On Friday morning, King met with his staff at the Gaston Motel. “We already had [many] people in jail,” remembers Andrew Young, “but all the money was gone, and we couldn’t get people out … the black business community and some of the clergy [were] pressuring us to call off the demonstrations and just get out of town. We didn’t know what to do. [King] sat there in Room 30 in the Gaston Motel and didn’t say anything. He listened to people talking for about two hours.’
Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety.
Bull Connor ordered his police department to use police dogs to break up the demonstrations.
King then left the suite’s living room and went into the bedroom. When he emerged, he told his staff, “Look, I don’t know what to do. I just know that something has got to change in Birmingham. I don’t know whether I can raise money to get people out of jail. I do know that I can go into jail with them.”
As King turned to go, he looked toward Ralph Abernathy, his constant adviser and companion. According to Andrew Young, Rev. Abernathy said he didn’t want to go to jail; he needed to be in his church pulpit on Easter Sunday. King turned to his best friend and said, “Ralph, you’ve always been with me, but I’m going [regardless].” Abernathy followed.
“Not knowing how it was going to work out, he walked out of the room and went down to the church and led a demonstration and went to jail,” recalls Young. “That was, I think, the beginning of his true leadership.”
A half mile into a march toward downtown Birmingham, King and Abernathy were arrested along with fifty other demonstrators. Media cameras were there to capture the symbolism as Martin Luther King was loaded into Bull Connor’s windowless police van on that Good Friday.
King was placed in solitary confinement in Birmingham’s jail. Demonstrators gathered on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and sang in brave jubilation. Afterwards, some of them moved across the street to the city’s Kelly Ingram Park. The police moved in, and brief fights broke out, but the protests ended peacefully. Later, a full-page ad taken out by members of the local white clergy appeared in the Birmingham News, calling King a troublemaker. From his cell, King responded to the ministers’ letter by writing in the margins of the newspaper and on scraps of toilet paper.
“I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was well-timed in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation,” he wrote in what was later published as the essay, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait.’ It rings in the ears of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see with one of our distinguished jurists that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’” The letter went on to explain, to the clergy and to the world, why the fight against racism must not be delayed.
Coretta Scott King heard nothing from her jailed husband all weekend. Fearing for his safety, on Easter Sunday she sought advice from Wyatt Walker, executive director of the SCLC. He suggested she call the president. On Monday, Kennedy returned her phone call.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Written in April, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter from jail stands as one of the most important documents of nonviolent protest in the civil rights movement. King began the letter by writing notes in the margins of the Birmingham News, which printed an open letter from eight clergymen who attacked King’s role in Birmingham. King’s letter was first published as a pamphlet by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. It was reprinted in dozens of periodicals and soon, with over a million copies in circulation, it became a classic of protest literature. Excerpts from the 6,500-word letter follow.
April 16, 1963 Birmingham, Alabama
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas … but since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
… You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiations. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
… One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hoped that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance … My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed… Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well-timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say. “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on
television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience…
“He said, ‘I want you to know that we are doing everything we can, and Dr. King is safe,’” Mrs. King recalls, “and Martin said after that [phone call] the treatment changed markedly.”
The demonstrations began to lose supporters as King’s incarceration dragged on. Finally, on April 20, King and Abernathy accepted release on bond. They went straight to the Gaston Motel to plan the next phase of Project “C.” James Bevel, a veteran of the student sit-ins in Nashville, had devised a strategy. He wanted to use Birmingham’s black children as demonstrators. Bevel argued that while many adults might be reluctant to march—afraid of going to jail at the cost of their jobs—children would be less fearful. Also, he told King, the sight of young children being hauled off to jail would dramatically stir the nation’s conscience.
“Most adults have bills to pay—house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills,” argued Bevel, “but the young people … are not hooked with all those responsibilities. A boy from high school has the same effect in terms of being in jail, in terms of putting pressure on the city, as his father, and yet there’s no economic threat to the family, because the father is still on the job.”
While King went to court on April 22 to be tried in connection with the Good Friday protest, SCLC workers Bevel, Andrew Young, Dorothy Cotton, and Bernard Lee recruited black schoolchildren from all over Birmingham. They asked the students to go to their local churches and see a film, The Nashville Story, about a student sit-in movement. King was found guilty of civil contempt but remained free pending appeal. On Thursday, May 2, the children began their demonstrations in Birmingham. King addressed a gathering of them at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. They ranged in age from six to eighteen. He told the youngsters he was proud of them, that they were fighting for their parents and for the future of America. Groups of children began to march toward downtown.
Police moved in to arrest them, at first herding them into paddy wagons. For four hours they continued to march from the church, singing songs of freedom. As their numbers increased, Bull Connor brought in school buses to haul them away. By the end of the day, 959 children had been taken to Birmingham jails. From Washington, Robert Kennedy called King to argue that the children could be seriously hurt by Connor’s police tactics.
