Bombingham 83Faced with continuing demonstrations, an exasperated Bull Connor retali-
ated. He ordered firemen to turn high-pressured hoses against demonstra-
tors who gathered at Kelly Ingram park opposite the Sixteenth Street church.
The hoses knocked them over like bowling pins. When Fred Shuttlesworth
was hospitalized with severe bruises, Connor remarked, ‘I’m sorry I missed
it. I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.’ Other demonstrators endured
free-swinging policemen and surly German shepherd police dogs. As televi-
sion broadcast the violence, the country was horrified and the president
sickened. ‘The civil rights movement,’ Kennedy quipped, ‘should thank God
for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.’ Those who did
not escape went to jail, where as many as sixty blacks crowded into a single
cell. With 3,000 blacks in custody, the movement filled the jails to over-
flowing for the first time.
The unrest in Birmingham prodded the Kennedy administration to
act, lest third-world nations tilt toward Moscow and the Republicans regain
the White House. Robert Kennedy persuaded the UAW to send $160,000
to secure bail bonds for the demonstrators. Meanwhile, Burke Marshall,
the administration’s chief troubleshooter on race, flew to Birmingham to
initiate negotiations between King and the city’s merchants. Treasury secre-
tary Douglas Dillon and Defense secretary Robert McNamara called large
business contractors, including US Steel’s Roger Blough, to lean on Alabama
businessmen.
After initially rejecting mediation, the city merchants capitulated. They
had had enough of the crippling boycott, negative publicity, and stiff pres-
sure from the White House. On 10 May, the chamber of commerce relented,
and King won his demands for desegregated public areas and the hiring of
some blacks at downtown stores. Shuttlesworth regarded the deal as entirely
premature, but the path-breaking agreement brought invaluable media and
presidential attention to the civil rights movement. Calling the settlement
‘the most magnificent victory for justice we’ve seen in the Deep South,’ King
told reporters that ‘the city of Birmingham has reached an accord with its
conscience.’ That summer, fifty cities in the upper South desegregated to
avoid the turmoil Birmingham experienced.
Sensing the collapse of their society, Alabama whites from the governor on
down scorned the accord as the work of ‘gutless traitors.’ Before a thousand
white-robed klansmen and flaming crosses, imperial wizard Robert Shelton
declared that ‘Martin Luther King’s epitaph, in my opinion, can be written
here in Birmingham.’ That night, bombs blew up the home of King’s brother
and the Gaston Motel, where King’s entourage and many reporters stayed.
Blacks choking with rage demanded Connor’s head. ‘We’ll kill him,’ they
vowed. When infuriated blacks overturned cars, burned white businesses,
and pelted lawmen with bottles, state troopers beat the first blacks they
Marshall, Burke(1922–
2003): US assistant attor-
ney general who handled
the Kennedy administra-
tion’s response to civil
rights demonstrations.