FREE AT LAST: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement

---

"We Have a Movement"

A booking photo of Rosa Parks taken February 22, 1956. (AP Images)

The successful boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama — which began with the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955 — transformed the civil rights cause into a mass political movement. It demonstrated that African Americans could unite and engage in disciplined political action, and marked the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. — the indispensable leader who inspired millions, held them to the high moral standard of nonviolent resistance, and built bridges between Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. While many brave activists contributed to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, it was King who more than any other individual forced millions of white Americans to confront directly the reality of Jim Crow — and shaped the political reality in which the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 could become law.

"Tired of Giving In":
The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Rosa Parks would later say of the day that changed her life: "The only tired I was was tired of giving in." A secondary-school graduate at a time when diplomas were hard to come by for blacks in the South, Parks was active in her local NAACP, a registered voter (another privilege held by few southern blacks), and a respected figure in Montgomery, Alabama. In the summer of 1955, she attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee institution that trained labor organizers and desegregation advocates. Parks thus knew of efforts to improve the lot of African Americans and that she was well-suited to provide a test case should the occasion arise.

On December 1, 1955, Parks was employed as a seamstress at a local department store. n a When she rode home from work on that afternoon, she sat in the first row of the "colored section" of seats between the "white" and "black" rows. When the white seats filled, the driver ordered Parks to give up her seat when another white person boarded the bus. Parks refused. She was arrested, jailed, and ultimately fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. Parks was 42 years old; she had crossed the line into direct political action.

Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett tells Martin Luther King Jr, left, and Dr. W.G. Anderson, center, that they are under arrest since they could not produce a permit to parade. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

A civil rights demonstrator in Birmingham, Alabama, is attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963. (AP Images)

An outraged black community formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to organize a boycott of the city bus system. Partly to forestall rivalries among local community leaders, citizens turned to a recent arrival to Montgomery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The newly-installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King was just 26 years old but he had been born to leadership: His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., headed the influential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was active in the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, and had since the 1920s refused to ride Atlanta's segregated bus system.

In his first speech to MIA, the younger King told the group:

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

Under King's leadership, boycotters organized carpools, while black taxi drivers charged boycotters the same fare — 10 cents — they would have paid on the bus. By auto, by horse-and-buggy, and even simply by walking, direct, nonviolent political action forced the city to pay a heavy economic price for its segregationist ways.

It also made a national figure of King, whose powerful presence and unsurpassed oratorical skills drew publicity for the movement and attracted support from sympathetic whites, especially those in the North. King, Time magazine later concluded, had "risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders of men."

Even after his house was attacked and King himself, along with more than 100 boycotters, was arrested for "hindering a bus," his continued grace and adherence to nonviolent tactics earned respect for the movement and discredited the segregationists of Montgomery. When an explosion shook King's house with his wife and baby daughter inside, it briefly appeared that a riot would ensue. But King calmed the crowd:

We want to love our enemies — be good to them. This is what we must live by, we must meet hate with love. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us.

A white Montgomery policeman later told a journalist: "I'll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life to that ... preacher, and so do all the other white people who were there."

In the end, the desegregation of the Montgomery bus system required not only Rosa Parks's personal initiative and bravery and King's political leadership, but also an NAACP-style legal effort. As the boycotters braved segregationist opposition, desegregationist attorneys cited the precedent of Brown v. Board of Education in their challenge to the Montgomery bus ordinance in the courts. In November 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the city's final appeal, and the segregation of Montgomery buses ended. Thus fortified, the civil rights movement moved on to new battles.

Sit-Ins

Shortly after the successful conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King and a number of senior movement figures — the Reverends Ralph Abernathy, T.J. Jemison, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.K. Steele, and the activists Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin — founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This new civil rights organization was devoted to a more aggressive approach than that of the legally oriented NAACP. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched "Crusade for Citizenship," a voter registration effort.

Younger activists, meanwhile, were growing impatient with King's gradualist tactics. In 1960, some 200 of them, including Howard University student Stokley Carmichael, formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. And in Greensboro, North Carolina, four freshman at the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College took matters into their own hands.

At 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, students Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and David Leinail took seats at a local Woolworth department store's whites-only lunch counter. They were denied service, but sat quietly until the store closed an hour later. The next morning, 20 Negro students took lunch-counter seats in groups of three or four. "There was no disturbance," the Greensboro Record reported, "and there appeared to be no conversation except among the groups. Some students pulled out books and appeared to be studying." Blair told the newspaper that Negro adults "have been complacent and fearful. ... It is time for someone to wake up and change the situation ... and we decided to start here."

