Birmingham, Washington and the Civil Rights Act, 1963-64

Why Birmingham, 1963

By spring 1963 the SCLC had concluded that the slow, court-by-court progress of the Kennedy administration would never produce a federal civil rights law. Martin Luther King and his lieutenant Wyatt Tee Walker chose Birmingham, Alabama, as the campaign target precisely because they expected its police commissioner Bull Connor to react with public violence. Birmingham, nicknamed ‘Bombingham’ for the dozens of unsolved bombings of Black homes and churches since 1945, was the most rigidly segregated large city in the South. The campaign would force the country to look at what segregation actually was.

The protest began in April 1963 with sit-ins, marches and a boycott of downtown stores. King was arrested on 12 April for marching without a permit. From his cell he wrote the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, replying to eight white moderate clergymen who had urged patience. ‘For years now I have heard the word “Wait!”’ he wrote. ‘This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”.’ The letter became one of the founding documents of the modern civil rights canon.

The Children’s Crusade and the Fire Hoses

Adult arrests had nearly emptied the Birmingham movement’s reserves. On 2 May 1963, James Bevel of the SCLC sent over a thousand schoolchildren onto the streets in what became known as the Children’s Crusade. By the end of the day around 600 had been arrested, the youngest aged six. The next day Bull Connor ordered Birmingham police to turn high-pressure fire hoses, set strong enough to strip bark from trees, on schoolchildren, and to set police dogs on protestors. The photographs — a teenage boy in a cardigan being lunged at by a German Shepherd, children rolled along the pavement by water jets — ran on every front page in the world.

President Kennedy, who had moved cautiously on civil rights through 1961-62, said the photographs made him ‘sick’. On 11 June 1963 he gave a televised address to the nation in which he framed civil rights as ‘a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution’, and announced he would send a federal civil rights bill to Congress. He had been pushed there by Birmingham. Hours after the speech, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers was shot dead in his driveway in Jackson.

The March on Washington, 28 August 1963

To pressure Congress to pass the bill, the major civil rights organisations agreed to hold the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On 28 August 1963 around 250,000 people, roughly three-quarters of them Black, gathered between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It was the largest political demonstration in American history to that point. King delivered the closing speech. The prepared text laid out specific legislative demands; the closing ‘I Have a Dream’ section was largely improvised after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called from behind him ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin’.

From Kennedy to Johnson: Passing the Bill

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. His successor Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan who had spent twenty years in the Senate, used Kennedy’s death as moral leverage. Five days after the assassination he told Congress that ‘no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honour President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill’. Through the spring of 1964 he applied the legislative skill that had earned him the nickname ‘Master of the Senate’, twisting Republican arms to overcome a 60-day Southern Democratic filibuster — the longest in Senate history. The Civil Rights Act 1964, signed on 2 July 1964, banned segregation in public accommodations, federally funded programmes and employment, and gave the federal government real enforcement power for the first time since Reconstruction.

Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Murders

The Civil Rights Act did not address voting. In Mississippi only 6.7 per cent of eligible Black adults were registered to vote. In June 1964 SNCC, CORE and the NAACP launched Freedom Summer, sending hundreds of mainly white Northern students to register Black voters and run freedom schools. The choice of white volunteers was deliberate: organisers knew that violence against Black activists alone had been ignored, but violence against white students would generate national news.

On 21 June 1964, the project’s third day, three volunteers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Six weeks later, after a search involving 200 FBI agents and US Navy divers (who in the process found the bodies of eight other murdered Black men whose disappearances had never been investigated), the three were found buried in an earthen dam. They had been beaten and shot by a mob of Klansmen led by the Neshoba County deputy sheriff. The murders made the front pages and the network news exactly as the organisers had reluctantly anticipated.