Birmingham March

Date: April 4-May 7, 1963

Protest march against segregation. A series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were designed to draw attention to the violent racism that underlay white southerners’ defense of segregation.

Origins and History

A disappointing campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, prompted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to select Birmingham, Alabama, as its subsequent target for nonviolent demonstrations. Protests against segregation had failed in Albany because the city’s chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, had held white mobs at bay and prevented the violent confrontations between police and protesters that would produce media coverage. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other SCLC leaders met in Savannah, Georgia, at the end of 1962 to plan a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, a city noted for its racial violence and uncompromising stand against the Civil Rights movement. The strategists hoped to gain national attention by provoking Birmingham officials into explicit displays of racial antagonism, thereby revealing the true face of southern segregation.

The March

Project C, the SCLC’s code name for its assault on segregation in Birmingham, proceeded in three stages. First, on the morning of April 4, 1963, an economic boycott of downtown businesses went into effect, and small groups began staging sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. After Chief of Police Eugene “Bull” Conner ordered arrests, the protest caught the attention of the media and the administration of John F. Kennedy. Stage two began on April 6 with daily marches on city hall. As the protest leaders had expected, the Birmingham police arrested all of the demonstrators while flashbulbs popped and television cameras whirred. King himself was arrested and during his incarceration penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent statement of the motivations that guided the Civil Rights movement. Police began to respond to the daily marches with less and less restraint, and African Americans began turning out for the marches in ever-larger numbers and tightened the economic boycott. The sit-ins, protest marches, and police violence had riveted a national audience to their television sets by the time the third stage began on May 2. That morning, more than one thousand African American children exited the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church as adult spectators cheered them on. The “children’s crusade” sang and danced its way into the paddywagons waiting to take them to jail. Extensive criticism of the decision to use children rained down from both sides of the struggle, but King and the other leaders had little choice. Adults had become reluctant to march and serve jail time. More important, the protest leaders recognized that the sight of children being arrested would stir the heart of the nation. The police’s actions beating and turning fire hoses on protesters and their continued brutality were captured by the media as the marches and arrests continued until May 7.

The Senior Citizen’s Committee, which had been organized by the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce to handle racial matters, feared that continued racial violence would drive away business and permanently damage the city’s reputation. On the afternoon of May 7, they met in secret session and ordered their negotiators to open talks with the SCLC. After three days of negotiations, the two sides reached an agreement that called for the desegregation of public accommodations, nondiscrimination in the hiring and promoting of African American workers in Birmingham industries, and the formation of a biracial committee. Even though the SCLC compromised and allowed gradual rather than immediate implementation of these measures, the demonstrations in Birmingham were considered a significant victory for the movement.

Impact

Public reaction to the events in Birmingham, along with the easing of Cold War tensions, convinced President Kennedy that the time had come for federal action in defense of civil rights, and he asked Congress for civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law on July 2 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor. The act prohibited segregation of public accommodations, made discrimination by employers and unions illegal, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The broader impact of the march was to change the tone of the Civil Rights movement from gradualism to immediacy; the African American community was no longer willing to wait for decent jobs, adequate housing, and a quality education. The march also marked the entry of poor and unemployed African Americans into the struggle.

Additional Information

Accounts of the Birmingham march can be found in Harvard Sitcoff’s The Struggle for Black Equality (1993) and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988).