The nonviolent occupation of a public space, or sit-in, dated at least to Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns for Indian independence from Britain. In the United States, labor organizations and the northern-based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had employed sit-ins as well. As events in Greensboro began to draw attention, SNCC moved swiftly to associate itself with this civil rights tactic, and over the next two months, sit-ins spread to more than 50 cities.

Particularly significant were events in Nashville, Tennessee, where the King-affiliated Nashville Christian Leadership Council had been preparing for this moment. Back in 1955, King had reached out to the Reverend James Lawson, a civil rights activist and missionary who had served in India and studied Gandhian satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance. King urged Lawson to relocate to the South: "Come now," King said. "We don't have anyone like you down there."

Working with King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Lawson in 1958 began to train a new generation of nonviolent activists. His students included Diane Nash, James Bevel, and John Lewis, today a U.S. representative from Georgia. All soon would assume prominence in the civil rights movement. At these training seminars, they agreed to stage a series of sit-ins at department store restaurants. Blacks were permitted to spend money in those stores, but not to eat at their restaurants.

The Nashville activists organized carefully and moved deliberately. But when the Greensboro sit-in began to draw national attention, they were ready. In February 1960, hundreds of their activists began the sit-ins. Their student-drafted instruction sheets captured the personal discipline and dignified commitment to nonviolence they would offer the world:

Don't strike back or curse back if abused. ... Don't block entrances to the stores and aisles.

Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times.

Sit straight and always face the counter. ...

Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

Remember love and nonviolence, may God bless each of you.

Typically a lunch counter would close when a sit-in began, but after the first few incidents, police began to arrest protestors, and the subsequent trials drew large crowds. When convicted of disorderly conduct, the activists chose to serve jail time rather than pay a fine.

Nashville was an early example of how Jim Crow could not survive exposure. The legendary journalist David Halberstam was just beginning his career, and his reports for the Nashville Tennessean helped attract national media attention. The sit-in movement spread throughout much of the country, and soon Americans across the nation were stunned by photographs like the one that appeared in the February 28, 1960 New York Times. The caption read: "A white man swings an 18-inch-long [46-centimeter-long] bat at a Negro woman in Montgomery. She was injured by the blow. The attack occurred yesterday after the woman brushed against another white man. Police, standing near by, made no arrest."

On April 19 of that year, a bomb exploded at the home of the Nashville students' chief legal counsel. Some 2,000 African Americans swiftly organized a march to the City Hall, where they confronted the mayor. Would he, Diane Nash asked, favor ending lunch-counter segregation? Yes, came the reply, but, "I can't tell a man how to run his business. He has got rights too."

This "right" to discriminate lay at the heart of the struggle. Meanwhile, the bad publicity stung the businessmen of Nashville, as did the stark contrast between the dignified, nonviolent black students and their armed and all-too-violent opponents. Secret negotiations began, and on May 10, 1960, quietly and without fanfare, a number of downtown lunch counters began serving black customers. There were no further incidents, and soon thereafter Nashville became the first southern city successfully to begin desegregating its public facilities.

Freedom Rides

Some of the young Nashville sit-in leaders joined up with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in 1961 helped to launch the "Freedom Rides." Back in 1946, Thurgood Marshall's NAACP lawyers had obtained a Supreme Court ruling that barred segregation in interstate bus travel. (Under the U.S. federal system of government, it is easier for the national government to regulate commerce that crosses state lines.) In the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, the Court expanded its ruling to include bus terminals and other facilities associated with interstate travel. But possessing a right and exercising it are two very different things.

It was widely understood that any African American who exercised his or her constitutional right to sit at the front of an interstate bus or use the previously whites-only facilities at a southern bus terminal would meet with a violent response. Understanding this, an interracial group of 13, including CORE National Director James Farmer, departed Washington, D.C., by bus. Farmer and his companions planned to make several stops en route to New Orleans. "If there is arrest, we will accept that arrest," Farmer said. "And if there is violence, we are willing to receive that violence without responding in kind."

Farmer was right to anticipate violence. Perhaps the worst of it occurred near Anniston, Alabama. Departing Atlanta, the Freedom Riders had split into two groups, one riding in a Greyhound bus, the other in a Trailways bus. When the Greyhound bus reached Anniston, the sidewalks, unusually, were lined with people. The reason soon became clear. When the bus reached the station parking lot, a mob set upon it, using rocks and brass knuckles to shatter some of the bus windows. Two white highway patrolmen in the bus, assigned to spy on the Riders, sealed the door and prevented the Ku Klux Klan-led mob from entering the bus.

