Martin Luther King, Jr., was freed on August 10 after two weeks in jail. He told reporters he would return to Atlanta to allow local blacks to negotiate with white officials. But even after he had left, city fathers refused to meet with the movement’s local leaders. The segregationists claimed they wanted a “new and responsible voice for the colored citizens of Albany.” On August 15, King returned to Albany, and local black leaders finally managed to meet with the mayor. They won no concessions, however, and King’s only recourse was to hold a news conference and rail against the stubborn segregationists. A few days later, King left Albany.
Freedom Singing: An Interview with Bernice Johnson Reagon
The protests in Albany, Georgia lasted from 1961 to 1965. One of the things that kept people fighting all that time was music. Albany was a deeply spiritual community and its music transformed not only the singer, but the movement as well. In 1962, SNCC established the Freedom Singers, a chorus that traveled throughout the country providing inspiration and raising funds for the civil rights movement. Bernice Johnson was one of the original Freedom Singers.
The Freedom Singers. From left to right: Charles Neblett, Bernice Johnson, Cordell Reagon, Rutha Mae Harris.
My father is a minister and I grew up in a church. We didn’t get a piano in that church until I was eleven, so my early music was a cappella and my first instruments were hands and feet. To this day, that’s the only way I can deal comfortably with creating music. But church was not the only place that music occurred because the same thing happened at school, on the playground. I went to a seven-grade, one-room school house. At noontime, my teacher would come outside and teach us games and songs.
I ended up being arrested in the second wave of arrests in Albany. And when we got to jail, Slater King, who was already in jail, said, “Bernice, is that you?” And I said yes. And he said, “Sing a song.”
The singing tradition in Albany was congregational. There were no soloists; there were song leaders. If Slater said, “Bernice, sing a song,” he wasn’t asking for a solo, he was asking me to plant a seed. The minute you start the song, the song is created by everybody there. There is really almost a musical explosion.
The mass meetings always started with these freedom songs. Most of the meeting was singing. Songs were the bed of everything, and I’d never seen or felt songs do that [before]. I’d had songs in college and high school and church, but in the movement, all the words sounded different. “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Going to Let it Shine,” which I’d sung all my life, said something very different. We varied the verses: “All in the street, I’m going to let it shine, All in the jailhouse, I’m going to let it shine.”
The voice I have now I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail. I did the song, “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air,” but I had never heard that voice before. I had never been that me before. And once I became that me, I have never let that me go … a transformation took place inside of the people. The singing was just the echo of that.
They could not stop our sound. They would have to kill us to stop us from singing. Sometimes the police would plead and say, “Please stop singing.” And you would just know that your word was being heard, and you felt joy. There is a way in which those songs kept us from being touched by people who would want us not to be who we were becoming. There was a woman at Shiloh Baptist Church who would sing one song, “Come and Go With Me To That Land,” for an hour. It was not a song anymore. People are clapping, the feet are going and you could hear her three blocks away. Your ears are not enough, your eyes are not enough, your body is not enough, and you can’t block it. The only way you survive the singing is to open up and let go and be moved by it to another space.
That Labor Day weekend, seventy-five protesters from the North, including ministers, laymen, and rabbis, drove to Albany to show their support for the activists. There they followed in King’s footsteps, stopping to pray on the steps of city hall. Chief Pritchett treated them no better than he had King, sending them to jail. “You have come to aid and abet the violators of this city and country,” he said. “If you come as violators, you will be treated as such. Go back to your homes. Clear your own cities of sin and lawlessness.”
The mass meetings in Albany continued for six more years. In that sense, SNCC could claim Albany as a victory. Albany also provided SNCC with valuable lessons on organizing a community, lessons they would use in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer.
For Bernice Johnson, who later married SNCC worker Cordell Reagon, the Albany Movement had meant personal growth. “I had grown up in a society where there were very clear lines,” she says. “The civil rights movement gave me the power to challenge any line that limits me … [the] movement said that if something puts you down, you have to fight against it.”
Dr. William Anderson, the Albany Movement’s president, called it “an overwhelming success, in that there was a change in the attitude of the people involved. They had [decided] that they would never accept that segregated society as it was anymore. There was [also] a change in the attitude of the kids who saw their parents step into the forefront and lead the demonstrations. They were determined that they would never go through what their parents went through to get the recognition that they should have as citizens.”
For many of Albany’s citizens, the movement was a moral victory. But Albany’s schools remained segregated. The city had closed its parks rather than integrate them. The library was integrated only after all the chairs were removed.
Even so, the SCLC learned many valuable lessons from Albany. The national press attention King’s presence brought to the city did not resolve the confrontation. Garnering public support did not always mean that the federal government would step in to defend civil rights.
King’s sense of his own leadership was wavering. He told reporters that the Albany Movement’s purpose had been “so vague that we got nothing and the people were left depressed and in despair.”
