Ballad of Birmingham (Historical Context)

Historical Context

If you were an African American in the 1950s and early 1960s in the southern United States, you lived under a separate code of behavior than your white counterparts. You only drank from water fountains labelled “Colored,” you went to “Colored Only” movie theaters, you went to schools that taught only other African-American children and received only a fraction of the funding white schools did, you rode in the rear “Colored” section of the bus, and understood that it was in some states illegal for you to even play checkers in public with white people. This was segregation, and it was the result of a series of “Jim Crow laws” that white, southern lawmakers had established after the Civil War (Jim Crow was a stock comic character in black-face minstrel shows first introduced in the nineteenth century). Southern planters were angry over the emancipation of the African Americans who had been previously enslaved by them and who had provided the unpaid labor on which their economic system and wealth were founded prior to the Civil War. Segregation was the social and legal result of the social inequity created by that system, and other forms of more violent intimidation accompanied it — actions including the public harassment, lynching, bombing, and murder of random African Americans by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Usually, local southern officials did not trace such actions to any particular figure, and even if they did, the stronghold powerful racists exerted on the legal system in the South insured that few of these perpetrators would ever actually be prosecuted for their crimes.

It was in the 1950s that more and more people — both African American and white — began to question and confront this system of inequity, creating the civil rights movement. African Americans themselves had been resisting the limits of their position in American society since the time the first Africans were kidnapped and brought to America as slaves. But the civil rights movement was a composite of actions and events that led to the most substantial change in the legal and political status of nonwhite persons in America since the nationwide abolition of slavery following the Civil War. The civil rights movement consisted of organized and sustained public protests and demonstrations like the Montgomery bus boycott and other nonviolent displays of civil disobedience promoted and led by groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The movement also consisted of specific legal cases, such as the Supreme Court judgment that decided that educational segregation was unconstitutional, and therefore illegal, in the 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The movement both affected and was affected by specific political events, including the election of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States in 1960. And it also, sadly, was shaped by acts of violence, such as the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who enraged a group of white men in Mississippi when he spoke to a white woman in a store on a dare from his friends. His body was found three days later, a bullet in his head, an eye missing, and barbed wire wrapping the fan from a cotton gin to his neck. Events and actions like this created the civil rights movement and gave it the momentum, purpose, and shape to address one of the most enduring systems of social injustice ever to be seen in this country.

Birmingham, Alabama, played a key role in the civil rights movement in America. The largest city in Alabama at the beginning of the 1960s, Birmingham was, according to SCLC leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” On Mother’s Day in 1961, a mob had attacked Freedom Riders (black and white demonstrators riding buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in defiance of segregation policies pertaining to interstate travel) as they entered Birmingham; the Birmingham police did nothing to stop the attack. The incident had drawn national attention to Birmingham, and the local leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), Reverend Fred Shut-tlesworth, convinced King to take the city on as his next site for nonviolent action against segregation. Birmingham had been nicknamed “Bombingham” because of the eighteen unsolved bombings that had occurred there between 1957 and 1963 (Shut-tlesworth’s own home had been completely destroyed by a bomb in 1956). It was time for Birmingham to move forward, civil rights leaders decided, and 1963 would be the year of concentrated demonstrations and protest marches all geared to force city officials to negotiate with black leaders in the attempt to end segregation in the downtown and financial sectors of the city. Using the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as their headquarters, the civil rights leaders developed “Project C” and began the protests in March.

