Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs & Brutality, Lewis’ Biography Chapter 7

Today we are reflecting on the chapter in David Levering Lewis’ biography
of Martin Luther King on his civil rights struggles in brutal Birmingham.
We reflect on these questions:
Why did Martin Luther King select Birmingham, Alabama, for his next
protests?
Why did Bull Connor attack young student protesters with police dogs
and fire hoses, in full view of television cameras and photographers?
Why did Attorney General Robert Kenned have to inquire whether Martin
Luther King was alive and well in the Birmingham jail?
Did the KKK dynamite a black church during Sunday School, killing four
young black girls?

Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments. Let us learn and reflect together!
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources
used for this video.
Please feel free to follow along in the PowerPoint
script we uploaded to SlideShare, which includes
illustrations. Our sister blog includes footnotes, both
include our Amazon book links.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2024
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
affiliate commissions.
Blog: https://wp.me/pachSU-VO

SlideShare contains scripts for my YouTube
videos. Link is in the YouTube description.
© Copyright 2024

Due to his rousing speeches, Martin Luther King was seen as the
spokesman for the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties. He was great
television.
Previously we have reflected on his youth and schooling, then the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, when Martin Luther King first gained national
prominence due to the national media attention. That was followed by
the sit-ins at the Lunch Counters and Freedom Rider protests, and then
pursued Civil Rights in Albany, Georgia. Albany did not attract media
attention, and the results were inconclusive, so next was the campaign
to promote Civil Rights in brutal Birmingham.

https://youtu.be/_64FMZ6AlEg https://youtu.be/TuiyFycWE-U
https://youtu.be/_TLt2fQqL4w

Martin Luther King at Birmingham, AL

Birmingham, a major center of iron and steel in the South, was one of
the toughest cities in Alabama, and Bull Connor was the ideal white
supremacist villain. At Albany, there were many protests and many
campaigns, but there was no focus, little sense of accomplishment, and
no clear villain. Martin Luther King and the SCLC learned their lesson,
they worked closer with the local affiliate of the SCLC, the ACMHR, or
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, founded by key
members of the black community in Birmingham and headed by
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. They trained hundreds of volunteers in a
civil rights boot camp, teaching them the basics of how to conduct a
nonviolent campaign. They were warned that they might face violence
and possibly death.

The SCLC decided to focus on one
campaign, a boycott of the local white
businesses just before Easter. As our
biographer Lewis writes, the strategy
was simple, “mobilize thousands of
black citizens” to protest, provoking a
“savage white counterreaction that
would compel the federal government”
now under JFK, a Democratic President,
“to implement vigorously the decisions
of the Supreme Court.” JFK was much
more open to civil rights enforcement;
he had been meeting with Martin Luther
King on these issues.

Bull Connor had been Commissioner of Public
Safety for several decades, off and on. He was
notoriously vigilant and cruel. Lewis notes that in
Birmingham, “segregation was total and the
slightest betrayal of discontent with the racial
order was severely, often capitally, punished.
Police brutality to blacks was the custom rather
than the exception.” “Of the 80,000 registered
voters in 1963, only 10,000 were black. When
desegregation was mandated, “they closed the
city’s parks rather than allow blacks to sully
them.” “Whites still sipped water from designated
fountains and tried on clothing in fitting rooms”
for whites. Blacks were intimidated by the
bombing of seventeen black churches in 1963.

Boycott Begins in Birmingham, Alabama

They delayed the start of the protests until after the
mayoral elections of Birmingham. Bull Connor was one of
the candidates, but he lost in a runoff election in April
1963 to a less violent segregationist candidate. The current
administration refused to vacate the office, arguing that an
ambiguity in the city charter allowed them to remain in
office for another two years, which meant that Bull Connor
could remain as Safety Commissioner. While this was
under review by the Alabama Supreme Court, Bull Conner
was still in charge.

The Birmingham Manifesto was issued, declaring:
“The patience of an oppressed people cannot
endure forever.” “We have been segregated
racially, exploited economically, and dominated
politically. Under the leadership of the ACMHR, we
sought relief by petition for the repeal of city
ordinances requiring segregation and the
institution of a merit hiring policy in city
employment.”
Martin spoke at a packed prayer meeting. “We are
heading for freedom land, and nothing is going to
stop us. We are going to make Birmingham the
center of antidiscrimination activity in the nation. I
have come here to stay until something is done.”
Martin Luther King promoting his book
Why We Can't Wait, based on his Letter
from Birmingham Jail, 1964

So many white Christians today somehow feel that
the Black Lives Matter movement is anti-Christian
and anti-American, that it is important to emphasize
that many of the leaders of the Civil Rights
movement were black ministers who genuinely
sought to protest the injustice suffered by blacks in
the spirit of Christ. Indeed, the Ten Commandments
drafted for the protesters are helpful for anyone
undergoing a difficult time in their lives.