When the local police finally arrived, they bantered with the crowd, made no arrests, and escorted the bus to the city limits. The mob, by some accounts now about 200 strong, followed close behind in cars and pickup trucks. About 10 kilometers outside Anniston, flat tires brought the bus to a halt. A crowd of white men attempted to board the bus, and one threw a fire bomb through a bus window. As the historian Raymond Arsenault writes: "The Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode." The bus was consumed by the blaze; the fleeing Freedom Riders, reported the Associated Press, "took a brief but bloody beating."

The second group of Freedom Riders shared their Trailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded at Atlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at the back of the bus, more beatings ensued. The white Freedom Riders, among them 61-year-old educator Walter Bergman, were attacked with particular savagery. All of the Freedom Riders held to their Ghandian training; none fought back. When the bus at last arrived in Birmingham, matters only grew worse. CBS News commentator Howard K. Smith offered an eyewitness account: "When the bus arrived, the toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists." Inside the segregated bus station, the Freedom Riders hesitated momentarily, then entered the whites-only waiting room. They, too, were beaten, some unconscious, while Birmingham's police chief, Eugene "Bull" Connor, refused to restrain the Klansmen and their supporters. Still, the Riders were determined to continue. In Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked Alabama Governor John Patterson to guarantee safe passage through his state. Patterson declined: "The citizens of the state are so enraged I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble-rousers." A member of Alabama's congressional delegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed the Freedom Riders "self-anointed merchants of racial hatred." He said the firebombed Greyhound group "got just what they asked for."

In Nashville, Diane Nash feared the political consequences. "If the Freedom Ride had been stopped as a result of violence," she later said, "I strongly felt that the future of the movement was going to be just cut short because the impression would have been given that whenever a movement starts, that all that has to be done is that you attack it with massive violence and the blacks would stop." With reinforcements from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other black and white activists supplementing the original Freedom Riders, a new effort was launched.

On May 20, a group of Freedom Riders boarded a Birmingham-to-Montgomery, Alabama, Greyhound. Their bus was met by a mob estimated at 1,000 "within an instant" of pulling into the station, Associated Press reported. Among the injured were John Seigenthaler, an assistant to Attorney General Kennedy. Kennedy dispatched 400 federal marshals to Montgomery to enforce order, while the Congress of Racial Equality promised to continue the Freedom Ride, pressing on to Jackson, Mississippi, and then to New Orleans. "Many students are standing by in other cities to serve as volunteers if needed," James Farmer told the New York Times. And some 450 Americans did step forward, boarding the busses and then filling the jails, notably in Jackson, when Farmer and others refused to pay fines imposed for "breeching the peace."

On May 29, Attorney General Kennedy directed the Interstate Commerce Commission to adopt stiff regulations to enforce the integration of interstate transportation. The agency did so. With this sustained federal effort, Jim Crow faltered in bus terminals, on buses, and on trains, at least those that crossed state lines.

The Freedom Riders' victory set the tone for the great civil rights campaigns that followed. Not for the first time during these climactic years, a free press forced Americans to take a cold, hard look at the reality of racial oppression. The Birmingham mob beat Tommy Langston, a photographer for the local Post-Herald newspaper, and smashed his camera. But they forgot to remove the film, and the newspaper's front page subsequently displayed his picture of the savage beating of a black bystander. Each arrest and each beating attracted more media and more coverage. And while many of those accounts still referred to "Negro militants," the contrast between rabid white mobs and the calm, dignified, biracial Freedom Riders forced Americans to decide, or at this point at least begin deciding: Who best represented American values?

White religious leaders were prominent among those who lauded the bravery of the Freedom Riders and the justice of their cause. The Reverend Billy Graham called for prosecution of their attackers and declared it "deplorable when certain people in any society have been treated as second-class citizens." Rabbi Bernard J. Bamberger denounced white segregationist violence as "utterly indefensible in terms of morality and law" and criticized whites who urged civil rights activists to "go slow." And always there were the righteous: Raymond Arsenault writes that while the Greyhound bus burned outside Anniston, "one little girl, 12-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking victims with water, filling and refilling a five-gallon [19-liter] bucket while braving the insults and taunts of Klansmen."