The events that took place in Birmingham quickly made the city a national symbol of the struggle and difficulty incurred by opponents of segregation. Police under the authority of the Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety, T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, used police dogs and fire hoses — powerful enough to tear the bark off trees — to disperse demonstrators that King, Shuttlesworth, and others organized and led. Although specifically forbidden to do so by a court injunction, King — and 132 other civil rights leaders — led another march downtown on April 12, Good Friday, and was subsequently arrested. Four days later, he completed his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that explained to local white clergymen (who had publicly denounced King’s actions) why this was indeed the time to act against segregation. Finally, movement leaders took an unprecedented approach when they recruited children — ranging in age from 6 to 18 — for special Freedom Marches; many people were concerned about the risk involved in such a move, but the media coverage that resulted from those marches helped galvanize national support for what the demonstrators were attempting to do. On the first day of these marches, Connor and his men arrested 959 children, using school buses to carry them to jail. The next day, more than a thousand children stayed out of school to march, and Connor called out the dogs and fire hoses. The African-American community, enraged by Connor’s attack on their children, came out in even greater numbers to demonstrate. The American public at large watched the nightly news in horror as children were attacked by dogs and washed down the streets of the torn city.

More than two thousand demonstrators had been sent to jail by May 6, and, concerned by the image of America such media coverage was sending to the rest of the world, President Kennedy sent a federal aide to work with King and local business leaders on negotiations. The day after an initial agreement was announced, bombs went off at the home of King’s brother and the hotel where the movement leaders had been staying. Riots ensued, and Kennedy sent federal troops to nearby Fort Mc-Clellan to ward off further disturbances to the fragile peace already established. In part a response to the events in Birmingham, Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress in June, and, in support of this bill’s passage, civil rights groups and leaders from around the country held in August what was then the largest public demonstration in American history — more than 250,000 people — in Washington, D.C., where King delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” oration.

Despite the success of the march on Washington, just weeks later, on a Sunday morning before church, a bomb went off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Eleven-year-old Denise McNair and fourteen-year-old Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were all killed in the blast on September 15. Much later, in 1977, the state’s key witness, the defendant’s niece, named her Klan-affiliated uncle, Robert Chambliss, as the man centrally responsible for the action. Fourteen years after the bombing, Chambliss was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The struggle for human civil rights continues, and in 1992, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened — its mission to educate visitors about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s and to further their understanding of how people all over the world continue to struggle for equality. In 1998 Spike Lee received an Academy Award nomination for his documentary 4 Little Girls, in which he retells the story of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church through interviews with friends and family members of the four murdered girls. While still a largely segregated city with weighty problems of black poverty and crime, Birmingham has begun to address its history as the rest of the country remembers those who died as a result of it.

Compare & Contrast

• 1957-63: Eighteen unsolved bombings in primarily African-American neighborhoods and locales earn Birmingham, Alabama, the nickname “Bombingham.”

  1995-96: More than thirty African-American churches in the South — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia — are burned in what are feared to be racially motivated crimes.

  1998: A bomb explodes outside of a women’s clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, that performs abortions; an off-duty police officer is killed and a nurse is severely wounded.

• 1960: The median annual income for African Americans is $3,000, less than half of what it is for white households.

  1990: In Selma, Alabama — one of the poorest sections of the country — the median household income for white households is $25,580 and, for African-American households, $9,615. Nationally, African Americans make about $63 for each $100 made by whites.

• 1970: Five times as many African-American workers between the ages of 24 and 44 are high school dropouts, as opposed to college graduates. Among all young professionals, only one in twenty is African American.

  1990: Almost as many African-American workers between the ages of 24 and 44 are college graduates as high school dropouts. Among all young professionals, one in twelve is African American.

• 1963: On August 28, more than 250,000 marchers descend on Washington, D.C., in the largest public demonstration held in this country, to protest the poverty, segregation, and lack of civil rights for African Americans.

  1989: On April 10, more than 500,000 people march in Washington, D.C., to show their support of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the United States.

  1995: On October 17, approximately 400,000 African-American men participate in the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to reinvorgate public interest in the problems of racial division and injustice in America.

• 1965: On March 7, later dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” mounted police use tear gas and billy clubs to stop some six hundred demonstrators marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in support of voting rights and protected registration for African Americans. The Selma March helped galvanize federal support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  1995: On March 10, civil rights leaders and workers march in Selma to commemorate the 1965 demonstration; former Alabama governor George Wallace, staunch segregationist of the 1960s turned apologist, joins the group, holding hands with those his policies and actions had at times brutally opposed thirty years before.