The structure of these Birmingham missives roughly
correspond to the actual Ten Commandments. First,
we are commanded to Love God and purify our
thoughts, which enables us to follow the
commandments bidding us to speak with reverence.
Once our thoughts and speech are pure, then we are
better able to ensure our actions are pure.

Moses on Mount Sinai, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1900

The volunteers had to agree to and sign this Ten
Commandments Pledge:
1. “MEDITATE daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2. REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in
Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation, not victory.
3. WALK AND TALK in the manner of love, for God is Love.
4. PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be
free.
5. SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be
free.
6. OBSERVE, with both friend and foe, the ordinary rules of
courtesy.
7. SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10.FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain
of the demonstration.”

The purpose of the last point is to avoid having the
protests spin off into violence.
Seeing the television cameras roll, Commissioner Connor’s
men behaved civilly for three days of the demonstrations,
politely leading those they were arresting into the police
vans, only showing their dogs briefly on one day. His
constraint anticipated that the local court would issue an
injunction forbidding future protests.

Martin Luther King in Birmingham Jail

When this injunction was issued, there was a panic. The
question arose: Would Martin Luther King himself protest
and be arrested, and would he seek bail? The dilemma was
that they needed to bail out the daily wage earners but felt
that only Martin had the charisma to raise the funds
needed for bail. But in the end, Martin Luther King and
Ralph Abernathy decided to go to prison as a form of
protest, along with fifty other volunteers. Martin was
placed in solitary confinement, without access to a phone,
without access to his attorney.

With all contact cut off, this was the most pressing
question: Was Martin Luther King alive? Or had he been
lynched? On Easter Sunday, Coretta Scott King placed a call
to the White House asking if they could inquire. The
Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, called her and told her,
though he was not able to arrange for her husband to call
her, that he was indeed safe. On Monday morning, JFK
called her to say she would be expecting a call from her
husband and that FBI agents were on the scene in
Birmingham.

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, 1963 / Coretta King with her husband MLK and daughter Yolanda, 1956

Martin Luther King and President John F Kennedy, and other Civil Rights Leaders , 1963

This controversy prompted eight white Birmingham
pastors, scandalized by the movement’s breaking the
unjust laws preventing demonstrations and the militance
of the black leaders and clergy, to issue an Appeal for Law
and Order and Common Sense, which discouraged civil
discord while the issue was being addressed by the local
and federal courts. In response, Martin Luther King wrote
his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, which forcefully
contended that blacks had been patient enough for
decades, that the time is NOW for positive racial change.

https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
As our author Lewis recounts, “Every
Negro was familiar with the cry of
‘WAIT!’ It nearly always meant
‘NEVER.’” While “Asian and African
countries were gaining
independence,” in America “we creep
at horse-and-buggy pace towards
gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch
counter.” The letter then lists the
many things denied to blacks.

There were direct and indirect links between the Jim Crow
system of segregation in the Deep South and the rising anti-
Semitic Naziism that infected Europe and the world in the years
before and during World War II. In his Letter from a Birmingham
Jail, Martin Luther King directly referenced the Jim Crow legal
system and the lynching plaguing the Deep South as an American
Holocaust. We were easily able to compare this letter to Hannah
Arendt’s essay on the Banality of Evil, discussing the role of the
bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann in the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi
Germany.

Scholars have revealed there were direct links between the Jim Crow
system of segregation in the Deep South and Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime.
When formulating the Nuremberg ant-Semitic Race Laws soon after
Hitler came to power, Nazi lawyers used the Jim Crow segregation laws as
precedent. Just as blacks would be denied due process and the right to
vote, so Jews in Nazi Germany were denied full citizenship and a voice in
government and were soon banned from schools and civil employment.
The Nazis felt they were unable to duplicate the Jim Crow system where
one drop of colored blood makes you subject to the Jim Crow laws, as
having only one Jewish grandparent did not mean that you were Jewish,
you had to have more family connections, and the Nazis were not initially
able to implement the total segregation of Jews in their society.

