2.
In 1963, when Martin Luther King came
to Birmingham, his movement was in
crisis. He had just spent nine months
directing protests against segregation in
Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles to
the south, and he had limped away from
Albany without winning any significant
concessions. The biggest victory the
civil rights movement had won to that
point had been the Supreme Court’s
decision in the famous Brown v. Board
of Education case in 1954, declaring
segregation of public schools to be
unconstitutional. But almost a decade
had passed and the public schools of the