The Albany Movement

Two major civil rights campaigns during 1962 and 1963 would illustrate both the limits and the possibilities of the nonviolent resistance strategy. African Americans in the segregated city of Albany, Georgia, had traditionally engaged in as much political activism as was possible in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, SNCC volunteers arrived to beef up an ongoing voter registration effort. They established a voter-registration center that served as a home base for a campaign of sit-ins, boycotts, and other protests. In November 1961, a number of local black organizations formed the Albany Movement, under the leadership of William G. Anderson, a young osteopath. The protests accelerated, and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators had been jailed. Anderson had met both Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor at Montgomery's First Baptist Church and King's chief lieutenant at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He decided to invite King's help, both to maintain the Albany Movement's momentum and to secure national publicity for its cause.

Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett proved a formidable opponent for King and the other activists. Pritchett realized that news media coverage of segregationist violence against dignified, nonviolent civil rights activists already had turned many Americans against Jim Crow. Pritchett worked assiduously to deprive the Albany Movement of a similar "media moment." Albany police officers were warned against employing any kind of violence against protestors, especially if the press was nearby. While earlier protestors had successfully "filled the jails," Pritchett scattered them in jails throughout the surrounding counties. "In the end," the New Georgia Encyclopedia concluded, "King ran out of willing marchers before Pritchett ran out of jail space."

Pritchett also understood that King was the media star and that national press coverage would ebb if there was no King "angle" to pursue. King returned several times to Albany, and several times was arrested and convicted for breach of the peace. When the court offered King and Abernathy their choice of jail time or a fine, they chose jail, the option certain to attract press coverage. But they found that an "anonymous benefactor" — a segregationist recruited by Pritchett — had paid their fine.

When the media moment finally came, it was not the one King had hoped for. By July 24, 1962, many of Albany's African Americans had grown frustrated at the lack of progress. That evening, a crowd of 2,000 blacks armed with bricks, bottles, and rocks attacked a group of Albany policemen and Georgia highway patrolmen. One trooper lost two teeth. But Laurie Pritchett's well-schooled officers did not retaliate, and the chief was quick to seize the initiative: "Did you see them nonviolent rocks?" he asked.

King moved swiftly to limit the damage. He cancelled a planned mass demonstration and declared a day of penance. But a federal injunction against further demonstrations in Albany added to the difficulties: Up till then, the civil rights cause had had the law on its side. Further action in Albany would allow segregationists to portray King and his followers as lawbreakers.

King understood that his presence in Albany would no longer help the wider movement. SNCC, NAACP, CORE, and other local activists continued the fight in Albany and would eventually secure real gains for the city's African Americans. For King and his SCLC team, Albany was a learning experience. As King explained in his autobiography:

When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped to make our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed that Albany was far from an unqualified failure.

Arrest in Birmingham

If Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett possessed the political savvy and emotional detachment to fight nonviolence with nonviolence, his Birmingham, Alabama, counterpart, Bull Connor, did not. King and the other movement leaders rightly anticipated that Connor would prove a perfect foil. King biographer Marshall Frady depicted Connor as "a bombastic segregationist of the old, unapologetically bluff sort — a podgy, strutful, middle-aged bossman in a snap-brim straw hat who ... held a famously irascible temper." Connor did not represent the views of all white Birmingham residents; a recent municipal election had produced gains for reformist candidates. But he controlled the police, and the "greeting" that the Freedom Riders had experienced in Birmingham amply illustrated what activists might expect to find there.

Albany had taught King and his SCLC team to focus on specific goals rather than a general desegregation. As King later wrote:

We concluded that in hard-core communities, a more effective battle could be waged if it was concentrated against one aspect of the evil and intricate system of segregation. We decided, therefore, to center the Birmingham struggle on the business community, for we knew that the Negro population had sufficient buying power so that its withdrawal could make the difference between profit and loss for many businesses.

On April 3, 1963, activists launched a round of lunch-counter sit-ins. A march on Birmingham's City Hall followed on the 6th. The city's African Americans began to boycott downtown businesses, a tactic King deemed "amazingly effective." A number of shops swiftly removed their whites-only signs, only to be threatened by Bull Connor with the loss of their business licenses. As the numbers of volunteers grew, the Birmingham movement expanded its efforts to "kneel-ins" in local church buildings and library sit-ins. The number of arrests grew and the jails filled.

The police response remained muted to this point. The New York Times described a typical incident:

Eight Negros entered the segregated library. They strolled through three of the four floors and sat at desks reading magazines and books. The police were present but did not order them to leave. They left voluntarily after about half an hour.

About 25 whites were in the library when the Negroes entered. Some made derogatory remarks such as, "It stinks in here." Others asked the Negroes: "Why don't you go home?" But there were no incidents.

