they thought they truly were inferior and deserved their lot. King had encountered that attitude before, and it distressed and saddened him.
Because of the divisions in the Negro community (it was Albany all over again), King forgot about going to jail for now and consumed an entire week trying to rally local Negroes to his standard. While limited sit-ins and boycotts continued, he appealed to groups of business and professional people, reminded them that “Birmingham is the testing ground” and that Negroes must “stick together if we ever hope to change its ways.” He pleaded with gatherings of Negro ministers to stop preaching “the glories of heaven” while ignoring conditions in Birmingham that caused men “an earthly hell.” The ministers were the most independent and influential leaders in the black community. How could the Negro ever improve his station in life without their guidance, inspiration, and support? “The bell of man’s inhumanity to man does not toll for one man,” King said. “It tolls for you, for me, for all of us.”
“I spoke from my heart,” King wrote later, “and out of each meeting came firm endorsements and pledges of participation and support.” With a new unity developing in the black community, King was certain that “the foundations of the old order were doomed.”
Meanwhile, in nightly mass meetings at the Negro churches, he summoned volunteers “to serve in our nonviolent army” and make going to jail their badge of honor. “We did not hesitate to call our movements an army,” King said. “But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. It was an army that would move but not maul. It was an army that would sing but not slay. It was an army to storm bastions of hatred, to lay siege to the fortress of segregation, to surround symbols of discrimination.” And so “the peaceful warrior,” as Abernathy styled King, called his people to nonviolent battle, to march against the Confederate flag of segregated Birmingham, the same flag that Lincoln’s troops had fought against a hundred years before.
And they came forward, ten and twenty Negroes at a time, surrendering whatever weapons they had to King’s stern-eyed staffers and attending workshops that trained them for nonviolent combat. Through socio-dramas that simulated real-life situations, the volunteers learned how to resist without rancor, how to be cursed and not reply, how to be beaten and not strike back. According to a Negro enlisted off the streets, King’s message and methods controlled a great deal of pent-up rage in the black population. When he first called for recruits, some Negroes viewed this as “a chance to kill me a cracker.” But King’s aides would take such men to the mass meetings and get them to singing and clapping and amening to King’s oratory, and that would quiet the angriest man in town, said one volunteer, because King “just had that thing about him.” He had to have that thing about him; otherwise he feared that some of his brothers might try to fight the white man with guns and knives, which could ignite a race war in Birmingham in which the Negro minority would be exterminated.
By Wednesday, April 10, small columns of singing Negroes were parading before City Hall as well as picketing the downtown stores. Once the cops showed up with a police dog, which attacked one Negro bystander and snapped and snarled at others. As the campaign grew in intensity, the police had a hard time rounding up all the demonstrators in Connor’s “jail ’em all” strategy. As fast as Connor would lock them up, movement leaders would bail the protesters out and send them back into the streets. Thus far some 300 Negroes had gone to jail—a modest number in comparison to the 738 imprisoned in the initial demonstrations in Albany. But at least SCLC had established a beachhead in the battle of Birmingham.
IT WAS LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT, April 11, in Room 30 of the Gaston Motel, and King and his associates were talking intently over cups of coffee, the large room clouded with cigarette smoke. The sheriff had just served King with a state-court injunction, requested by city attorneys, which prohibited him, Abernathy, Walker, Shuttlesworth,
and other movement leaders from conducting demonstrations. The injunction provoked a lively discussion in Room 30, with King reminding everyone how segregationists had vowed to block the Brown decision through a “century of litigation.” Since then, the court injunction had become their major weapon against civil-rights operations, entangling them in litigation that sometimes consumed two or three years. The tactic had been “maliciously effective.” King recalled how the injunction had been used to break up a student protest in Talladega, Alabama, and to cripple the Albany campaign beyond repair. Well, there was no question what King would do in this case. He would violate the injunction and get arrested. It was time for him and Abernathy to go to jail anyway and “present our bodies as personal witnesses in this crusade.” This would also create a lot of sympathy for the movement, King said, and really “stir up the local Negro community behind us.” They would break the injunction day after tomorrow, on Good Friday.
The next day, King held a press conference in the motel courtyard. Wearing faded denim overalls and an open-neck white shirt, he sat at a table crowded with microphones, facing a row of television cameras and some twenty reporters, with Negro supporters looking on from the motel balconies. He lashed the injunction as “raw tyranny under the guise of maintaining law and order” and said that “we cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction.” As he spoke, Shuttlesworth nodded at a policeman who scribbled notes on a pad. The reporters bombarded King with questions. Would the demonstrations continue? Yes, he said, through today, tomorrow, and through Easter and beyond. Would he lead a march on Good Friday? Yes, he would. “I am prepared to go to jail and stay as long as necessary,” he said.
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