While the World Watched (9 page)

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns: and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom far beyond my own hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
[30]

Although Salisbury described accurately the terrorism that had become a normal way of life for me, my family, and my community, the article outraged Birmingham’s city leaders. It also led to a six-million-dollar libel suit against the
New York Times
—a suit resolved in 1964 in the
Times
’ favor.
[31]

The belief on the part of white Birmingham residents that life was “perfectly normal” was reflected in the 1961 documentary
Who Speaks for Birmingham?
In it, David Lowe interviewed a leading attorney in Birmingham on the city’s race relations. The attorney looked into the television camera and, with serious tone and straight face, said, “Substantially all of the Negroes in Alabama, and perhaps the South, Deep South, have the same background. They were all savages in Africa. Their parents sold them into slavery, or their chieftains sold them into slavery. They were brought into this country in a state of savagery. . . . Their concept, when they were hungry, was to raid the jungles of Africa and to live in the forest.”

When David Lowe asked the attorney about court-ordered desegregation of Birmingham’s schools and public facilities, the attorney replied, “I don’t believe it will ever happen. There would be a measure of violence in Birmingham. . . . There’s a lot of white people here that say this: ‘Even the dumbest farmer in the world knows that if he has white chickens and black chickens, the black chickens do better if they are kept in one yard to themselves; the white chickens do better if they’re kept in a separate yard to themselves.’ They each do better under those conditions, and a farmer who would mix white and black chickens would be the dumbest man in the world.” During the taped interviews, other leading citizens in Birmingham voiced the same opinions about black people and desegregation.
[32]

Whites all over Alabama and the nation seemed to think that the Civil Rights movement was just about sitting next to black people in classrooms or using the same toilets and public facilities. Blacks, however, saw this as a bigger issue. They wanted equal access and opportunities to do whatever their talents and resources would allow them to do. It is one scenario to be unable to attend school for lack of academic standing or financial resources. It is quite another matter to have academic standing and financial resources yet have the door locked and bolted because of one’s ethnicity. Blacks wanted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—whatever that meant to each person individually. But in a nutshell, we wanted freedom.

Some blacks were willing to fight for that freedom, and Fred Lee Shuttlesworth was one of them. Sometimes referred to as the “Wild Man from Birmingham,” Shuttlesworth has been described as an “unpolished, rabble-rousing Baptist preacher.”
[33]
He and Martin Luther King Jr. had together founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a national Civil Rights group organized after the Montgomery bus boycott. Now, several years later, he felt it was time to contact Dr. King in Atlanta to help him.

Along with most of the black community, I knew who Reverend Shuttlesworth was, and I thought he represented the very height of bravery. To test the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling to integrate the public schools, Shuttlesworth had driven to Birmingham’s Phillips High School with his two daughters in the car. He planned to enroll them in the all-white school. But white mobs were waiting for him. When he stepped out of his car, white men jumped him. On the evening news, I saw the men hitting and beating and kicking Reverend Shuttlesworth. At the time, I remember thinking,
Surely he knew a white mob was waiting for him at the entrance of Phillips High School that day. But he still drove to the school and got out of his car! Was he afraid of what might happen? Certainly he knew the mob might kill him and his daughters! How in the world did he prepare his mind and heart for that confrontation? What did he tell his daughters might happen? How did he prepare them to possibly meet their deaths?

I came to see Reverend Shuttlesworth as a minister and a man who was God-sent and who knew what was right. The truth pushed him to fight for the rights of all Birmingham’s black people. To me, he was the epitome of courage. Former mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador Andrew Young once described Shuttlesworth as “fearless to the point of insanity.”

During those violent years, the Klan bombed Shuttlesworth’s home twice and his church once. Very early one Christmas morning as he and his wife lay in bed asleep, an explosion woke him. He opened his eyes, and all he could see was the sky above him. The bomb had blown away the roof of his house and the walls of his bedroom. He figured this close escape from death was God’s way of telling him, “Shuttlesworth! I am with you for the duration of this!”

Dr. King accepted Shuttlesworth’s invitation to come to Birmingham, a hotbed of racial violence—the city Dr. King called “the most segregated city in America.” Together they organized Project C and planned peaceful protests. Dr. King made it clear that any protester confronted with violence by police or the Klan was to respond with nonviolence. Project C officially began on April 3, 1963. I was fifteen years old.

When Bull Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, heard about the upcoming protests, he obtained a court order forbidding the marches. That meant that if black people marched down the streets of Birmingham, they would be arrested. On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Dr. King himself was arrested and locked up in a Birmingham jail.

Things in Birmingham certainly heated up when Dr. King arrived. And I was right in the center of it all.

Chapter 9

“It's Time!”

* * *

Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. . . . 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. . . . 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.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
“Letter from Birmingham Jail”
[34]

In January 1963, when newly elected Alabama governor George C. Wallace took the oath of office, he stood proudly before his supporters and, in his inaugural speech, said,

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.
[35]

When I heard those painful, frightening words on TV at the age of fourteen, they touched my heart like a hot branding iron. I will never forget them. You see, when white people said things like that, we in the black community knew they would happen. We figured it was settled and that nothing could be done about it. When Wallace announced segregation today, tomorrow, and forever, we just believed that was the way it would always be here in Alabama. I didn't have the maturity or perspective then to know that things can be changed in a society, that segregation wouldn't last forever even though Wallace said it would.

