Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  With the nation and the world looking on, King escalated the pressure in the streets of Birmingham. Each day the demonstrations grew larger and more dramatic, as grade schoolers and high schoolers, parents and children, old and young together, marched and sang toward freedom’s land. Again the firemen sprayed them with hoses, again Connor brought out his dogs and even added an armored car to his motorized forces. When someone in a building threw a little plaster on some officers, Director of Public Safety Al Lingo, itching to bring in his state troopers, ranted at a Birmingham cop, “I’d shoot them goddamn son-bitches, that’s what I’d do.”

  And so it went in embattled Birmingham, as the police chased after elusive columns of children and the firemen pulled and grunted at their hoses. But the children baffled them, springing up first here, then there, then somewhere else, waving their signs “WE WANT FREEDOM.” And when the police finally got them subdued and into the buses and paddy wagons, they shouted at the tops of their lungs on the way to jail, “WE WANT FREEDOM! WE WANT FREEDOM! WE WANT FREEDOM!” Then playfully, “Everybody wants freedom! Bull Connor wants freedom! Our mayor wants freedom! The driver wants freedom!”

  And over the noise of Birmingham, over the songs and the sirens, the cries and the clash of battle, sounded the haunting voice of Martin Luther King: “We must say to our white brothers all over the South who try to keep us down: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you. And yet we cannot in all good conscience obey your evil laws. Do to us what you will. Threaten our children and we will still love you…. Say that we’re too low, that we’re too degraded, yet we will still love you. Bomb our homes and go by our churches early in the morning and bomb them if you please, and we will still love you. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. In winning the victory, we will not only win our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.”

  On Sunday, May 5, occurred the largest demonstration so far, as Reverend Charles Billups and other Birmingham ministers led more than 3,000 young people on a prayer pilgrimage to Birmingham jail, singing “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as they moved. King and his aides were in the streets that day, orchestrating operations with walkie-talkies, and King saw Billups’s column approach the police barricade, the ministers and the children ready to pit their bodies against Connor’s dogs, fire hoses, and armored car. King saw the column halt and then kneel in prayer, all the while Connor repeatedly ordered them to turn back. But the Negroes continued their prayer, calling up to God in rising exaltation, then singing, then praying again. Suddenly Billups stood and confronted the police. “We’re not turning back. We haven’t done anything wrong. All we want is our freedom…. How do you feel doing these things?…Bring on your dogs. Beat us up. Turn on your hoses. We’re not going to retreat.” Then he started forward, followed by the other ministers and the children. Connor whirled about and yelled, “Turn on the hoses.” His men just stood there. “Damnit! Turn on the hoses!” But as the blacks marched through their ranks, the firemen and cops fell back “as though hypnotized.” Some of the firemen were crying. The Negroes continued their journey unimpeded, prayed for their imprisoned comrades in front of the jail, then headed back to the Negro section singing ‘I Got Freedom Over My Head.”

  “You would have to say that the hand of God moved in that demonstration,” said one Negro. “For the people who went through the line without being caned or kicked or beaten,” said another, “well, it did something to them. They had experienced nonviolence in its truest form.” King agreed. “It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.”

  By Monday, May 6, more than 3,000 Negroes were in jail in Birmingham—the largest number ever imprisoned at one time in the history of the movement—and some 4,000 more were still parading and picketing. In one demonstration, the police intercepted 500 youngsters and simply dispersed them without arrests. There was no place to jail them. “The activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days to my mind mark the nonviolent movement’s coming of age,” said King. “This is the first time in the history of our struggle that we have been able literally to fill the jails. In a real sense this is the fulfillment of a dream, for I have always felt that if we could fill the jails in our witness for freedom, it would be a magnificent expression of the determination of the Negro and a marvelous way to lay the whole issue before the conscience of the local and national community. And I think in a real sense this Birmingham movement is one of the most inspiring developments in the whole nonviolent struggle.”

  With the jails full, with Birmingham roundly condemned in the court of world opinion and her economy hurting from the racial crisis, business leaders agreed at last to start serious negotiations with King’s forces. Dave Dellinger, a notable pacifist who covered Birmingham for Liberation, attributed the breakthrough to King’s use of the children, because it forced white people to look at something they had hidden from themselves: the impact of segregation and racism on Negro youngsters. Dellinger contended that the spectacle tortured the conscience of the white moderate—the South’s “silent integration-ist”—and that it got to hardened segregationists, too, that even they recoiled from the sight of a police dog lunging at a child. By exposing that kind of evil, King had indeed opened the boil of segregation to the medicine of air and light, as he had phrased it in “Letter from Birmingham jail.” In that respect, the decision to enlist the children, as Abernathy said, “was an act of wisdom, divinely inspired.”

