Moving into Birmingham in the first week of April, King and his group
began putting their plans to work. Bull Connor, who had lost the election but
refused to relinquish power, sent his spies into the Negro community to seek
information. Fearing that their phones were tapped, King and his friends worked
up a code. he became "J.F.K.," Ralph Abernathy "Dean Rusk," Birmingham Preacher
Fred Shuttlesworth "Bull," and Negro Businessman John Drew "Pope John."
Demonstrators were called "baptismal candidates," and the whole operation was
labeled "Project C"--for "Confrontation."
The protest began. Day after day, Negro men, women and children in their
Sunday best paraded cheerfully downtown to be hauled off to jail for
demonstrating. The sight and sound of so many people filling his jail so
triumphantly made Bull Connor nearly apoplectic. he arrested them at lunch
counters and in the streets, wherever they gathered. Still they cam, rank on
rank. At length, on Tuesday, May 7, 2,500 Negroes poured out of church, surged
through the police lines and swarmed downtown. Connor furiously ordered the
fire hoses turned on. Armed with clubs, cops beat their way into the crowds. An
armored car menacingly bulldozed the milling throngs. Fire hoses swept them
down the streets. In all, the Birmingham demonstrations resulted in the jailing
of more than 3,300 Negroes, including King himself.
The Response. The Negroes had created their crisis--and Connor had made it
a success. "The civil rights movement," said President Kennedy in a meeting
later with King, "owes Bull Connor as much as it owes Abraham Lincoln." that
was a best an oversimplification; nevertheless, because of Connor, the riots
seared the front pages of the world press, outraged millions of people.
Everywhere, King's presence, in the pulpit or at rallies, was demanded. But
while he preached nonviolence, violence spread. "Freedom Walker" William Moore
was shot and killed in Alabama. Mississippi's N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers
was assassinated outside his home. There was violence in Jackson, Miss., in
Cambridge, Md., in Danville, Va. In Birmingham, later in the year, a church
bombing killed four Negro Sunday-school children, while two other youngsters
were shot and killed the same day.
Those events awakened long-slumbering Negro resentments, from which a
fresh Negro urgency drew strength. For the first time, a unanimity of purpose
slammed into the Negro consciousness with the force of a fire hose. Class lines
began to shatter. Middle-class Negroes, who were aspiring for acceptance by the
white community, suddenly found a point of identity with Negroes at the bottom
of the economic heap. Many wealthy Negroes, once reluctant to join the fight,
pitched in.
Now sit-in campaigns and demonstrations erupted like machine-gun fire in
every major city in the North, as well as in hundreds of new places in the
South. Negroes demanded better job opportunities, an end to the de facto school
segregation that ghetto life had forced upon them. The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy
Wilkins, a calm, cool civil rights leader, lost some of his calmness and
coolness. Said he: "My objectivity went out the window when I saw the picture
of those cops sitting on that woman and holding her down by the throat."
Wilkins promptly joined a street demonstration, got himself arrested.
"Free at Last." Many whites also began to participate, particularly the
white clergy, which cast off its lethargy as ministers, priests and rabbis
tucked the Scriptures under their arms and marched to jails with Negroes whom
they had never seen before. The Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, executive head of
the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., declared: "Some time or other, we
are all going to have to stand and be on the receiving end of a fire hose."
Blake thereupon joined two dozen other clergymen in a protest march--and was
arrested.
In the months following Birmingham, Negroes paraded, demonstrated, sat in,
stormed and fought through civil rights sorties in 800 cities and towns in the
land. The revolt's basic and startling new assumption--that the black man can
read and understand the Constitution, and can demand his equal rights without
fear--was not lost on Washington. President Kennedy, who had been in no great
hurry to produce a civil rights bill, now moved swiftly. The Justice Department
drew up a tight and tough bill, aimed particularly at voting rights,
employment, and the end of segregation in public facilities.
