Bombingham 81would compel federal intervention. If ‘the most segregated city in America’
could be integrated through nonviolent direct action, the back of Jim Crow
would be broken throughout the South. The plans for Birmingham became
more imperative when president Kennedy told King that congressional
opposition consigned civil rights to the back burner.
At the forefront of the battle to end such injustice stood the fiery
Baptist preacher Fred Shuttlesworth. When Alabama banned the NAACP in
1956 for helping the Montgomery bus boycott, Shuttlesworth founded the
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which became SCLC’s
strongest affiliate. Before long, ACMHR sought black police officers, chal-
lenged bus segregation, and tried to integrate the schools and railroad
station. Shuttlesworth paid a heavy price for staring down evil. Klansmen
bombed his home and church on Christmas Eve, and the police infiltrated
ACMHR meetings, tapped his telephone, and harassed every black person
walking down his street. When Shuttlesworth enrolled his children at the
white school near his home, a mob stabbed his wife and pummeled him with
chains while the police looked on. After years of frustration, Shuttlesworth
pleaded with King to come to Birmingham.
Unlike Albany, SCLC would not pressure Birmingham politicians who
had nothing to fear from the minuscule black vote. In early 1963, SCLC
planned instead to disrupt the city’s commerce by urging blacks to boycott
selected downtown department stores. Using the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church as the protest headquarters, Wyatt T. Walker meticulously calculated
how long it would take demonstrators to walk downtown so that traffic and
business could be disrupted constantly even if some of them were arrested.
Singer Harry Belafonte raised several hundred thousand dollars for bail
money when mass arrests came. Just days before the Easter shopping season
in April, King laid down a list of demands that included black jobs and the
right of blacks to enter any public place.
Project C almost fell apart when a reform candidate beat Bull Connor for
mayor and many blacks wanted to give the new man a chance. King had come
too far to stop now, despite the Justice department’s plea to postpone the
protests. Small groups of demonstrators led by Shuttlesworth and A.D. King,
King’s younger brother, marched downtown, where they were arrested for
demonstrating without a permit. Bull Connor’s police tired of such demon-
strations and consequently thrashed the protesters with nightsticks and set
snarling K-9 dogs on them. The cameras caught the ugly spectacle, provoking
hundreds of steel mill workers to join the struggle. As the black community
mobilized, officials obtained a state court injunction forbidding further protests.
This moment marked a Rubicon for King. In Albany, he obeyed a
similar injunction against demonstrations, which stalled the movement. The
Birmingham demonstration seemed doomed as well, with bail money having
Alabama Christian Move-
ment for Human Rights:
This organization replaced
Birmingham’s NAACP,
which was outlawed in
1956.