You might have concluded that here was a city which had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools. If you had visited Birmingham before the third of April in the one hundredth-anniversary year of the Negro's emancipation, you might have come to a startling conclusion. President Kennedy calls Coretta Scott King expressing concern for her jailed husband The Kings' fourth child, Bernice Albertirie, is bornĪlbert Boutwell wins runoff election over Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor for mayor of Birmingham, but Connor and other city commissioners refuse to leave officeĪfter delays in order to avoid interfering with-election, SCLC and -Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights launch protest -, campaign in BirminghamĪfter violating a state circuit court injunction against protests,King' is arrested The challenge to nonviolent, direct action could not have been staged in a more appropriate arena. Its financial interests were interlocked with a power structure which spread throughout the South and radiated into the North. It was a community in which human rights had been trampled on for so long that fear and oppression were as thick in its atmosphere as the smog from its factories.
The largest industrial city in the South, Birmingham had become, in the thirties, a symbol for bloodshed when trade unions sought to organize. In the entire country, there was no place to compare with Birmingham.
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