Albany. Montgomery was one of the first great battles won by the Negro in
the South, and for a while after it was won everything seemed anticlimactic to
King. When the sit-ins and freedom-ride movements gained momentum, King's
S.C.L.C. helped organize and support them. But King somehow did not seem very
efficient, and his apparent luck of imagination was to bring him to his lowest
ebb in the Negro movement.
In December 1961, King joined a mass protest demonstration in Albany, Ga.,
was arrested, and dramatically declared that he would stay in jail until Albany
consented to desegregate its public facilities. But just two days after his
arrest, King came out on bail. The Albany movement collapsed, and King was
bitterly criticized for helping to kill it. Today he admits mistakes in Albany.
"Looking back over it," he says, "I'm sorry I was bailed out. I didn't
understand at the time what was happening. We though that the victory had been
won. When we got out, we discovered it was all a hoax. We had lost a real
opportunity to redo Albany, and we lost an initiative that we never regained."
But King also learned a lesson in Albany. "We attacked the political power
structure instead of the economic power structure," he says. "You don't win
against a political power structure where you don't have the votes. But you can
win against an economic power structure when you have the economic power to
make the difference between a merchant's profit and loss."
Birmingham. It was while he was in his post-Albany eclipse that King began
planning for his most massive assault on the barricades of segregation. The
target: Birmingham, citadel of blind, die-hard segregation. King's lieutenant,
Wyatt Tee Walker, has explained the theory that governs King's planning: "We've
got to have a crisis to bargain with. To take a moderate approach, hoping to
get white help, doesn't work. They nail you to the cross, and it saps the
enthusiasm of the followers. You've got to have a crisis."
The Negroes made their crisis, but it was no spur-of-the- moment matter.
King himself went to Birmingham to conduct workshops in nonviolent techniques.
he recruited 200 people who were willing to go to jail for the cause, carefully
planned his strategy in ten meetings with local Negro leaders. Then, declaring
that Birmingham is the "most thoroughly segregated big city in the U.S.," he
announced early in 1963 that he would lead demonstrations there until "Pharaoh
lets God's People go."
Awaiting King in Birmingham was Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus
Eugene ("Bull") Connor, a man who was to become a symbol of police brutality
yet who, in fact, merely reflected the seething hatreds in a city where acts of
violence were as common as chitlins and ham hocks. As it happened, Bull Connor
was running for mayor against a relative moderate, Albert Boutwell. To avoid
giving campaign fuel to connor, King waited until after the April 2 election.
Between Jan. 16 and March 29, he launched himself into a whirlwind speaking
tour, made 28 speeches in 16 cities across the nation.
