408 ChaPter^8
before it got better. In April 1963, in an epic battle, King and others wanted
to desegregate the businesses in Birmingham, Alabama, where blacks were
spending their money but not being given jobs. So they decided to boycott
Birmingham’s businesses during Easter season, one of the busiest and more
profitable times of the year. In Birmingham, Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor, who
could have been the stereotype of the Hollywood “redneck” lawman, sent
attack dogs and fire hoses to disperse marchers, and jailed hundreds of black
protestors—including King. The liberals, the media, and politicians actually
focused much of their anger on King and the protestors, claiming their actions
were ill- timed, would provoke violence, and were illegal. King, under arrest,
responded with one of the powerful documents ever written, his Letter from a
Birmingham Jail, in which he confessed to being “gravely disappointed with the
white moderate.” Not unlike Frederick Douglass’s oration on “What to the
Slave is the Fourth of July?” King attacked southern racism and northern lib-
eralism, wondering whether Whites who claimed to support civil rights were
more committed to “order” than to justice and might be a greater barrier to
racial progress than the Ku Klux Klan. King was tired of northern calls for
him to go slowly: For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’... This ‘wait’
has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We have waited more than 340 years for our
constitutional and God-given rights... Perhaps it is easy for those who have
never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say ‘Wait.’ But... when your
first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’... when you
are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a negro...
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you
will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
King’s powerful letter, however, did not end the protests in Birmingham.
That would be up to the local Black community, especially the children. The
movement was running out of demonstrators because of arrests and trials, so
King, controversially, agreed to let Birmingham schoolchildren march in pro-
test. On May 3rd, 1963, with nearly 1000 black children inside the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church, Bull Connor had police bar the doors. Hundreds of kids
escaped, however, and joined a crowd in a park across the street. Connor
incredibly ordered his troops to attack. The ensuing scenes—police swinging
clubs, German Shepherds lunging at children, water hoses knocking kids
down—shocked Americans as they turned on network news that evening,
while newspapers throughout the world ran the Birmingham story and photos
on the front page the next day. The Kennedy administration finally had to act,