Also, you can compare the firebombing of dozens of
black homes and churches during the Civil Rights era
to the Nazi Night of Broken Glass, the Kristallnacht,
when Nazi SS stormtroopers destroyed Jewish
synagogues, businesses, and homes.

Sensing an impasse, Martin Luther King and Ralph
Abernathy accepted release on bail in late April.
When tried a week later, they were fined fifty dollars
and five days loss of liberty.

School Children March in Protest

This was good television, but they needed better
television. They launched the most controversial
tactic of all. Six thousand children, aged six to
sixteen, marched and protested from the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to downtown. A
thousand children were arrested. Up to now, Bull
Conner showed restraint for television, but for
some reason, he decided to brutalize these
children.

Bill Hudson's
image of Parker
High School
student Walter
Gadsden being
attacked by dogs
was published in
The New York
Times on May 4,
1963.

As Lewis recounts:
“Police dogs were
released to charge
snarling into the
marchers. At least three
young people were
seriously bitten. Officers
waded into the midst,
flailing nightsticks
indiscriminately. Firemen
release gallons of
blistering water from
their pressure hoses.”

This violence was repeated over the next three days.
Angry young black men joined the demonstrators,
throwing bottles and bricks at the police, some
marched with knives and pistols. More than two
thousand demonstrators were arrested, and several
more thousand volunteers were waiting their turn to
march.

Sculptures dedicated to Leader & Foot Soldiers of Civil Rights Movement, Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama

There were negotiations between Martin and
federal officials. Lewis recounts, “Black
demands had crystallized into four conditions:
• Desegregation of lunch counters,
restrooms, fitting rooms, and drinking
fountains in department stores.
• Promotion and hiring of blacks on a
nondiscriminatory basis throughout the
city’s business and industrial community.
• Dropping all charges against demonstrators.
• Formation of a biracial committee to
prepare a timetable for desegregation in
other areas of Birmingham.”
Benjamin Cowins during a sit-in at McCrory's
lunch counter in Tallahassee, 1961

Lewis recounts the rising violence.
Two fire hoses “were dislodged by
their water pressure and rocketed
into a group of policemen; one
officer’s ribs and another’s legs
were crushed. Connor’s men were
no longer attempting to control
the crowds. They had been
ordered to drive them brutally
into the black section of the city. It
was not surprising that nonviolent
discipline collapsed under naked
provocation. A hail of rocks,
bottles, and brickbats showered
the police and firemen.”
Protestors in Birmingham, by Charles Moore, Black Star agency

In the melee, Reverence
Fred Shuttlesworth was
injured when a fire hose
threw him against a
building. When told that
an ambulance carried him
off, Bull Conner remarked,
“I am sorry I missed it. I
wish they had carried him
away in a hearse.”
Statue by John Walter Rhoden

Although the SCLC leadership realized they had lost
control of the crowds, Martin Luther King did not call
for a halt in the protests as he had in Albany. Tempers
ran so high that this was likely not possible.

Lewis recounts: “Frightened by Connor’s
stormtrooper methods and fearful of a
recurrence of violence, white businessmen
requested a truce. That evening, Connor
asked Governor George Wallace for and
received more than five hundred state
troopers.” “The Connor forces had every
intention of engineering a slaughter. After a
three-hour conference with the whites, the
SCLC leaders agreed to a truce that evening.
But Martin announced that demonstrations
would resume on Thursday at 11 AM if their
demands had not been met.”
Civil rights activists arrested, Tallahassee, FL, 1961

Then Bull Connor arrested Martin Luther King and
Ralph Abernathy. When they threatened the
resumption of demonstrations, federal officials
intervened to give the Attorney General time to
negotiate their release, and they were later bailed
out of jail.

King was
arrested in
1963 for
protesting
the
treatment of
blacks in
Birmingham

Lewis recounts, “On Thursday morning, the white
negotiators agreed to the essential demands of
the black community. Lunch counters, restrooms,
fitting rooms, and drinking fountains in the large
downtown stores were to be desegregated. The
SCLC accepted a ninety-day transition period.
Similarly, the hiring and promotion of black
personnel was to take place over the next sixty
days. The biracial committee was to be formed
within two weeks. The nearly three thousand
persons arrested were to be released
immediately. The whites refused, however, to
recommend the dismissal of the charges against
them, necessitating the payment of bail.”
Demonstrators, March on Washington, 1963

Lewis continues: Later that
month, “the US Supreme
Court’s decision legalizing
sit-in demonstrations in
cities enforcing segregation
nullified the Alabama laws
under which the large
majority of Birmingham’s
demonstrators could be
prosecuted.”