I had never thought much about the “whites only” and “coloreds” signs posted above public facilities. I didn't know why white people drank from one water fountain and black people drank from another fountain or why they used a different toilet. Why did white people sit in the front of city buses and black people sit in the back, behind the signs that said “coloreds”? I didn't know. It was just the way it was. I had grown up with the signs, and I simply obeyed their instructions, as my parents and grandparents had taught me.

It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who first opened my eyes to the injustices that came with segregation and the inhumane treatment of black people in Birmingham. For the first time, I started to think about all those things I had once taken for granted—the way things had always been for black people in Alabama.

Shortly after Dr. King came to Birmingham, I tested the signs for the first and only time in my youth. In the early 1960s, the bus desegregation law had been passed, but the “coloreds” signs still hung prominently in the back of buses. I had seen on television the confrontations between whites and blacks when black people refused to sit in the back of a bus, and I decided I would try it out myself. When I was fifteen years old, I asked my mother, “Mom, do you want me to go downtown to Pizitz department store and pay some money on your bill? It will save you a bus trip.” Like many families at that time, we sometimes put clothes on layaway and paid a little money at a time on them. Once the entire bill was paid off, we could take our clothes home.

From Governor George Wallace's Inaugural Address

The Washington, D.C. school riot report is disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice our children to any such type [of] school system—and you can write that down. The federal troops in Mississippi could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington, D.C., where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ballgame—and that is the nation's capitol. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid, than the people of Washington are walking to the White House neighborhood. A closer example is Atlanta. The city officials fawn for political reasons over school integration and
then
build barricades to stop residential integration—what hypocrisy!

Let us send this message back to Washington by our representatives who are with us today . . . that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man . . . that we intend to take the offensive and carry our fight for freedom across the nation, wielding the balance of power we know we possess in the Southland . . . that
we
, not the insipid bloc of voters of some sections . . . will determine in the next election who shall sit in the White House of these United States . . . that from this day, from this hour . . . from this minute . . . we give the word of a race of honor that we will tolerate their boot in our face no longer . . . and let those certain judges put
that
in their opium pipes of power and smoke it for what it is worth.

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the farthest reaches of this vast country . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Midwest . . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . . we invite you to come and be with us . . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . . and the Southern philosophy. . . . You are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

What I have said about segregation goes double this day . . . and what I have said to or about some federal judges goes
triple
this day. . . .

And so it was meant in our racial lives . . . each race, within its own framework has the freedom to teach . . . to instruct . . . to develop . . . to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers . . . but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers . . . then the enrichment of our lives . . . the freedom for our development . . . is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government . . . and we stand for everything . . . and for nothing. . . .

But we warn those, of any group, who would follow the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation that we will not surrender our system of government . . . our freedom of race and religion. . . . That freedom was won at a hard price and if it requires a hard price to retain it . . . we are able . . . and quite willing to pay it.
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“Yes, Carolyn,” she said. Little did she know I intended to step inside the bus and sit in the front seat!

Quarter in hand, I waited at the stop for the bus to arrive. I was so scared. When the bus came to a halt and the driver swung open the front door, I felt the butterflies in my stomach and dropped my armful of books. Flustered, I jumped up the stairs and tried to get on. I had forgotten to wait and allow the exiting passengers to disembark. The white driver barked at me, “You need to let the people get off the bus before you get on!”

But his reprimand didn't stop me. Instead of backing down the bus stairs, I squeezed inside, pulling close to the rail between the people getting off, and dropped my quarter in the money slot.

My heart beat hard in my chest as I slid into the front seat—the seat where white people always sat. I cut my eyes several times toward the driver as he drove to Pizitz, and I wondered,
Will he say anything to me? Will he make me get up and move to the back of the bus behind the “coloreds” signs?

Surprisingly, the bus driver said nothing to me as I sat in the white section of his bus. But I was glad when the bus finally arrived at the department store and I could get off.

For the first time in my life, I had deliberately chosen where I wanted to sit, and I hadn't asked anyone for permission. I felt I had won a small battle that day.

* * *

I first met Dr. King at my church, Sixteenth Street Baptist, in April of 1963. The church became a central meeting place for Civil Rights leaders to get together and discuss the issues of the day and to plan freedom strategies. As one of the church's hostesses and secretaries, I worked in the office on a regular basis—before and after school, and on weekends—so I had the chance to observe some of these meetings firsthand.

One day, as I was working in the church's back office, I heard singing coming from the sanctuary:

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around,

Turn me around, turn me around.

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around,

Keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking.

Gonna build a brand new world.

I had no idea a mass meeting had been scheduled for that day, but a crowd of people had gathered there. As I walked toward the sanctuary, the people continued to sing passionately:

I woke up this morning with my mind (My mind it was)

Stayed on freedom (Oh, well I)

Woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom (Oh, well I)

Woke up this morning with my mind (My mind it was)

Stayed on freedom.

From Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants—for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. . . .

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 the 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 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 go 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. . . .

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
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