  IT WAS BURKE MARSHALL, a quiet, unobtrusive, patient man, who choreographed the start of direct negotiations. While the children marched in the streets, Marshall had gone back and forth between the two sides, trying desperately to get them to talk. But initially King was suspicious of him, given Robert Kennedy’s criticism of the campaign. But Marshall assured him that Kennedy and others in the administration were doing all in their power to help produce a truce in Birmingham: the Attorney General himself was making hundreds of phone calls to influential southern officials and was prodding national businesses with subsidiaries in Birmingham to push for a settlement. At last Marshall won King’s trust. And he earned the confidence of the business leaders, too, with his sincere and persistent ways. Thus, when the children’s crusade reached a peak of intensity, Marshall spoke with distraught merchants and arranged for secret face-to-face meetings to commence between their representatives and King’s.

  But the merchants balked at accepting King’s demands as set forth in the “Birmingham Manifesto.” Though the demonstrations and boycotts were damaging their businesses, they were afraid of the public reaction if they attempted to desegregate their stores. So King attacked again. On May 7, as 125 of the city’s most powerful business leaders met downtown, he mounted the largest demonstration of all to make them come to terms. As he and his staff monitored events by walkie-talkies, thousands of students filtered through Connor’s police lines and flooded the downtown area, where the businessmen were gathered. The students tangled up traffic for several square blocks and disrupted store after store with sit-ins and standins. When the businessmen broke for lunch and stepped outside, they faced a sea of marching, singing, clapping Negroes, with Connor once again calling for his dogs and fire hoses.

  After the businessmen retreated inside their building, Connor’s cops and fifty steel-helmeted sheriff’s deputies cordoned off eight downtown blocks and drove many of the demonstrators back to Kelly Ingram Park, where hundreds of Negro bystanders, jeered and taunted the police. Firemen roared up in trucks and trained jets of water on the Negroes, some of whom battled back with rocks. A blast of water knocked Fred Shuttlesworth unconscious against a building and he was carried away in an ambulance. Connor said it should have been a hearse. In all the mayhem, Birmingham seemed on the verge of complete social d
isorder.

  At their meeting downtown, the businessmen were horrified at what was happening to their city. Real-estate executive Sid Smyer, who claimed he had recently met with President Kennedy, took the floor: “I’m a segregationist from bottom to top, but gentlemen you see what’s happening.” They all agreed that it was disastrous and that “we got to do something,” got “to work something out.” Whereupon they approved a plan to bypass city officials and reach a settlement with King on their own. A committee under Smyer would meet with him and his colleagues that night, in the downtown offices of a prominent insurance broker. Meanwhile Bull Connor pleaded with Governor Wallace for help, and by nightfall Al Lingo had 250 state troopers in Birmingham, with 575 more encamped on the outskirts of the city.

  That night there began round-the-clock negotiations involving Smyer’s committee, King and a committee of Negroes, Marshall, and a battery of bank presidents, insurance executives, white ministers, and lawyers. Vincent Harding thought how sad it was that it took a major crisis to bring them all together like this. For three smoke-filled days the negotiators went over the Negro demands, trying to fashion an agreement specific enough to satisfy the blacks and vague enough to protect individual merchants from white reprisals. As they worked together in those marathon sessions, the Negroes and whites came to have a genuine respect for one another. Once they agreed on the main issues, King and Shuttlesworth, the latter out of the hospital and reeling from hypos and pain, suspended demonstrations for twenty-four hours so that final details could be worked out.*

  At last, on Friday, May 10, the two groups produced an accord that met every movement demand. Within ninety days, lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains in the downtown stores would be desegregated. Within sixty days, Negroes would be hired in clerk, sales, and other positions heretofore closed to them. Within two weeks, a biracial committee would be established to improve communications between black and white Birmingham. City officials, moreover, would be pressed to release all incarcerated Negroes on bond or their own recognizance. As it happened, Reuther’s United Automobile Workers and other unions put up the huge sums of money needed for bail.†

  When the terms became public, King’s critics both black and white were quick to find fault. They pointed out that school desegregation had been ignored entirely and that he had settled for promises rather than immediate concessions. “I think the same thing about that agreement,” sniffed one Negro, “as I do of the one that the white man made with the Indian.” Moreover, both Mayor-elect Boutwell and the three city commissioners disavowed any responsibility for the accord. And Governor Wallace, too, announced that he would not be a party to a “compromise on the issue of segregation.” When he said that, Al Lingo’s state troopers were patrolling the streets of Birmingham with sawed-off shotguns.

  Nevertheless, King and his movement colleagues were all proud of the agreement and confident that the merchants and their team of negotiators would abide by its terms. “The city of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience,” King and Shuttlesworth told a packed press conference. “Birmingham may well offer for Twentieth Century America an example of progressive racial relations; and for all mankind a dawn of a new day.”

  On Saturday night, as exhausted as he had ever been, King left a small SCLC task force in Birmingham and flew home to his family. He wanted to preach at Ebenezer the next day and mingle with his friends and church members. The next day was Mother’s Day.