The next day, more than a thousand children stayed out of school, gathering at the church to march. Bull Connor, hoping to abort the demonstrations before they began, brought out the city’s police dogs. He also ordered firefighters to turn their hoses on the youngsters. With 100 pounds of pressure per square inch, the water hit with enough force to rip the bark off trees. Children were knocked down by the streams, slammed into curbs and over parked cars. Several demonstrators were attacked by dogs.
As Connor lashed the demonstrators with water, black businessman A. G. Gaston, from his office across the street, was on the phone with attorney David Vann. Gaston “was expressing a great deal of resentment about King coming in and messing up things just when we [through the city government] were getting a new start,” Vann recalls. “And then he said to me, ‘But Lawyer Vann, they’ve turned the fire hoses on a black girl. They’re rolling that little girl right down the middle of the street. I can’t talk to you no more.’”
Vann would later say that it was then, when Connor’s troopers attacked the children, that “in the twinkling of an eye the whole black community instantaneously consolidated … behind Dr. King.”
Birmingham’s blacks were raging with anger. At a demonstration the next day, some brandished guns and knives. James Bevel, fearing a riot that would be blamed on the movement, announced through a policeman’s bullhorn, “Okay, get off the streets now. We’re not going to have violence. If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement.” Tension mounted; the SCLC had created a protest it could not control.
The marches grew in size. By Monday, May 6, more than two thousand demonstrators had been jailed, some in Birmingham, others in a temporary prison camp at the Alabama state fairgrounds. The next day, the confrontation moved into the downtown area, and Bull Connor once again summoned his firemen and ordered the hoses turned on. When the public safety commissioner was told that Rev. Shuttlesworth had been injured by the hurtling water and taken to the hospital by ambulance, he broke into a smile and said, “I’m sorry I missed it. I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”
Across the nation people watched television pictures of children being blasted with water hoses and chased by police dogs. Newspapers and magazines at home and abroad were filled with reports and photographs. The news coverage shocked the American public. In Washington, the Kennedy administration also watched.
“There were pictures throughout the nation, throughout the world,” recalls Burke Marshall, then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “It was a matter of great concern to the president, because it was a hopeless situation in terms of any lawful resolution.” The federal government worried about America’s image abroad.
But President Kennedy, according to Marshall, could exercise no executive power in Birmingham. “There was no legal remedy,” Marshall said. “That was clear from the start. We discussed it with the president so he understood, but most of the country did not. You know, they wanted him to send in troops, do this and that …”
As demonstrators filled the jails, the city had to establish temporary prison camps.
As Kennedy considered his options, the situation worsened. Alabama governor George Wallace sent in 500 state troopers. Television and newspaper reporters intensified their coverage. As King and the SCLC had hoped, the press had drawn the whole world’s attention to Birmingham.
“It was a masterpiece [in] the use of media to explain a cause to the general public,” says David Vann. “In those days, we had fifteen minutes of national news and fifteen minutes of local news, and in marching only one block they could get enough news film to fill all of the newscasts of all the television stations in the United States.”
Governor Wallace did not share the president’s concern over America’s image. “It seems to me that other parts of the world ought to be concerned about what we are thinking of them instead of what they think of us,” Wallace said. “After all, we’re feeding most of them. And whenever they start rejecting twenty-five cents of each dollar of foreign-aid money that we send them, then I’ll be concerned about their attitude toward us. But until they reject that twenty-five cents … that southerners pay for foreign aid to these countries, I will never be concerned about their attitude. In the first place, the average man in Africa or Asia doesn’t even know where he is, much less where Alabama is.”
The Birmingham Fire D
epartment turned their hoses on the young demonstrators. The force of the water tore bark off trees.
Kennedy, seeking a quick settlement, had sent Burke Marshall to Birmingham on May 4 to encourage negotiations between King and the city’s business leaders. Marshall learned that most of Birmingham’s white leaders were not speaking to blacks, and that the white business community was not speaking to Bull Connor and his police department. Some blacks would not talk to blacks whom they considered too radical, while others refused to speak to fellow blacks they thought of as “Uncle Toms.” And except for lawyer David Vann, whites were not speaking to King. “Anything that Martin Luther King wanted was poison to them [whites],” said Marshall.
The federal aide asked King what concessions he wanted from the whites of Birmingham. Marshall recalls that King said he really was not sure now that the protests had escalated uncontrollably; the campaign’s original goal, desegregation of downtown stores, now seemed too small an issue. Blacks wanted integration in every aspect of the city’s life, King said. But at Marshall’s insistence, King agreed that the bottom line remained the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown stores.
With the dispute over the new city government’s legitimacy still pending in court, it was up to the private sector to work out a settlement. Marshall approached the city’s leading business owners and presented King’s demands. A mercantile group called the Senior Citizens Committee represented about seventy percent of Birmingham’s businesses and employed about eighty percent of the city’s workers.
Eyes on the Prize Page 23