“When Martin left Albany he was very depressed,” recalls Andrew Young, an SCLC staff member at that time. “He knew what had happened … It was a federal judge that called off that movement. [King] had a very emotional exchange with Burke Marshall [of the Justice Department] over that, because he felt as though the Kennedy administration had helped to undercut the possibility of continuing in Albany.”
King later told the press, “One of the greatest problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white southerners who have been influenced by the mores of their community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.” This statement enraged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was already convinced that the civil rights movement was infiltrated by Communists. Later, it would be learned that Marion Page, the Albany Movement’s secretary, had spoken with police chief Pritchett almost nightly and had been in regular contact with the FBI.
Black journalist Louis Lomax wrote of King, “[In] The next town he visits to inspire those who are ready to suffer for their rights, he will find people saying ‘Remember Albany.’”
The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth wanted that town to be Birmingham. “Dr. King’s image at this time was slightly on the wane because he had not projected [a victory in Albany],” recalls Shuttlesworth. “I said, ‘I assure you, if you come to Birmingham, this movement can not only gain prestige, it can really shake the country.’” As head of a Birmingham-based group called the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Shuttlesworth was the leader of black activists in that city. He convinced the SCLC to make Birmingham the target of its next offensive.
Birmingham was infamous for the Mother’s Day, 1961, mob attack on the Freedom Riders, when police failed to intervene. Even local papers, usually supportive of Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor, were outraged by that incident. One editorial asked, “Where were the p
olice?” Trezzvant W. Anderson wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier, a national black weekly, that black leaders condemned Birmingham as the “worst big city in the U.S.A.” Between 1957 and 1963, eighteen unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods earned the city its nickname of “Bombingham.” Bull Connor sent his men to break up black political meetings, and since 1956 the NAACP had been kept out of Alabama. In 1962 the city closed sixty-eight parks, thirty-eight playgrounds, six swimming pools and four golf courses to avoid complying with a federal court order to desegregate public facilities.
Birmingham, Alabama. As King described it, “Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”
The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, spiritual leader of Birmingham’s black community.
Rev. Shuttlesworth’s home had been bombed to ruins in 1956. “Were there any arrests?” asked columnist Anderson in his article. “You can bet your life there were not … The Reverend Mr. Shuttlesworth himself was chain whipped on a public street by a white mob at Phillips High School when he took his children there in 1957 to seek to enroll them [in the white school]. His wife was stabbed during the same incident with white cops present. Has anybody been convicted? No indeed.”
With a population of 350,000, Birmingham was in 1960 Alabama’s largest city. A steel town, it was one of the region’s major business centers. Blacks accounted for forty percent of the city’s population, but were three times less likely than white residents to hold a high-school diploma. Only one of every six black employees was a skilled or trained worker, as opposed to three-quarters of whites. The median annual income for blacks was $3,000, less than half of that for white people. Singer Nat King Cole had been beaten on stage during a 1956 Birmingham performance, and on Labor Day, 1957, a carload of drunken whites had grabbed a black man off a street corner, taken him to a country shack, and castrated him.
The ravaging of the Freedom Riders in May, 1961, and President Kennedy’s decision to send in federal marshals had drawn unwelcome national publicity to Birmingham. Economic development had begun to lag as the city’s reputation tarnished. A group of whites, headed by Chamber of Commerce president Sidney Smyer, proposed a change in the structure of the city government. Under the existing system, a tightknit group of three segregationist city commissioners ran Birmingham. One was Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor. Smyer’s group wanted the city to switch to a mayor-council form of government, giving the new chief executive officer direct control over the police department and putting Bull Connor out of office.
On November 6, 1962, Birmingham voters approved the new form of government—a mayor and nine council members. The next step was a mayoral election. Connor, undaunted, declared his candidacy, as did Albert Boutwell, former lieutenant governor of Alabama and a moderate segregationist.
In January, 1963, the SCLC held a three-day retreat in Dorchester, Georgia. King, working with Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker and Rev. Shuttlesworth, carved out a careful plan of attack on segregation in Birmingham. King believed that the failure in Albany had stemmed from a complete lack of strategy. The civil rights leaders vowed that Birmingham would be different. They called their plan Project “C”—for “confrontation.” It would be launched in March, 1963, with Birmingham’s downtown businesses as its primary focus.
Two weeks after the retreat, King began a national tour in preparation for the Birmingham offensive. He delivered twenty-eight speeches in sixteen cities, telling his listeners, “As Birmingham goes, so goes the South.” He asked for volunteers and donations everywhere he went, including a private party at the home of singer Harry Belafonte that was attended by seventy-five eastern liberals. After a similar gathering in Hollywood, King had collected nearly $75,000 in bail money for the anticipated arrests.
Walker and Shuttlesworth handled the preparations in Birmingham. They studied the city’s laws and regulations to learn what constituted grounds for arrest. In Albany, the SCLC had not realized that they needed a parade permit to demonstrate.
“Since the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was going to be our headquarters,” Walker said, “I had it timed as to how long it took a youngster to walk [from there to the stores targeted for the protest], how long it took an older person, how long it would take a middle-aged person. And I picked out the best routes. Under some subterfuge I visited all three of [the targeted] stores and counted the stools, the tables, the chairs, and [figured out] the best method for ingress and egress.”