  LATE THAT SATURDAY NIGHT, King received a desperate phone call from Birmingham. It was his brother A. D., who lived and preached there and who had been active in the demonstrations. Vengeful whites—probably Klansmen—had bombed A. D.’s house and dynamited the Gaston Motel, too, in an obvious attempt to kill King and his lieutenants. Yes, A. D. and his family were safe, but several people had been injured at Gaston’s. And Negroes were now rioting in retaliation. Over the phone, King could hear the pandemonium in the streets—shouts, the sound of breaking glass, the awful dogs again. Marauding blacks had already stabbed a cop and set a taxi and two stores ablaze. “Let the whole fucking city burn,” some raged. “This’ll show those white motherfuckers.” With fires glowing against the night, Lingo’s state troopers stormed into the Negro district and started beating people at random with billy clubs and gun butts. A. D. said that movement leaders were in the streets, too, trying to disperse the rioters before somebody got killed. Over the phone, King heard a chorus of voices rising above the din, and he got tears in his eyes. Led by SCLC’s Dorothy Cotton, a group of Negroes were singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  The next day King rushed back to Birmingham and took to the streets himself to preach nonviolence and forestall further rioting. Clearly the bombs last night were the work of demonic men who wanted to destroy the accord and plunge the city into a bloodbath. And the Kennedys thought so too. On Sunday evening, the President announced to the nation that he would not let extremists imperil the pact in Birmingham. He ordered 3,000 federal troops into a position near the city and made plans to federalize the Alabama National Guard. That, King said later, put an abrupt end to the bombings.

  King was deeply disappointed that violence had marred his long and arduous campaign. But he stood firmly behind the accord with Birmingham’s business leaders. “This won’t destroy the agreements,” he and his associates declared; “this kind of thing didn’t come from the men we were dealing with.” “Whatever happens from here on, Birmingham will never be the same again.”

  And Birmingham never was the same again. Though recalcitrant city officials fought bitterly against the accord, the forces of reason won out in the end. On May 23, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that Bull Connor and the other two city commissioners were out of office and that Boutwell’s was the legal city government. One of the dethroned commissioners ranted about King—”This nigger has got the backing of the Attorney General and the White House”—and warned of the horrors of race mixing. But when Boutwell’s government took over, it rescinded Birmingham’s segregation ordinances and under strong Negro pressure eventually desegregated public facilities, including the library, municipal golf courses, public buildings, and finally even the schools themselves. Although initially interpreting the Birmingham accord as narrowly as possible, local merchants at last removed “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs on drinking fountains and restrooms, opened downtown lunch counters to Birmingham’s long-suffering Negroes, and even hired some in hitherto whites-only positions. And if these were small breaches in the fortress of segregation, as some contended, King and most local Negroes thought them extraordinary achievements, given the power of the fortress.

  But the greatest accomplishment of the campaign was its positive impact on local Negroes. As in Montgomery and Albany, they had learned for the first time that they could work together against the most determined opposition whites could muster. And this strengthened “the backbone of Negroes all down the line,” said a local black, “whether he was middle class or no class.” Indeed, as Dave Dellinger of Liberation pointed out, Birmingham was “a turning point in the civil-rights struggle” because of “the extent to which the whole community became involved.” Not long after the campaign, Dellinger found Birmingham Negroes “so permeated by the sense of fulfillment and well-being…that there is practically no room left for fear and hate. They have learned that they can stand up to brutality without compromise.”

  For King himself, the Birmingham campaign was indisputable proof that nonviolent direct action could work, proof that he and his organization could mobilize people in masses and win a resounding victory for love and racial justice. In the eyes of his fellow Negroes, he now became the top black leader in the country. A Newsweek poll of Negro opinion indicated that 95 percent of black leaders and 88 percent of ordinary Negroes regarded King as their most successful spokesman, ranking him ahead of Jackie Robinson, James Meredith, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and Ralph Bunche. Though Atlanta student Julian Bond griped that King had
“sold the concept that one man will come to your town and save you,” most Negroes sampled praised him effusively for his willingness “to fight for his brother under any condition,” as a black construction worker put it. “King’s magic touch with the masses of Negroes remains,” wrote a journalist in the Saturday Evening Post. “What they see is a powerful crusader for equality who does something instead of just talking, who sticks lighted matches to the status quo,” and who “endows this American struggle with qualities of messianic mission.”

  After Birmingham, Negro Congressman Adam Clayton Powell proclaimed King “probably the greatest human being in the United States today.” Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation agreed. “In my book he’s the best and freshest thing that ever happened in America, not just in Negro life, but in American life.”

  AS JUNE CAME ON, King had his eye on Washington. Word was out that Birmingham had moved the Kennedys enormously and that the President was about to propose a new civil-rights bill to Congress. On a New York television show, King said he hoped that Kennedy would “do more than issue a call,” because thus far his administration had substituted “an inadequate approach for a miserable one” in the matter of civil rights. If the President did not act, King warned, then civil-rights groups might stage “a march on Washington, even sit-ins in Congress.” But Stanley Levison maintained that “the White House believes nothing has moved the nation and the world as Birmingham, and they are convinced the imprint will be long and lasting.” Thanks to the tremendous outpouring of sympathy for King and his legions in Birmingham, the Kennedys decided that the time had come to make desegregation of public accommodations a matter of law.