What was the toll? Several dozen people were
injured and hospitalized. Many demonstrators had
been fired from their jobs.

Violence Continues in Birmingham

But the violence did not cease. Martin’s brother’s house was
demolished by a bomb, though miraculously he, his wife, and his
children were not harmed. A motel used by SCLC leaders was
partially destroyed by a bomb. The rioting continued. Bull Connor
called on whites to boycott the stores until the compact was
abrogated. Children who participated in the demonstrations were
expelled from school, though the NAACP lawyers were able to
persuade the federal courts to reverse this. At the month’s end,
the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the current city
government should relinquish office, meaning Bull Connor was
no longer in charge.

Wreckage at
the AG Gaston
Motel
following
bomb
explosion in
1963

Bomb-
damaged
home of
NAACP
attorney
Arthur Shores
in 1963

But four months later, in September 1963, the KKK
detonated dynamite under the stairs of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham during Sunday School, killing
four young black girls, including Addie Mae, Cynthia,
Carole, and Denise, ages eleven to fourteen, and injuring
several dozen others. A white jury eventually convicted
several of the perpetrators for murder, unlike other trials
where white juries refused to rule against white
defendants no matter how heinous their crimes against
blacks.

The 16th Street Baptist Church, headquarters for the Birmingham campaign

Addressing the nation on television,
President Kennedy proclaimed, “This
nation is committed to a course of
domestic justice and tranquility.” “If
these cruel and tragic events can
awaken that city and state, if they can
awaken this entire nation,” “then it is
not too late for all concerned to unite
in steps toward peaceful progress
before more lives are lost.” But no
whites attended the funeral services
of these four young black girls.

“Am I imaging it,” a
Birmingham businessman
inquired, “or are the Negroes
I see around town walking a
little straighter these days?”
Martin Luther King wrote,
“For hundreds of years, the
quiet sobbing of an
oppressed people had been
unheard by millions of white
Americans.” “The lament
became a shout and then a
roar and for months no
American, white or Negro,
was insulated or unaware.” March in memory of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing victims

John F Kennedy said this to the
American people in his
television address: “One
hundred years of delay have
passed since President Lincoln
freed the slaves, yet their heirs,
their grandsons, are not fully
free. They are not yet freed
from the bonds of injustice.
They are not yet freed from
social and economic
oppression. And this nation, for
all its hopes and all its boasts,
will not be fully free until all its
citizens are free.”

JFK continues, “We preach
freedom around the world,
and we mean it, and we
cherish our freedom here at
home, but are we to say to the
world” “that this is a land of
the free except for the
Negroes?” “Now the time has
come for this nation to fulfill its
promise. The events in
Birmingham and elsewhere
have so increased the cries for
equality that no city or state or
legislative body can prudently
choose to ignore them.”

Our author began this
chapter with this quote by
JFK: “Our judgment of Bull
Connor should not be too
harsh. After all, in his way, he
has done a good deal for civil
rights legislation this year.”

Now only Americans in their Seventies remember
seeing these images on their television sets. For the
rest of us, this is history we must study and
remember.

After the Birmingham struggle, there was the March
on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered
his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Reflecting
Pool in Washington, DC. After that, there was the
bloody marches on Selma, his fight for more
equitable housing in Chicago, and finally, when his
life was cut short by his assassination in Memphis.

The author, David Levering Lewis, was planning to
write the biography of Martin Luther King when he
was assassinated. It became the classic biography of
this Civil Rights icon. We reflected on his classic
biography in greater depth, including several
controversial topics, in our reflection on his youth
and school years. Lewis also wrote the definitive
biography for WEB Du Bois.

YouTube Channel (click to subscribe):
Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History:
© Copyright 2023 Become a patron:
https://amzn.to/3SvyBVu
https://amzn.to/3xOZADs
https://amzn.to/3kfEXbT
https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0
Martin Luther King, Birmingham
https://youtu.be/5y0v0tYMdy8
https://amzn.to/3orcpz7
https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom
https://www.youtube.com/@ReflectionsMPH/?sub_confirmation=1
https://amzn.to/3je7rmW
https://amzn.to/3TJ5WQl

https://www.meetup.com/Reflections/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg/

Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs & Brutality, Lewis’ Biography Chapter 7

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Plus de Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History

Plus de Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs & Brutality, Lewis’ Biography Chapter 7