The year before, some Birmingham merchants had tried to integrate lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains and even hired some black clerks after a student-led boycott deprived them of about eighty percent of black patronage. A handful of businessmen agreed to remove their Colored Only signs. In response, Public Safety Commissioner Connor sent inspectors to cite the stores for building-code violations. The businesses returned their Colored Only signs. As summer emptied the schools and black students became unavailable, the boycott faded.
Now, a year later, news of the impending demonstrations leaked to Birmingham’s business community. With the lucrative Easter shopping season approaching, merchants did not want another boycott. Vincent Townsend, editor of the Birmingham News, called Burke Marshall at the Justice Department. He asked Marshall to have a representative of the Kennedy administration call Martin Luther King and request that he cancel the Birmingham protests.
On April 2, Marshall called King and entreated him to leave Birmingham. Bull Connor had been defeated by the moderate white segregationist Albert Boutwell that very day in a special mayoral election (the first election produced no clear victor). Marshall asked King to give the new mayor a chance to resolve black grievances. But King said no; much had happened since his exit from Albany.
Shortly after King left the city, the Ku Klux Klan had bombed four black churches outside Albany. In October, 1962, King had learned of the riots at Ole Miss as James Meredith enrolled as the university’s first black student. Two people were killed and 375 injured. In January, 1963, King had listened to Alabama’s new governor, George Wallace, give his inauguration speech and work the crowd into cheers as he cried, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
February had brought another setback: the Kennedy administration refused King’s requests to issue a modern emancipation proclamation to outlaw segregation on the 100th anniversary of the original document’s signing. The administration was preoccupied with the cold war. Just a few months before, the Cuban missile crisis had placed the nation in unprecedented danger; compared with that, the civil rights movement was simply a local disturbance. Kennedy did send a civil rights bill to Congress, but it languished in committee and was forgotten.
At a press conference, reporters aggressively questioned King about what he hoped to accomplish in Birmingham, given his difficulties in Albany. King snapped back, “The Negro has enough buying power in Birmingham to make the difference between profit and loss in any business. This was not true in Albany, Georgia.”
Albert Boutwell had beaten Bull Connor by 8,000 votes in the mayoral election. The headline in the Birmingham News ran, “A New Day Dawns for Birmingham.” But the SCLC was convinced that Boutwell was “just a dignified Bull Connor,” as King put it. As a state senator, Boutwell had authored legislation thwarting the Brown decision. He may have been a moderate segregationist compared to Bull Connor, but in the eyes of the SCLC he was still a segregationist.
On the first day of the protests, hours after Boutwell’s victory, twenty blacks were arrested for trespassing as they picketed a downtown store. Rev. Shuttlesworth had tried to get a city permit for the demonstration, but Bull Connor brashly told him, “You will get a permit in Birmingham to picket—I will picket you over to the city jail.”
City merchants were not pleased. “I was upset with Dr. King,” remembers David Vann, a white Birmingham lawyer representing the downtown stores, “because he wouldn’t give us a chance to prove what we could do through the political proc
esses. A year and a day after Connor had been reelected with the largest vote in history, a majority of the people in this city voted to terminate his office. And when he ran for mayor, we rejected him.”
Some members of the black community were also less than enthusiastic about the new protests. One of them was A. G. Gaston, a millionaire who, despite his misgivings, made his Gaston Motel available to the SCLC and provided financing as well.
After the election, Connor immediately went to court asking that he and the two other commissioners be allowed to complete the terms of office they had earlier been elected to serve, before the voters had decided to do away with the commission form of government. While waiting for the dispute to be settled, the citizens of Birmingham found themselves with two city governments. As David Vann remembers, “On Tuesdays, the [old] Commission met … and proceeded to govern the city, and when they finished, they would march out and [the] nine [new] Council members would march in, and they would proceed to adopt laws and spend money and conduct the affairs of the city.” Municipal employees found their paychecks signed by both Boutwell and Connor.
During this governmental turmoil, the SCLC accelerated its demonstrations. On Saturday, April 6, Shuttlesworth led thirty protesters to city hall and the entire group was sent to jail. The next day, Palm Sunday, A. D. King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King, headed a prayer march through the downtown streets. Police using dogs and nightsticks clashed violently with the demonstrators.
Bull Connor, still in control of the police, sought a court injunction banning further picketing. On Wednesday, April 10, Alabama Circuit Court Judge W. A. Jenkins, Jr., issued an order naming 133 civil rights leaders whom he forbade to take part in or encourage any sit-ins, picketing, or other demonstrations. The list included King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth. In Albany, King’s refusal to defy the court injunction and the subsequent lapse in the demonstrations had irrevocably hampered the movement’s momentum. Furthermore, Project “C” called for King to subject himself to arrest in Birmingham on April 12, Good Friday. If the minister obeyed the court order, the movement would lose a carefully planned chance to attract the attention of television and newspapers.
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