On April 10, Connor followed Pritchett's example, obtaining a county court injunction barring King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and 134 other leaders from engaging in boycotts, sit-ins, picketing, and other protest activities. Any violation of the injunction would be contempt of court, punishable by more substantial jail time than a mere breach of peace.

King now faced a choice. He and Abernathy decided they would violate the injunction. King issued a brief statement:

We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.

We do this not out of any disrespect for the law but out of the highest respect for the law. This is not an attempt to evade or defy the law or engage in chaotic anarchy. Just as in all good conscience we cannot obey unjust laws, neither can we respect the unjust use of the courts.

We believe in a system of law based on justice and morality. Out of our great love for the Constitution of the United States and our desire to purify the judicial system of the state of Alabama, we risk this critical move with an awareness of the possible consequences involved.

On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King led a protest march toward downtown Birmingham. On the fifth block, King, Abernathy, and about 60 others, including a white clergyman who joined the protest, were arrested. As King was taken into custody, Connor remarked: "That's what he came down here for, to get arrested. Now he's got it."

Letter From Birmingham Jail

As King languished in his jail cell, he produced one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of American thought. A number of local white clergymen, themselves friendly to King's long-term objectives, disagreed with his short-term tactics. They published a public statement calling the King-led demonstrations "unwise and untimely," and they opposed King's civil disobedience "however technically peaceful those actions may be."

King's reply was the Letter From Birmingham Jail. Lacking writing paper, he scribbled in the margins of a newspaper page. King's handwritten words wrapped around the pest control ads and garden club news, recalled the aide who smuggled the newsprint out of the jail. Yet those margins held a powerful condemnation of inaction in the face of injustice, and they displayed an extraordinary faith that in America the cause of freedom necessarily would prevail.

King answered the white pastors' charges with timeless, universal language. Accused of being an outsider fomenting tension in Birmingham, King replied that, in the face of oppression, there were no outsiders. "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." As for the tension: "There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth." For those who do not themselves suffer from the disease of segregation, King added, no direct action ever seems well timed: " 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' " No man, he continued, can "set the timetable for another man's freedom."

Acknowledging that he and his followers had indeed violated the county court injunction, King cited Saint Augustine's distinction between just and unjust laws. He asserted that one who breaks an unjust law in order to arouse the consciousness of his community "is in reality expressing the highest respect for law," provided he acts "openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." Writing from his cell, King led by example.

From that cell, King believed that in the United States, freedom ultimately would — indeed, must — prevail: "I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle. ... We will reach the goal of freedom ... because the goal of America is freedom. ... Our destiny is tied up with America's destiny ... the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. ... One day," King concluded, "the South will recognize its real heroes."

"We Have a Movement"

Because the Birmingham campaign required their leadership, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy posted bond after eight days in jail. They turned to an idea credited to the Reverend James Bevel, a Nashville sit-in and Freedom Ride veteran recruited by King to serve as Southern Christian Leadership Conference's director of direct action and nonviolent education. Knowing that few black families could afford to have their primary wage earner serve jail time, Bevel began to organize the city's young African Americans. College students, secondary schoolers, and even elementary school pupils were instructed in the principles of nonviolence. They prepared to march downtown, there to enter whites-only lunch counters, use the whites-only drinking fountains, study in the whites-only libraries, pray in the whites-only churches. In some denominations, at least, their churches welcomed the young blacks.

The decision to use children was a controversial one. The SCLC's executive director, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, defended it on the grounds that "Negro children will get a better education in five days in jail than in five months in a segregated school." In his Autobiography, King related the case of a black teenager who decided to march in the face of his father's objections:

"Daddy," the boy said, "I don't want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I'll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I'm not doing this only because I want to be free. I'm doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die."

That father thought again, and gave his son his blessing.

On May 2, 1963, hundreds of young African Americans set out, linked by walkie-talkie, singing "We Shall Overcome." Hundreds were arrested, swelling the Birmingham jail well beyond its capacity. Perhaps most importantly, they stretched Bull Connor's temper to its breaking point.

On May 3, Connor determined to halt the demonstrations by force. Fire hoses set to full pressure — enough to peel bark from a tree — knocked protestors off their feet and rolled them down the asphalt streets. At the police chief's order, police dogs were used to disperse the crowds, and several demonstrators were bitten.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist James Foreman was at SCLC headquarters when the news came. He reported that the leaders there were "jumping up and down, elated. ... They said over and over again, 'We've got a movement. We've got a movement. We had some police brutality.' " Foreman thought this "very cold, cruel, and calculating," but, as the historian C. Vann Woodward concluded: "The more seasoned campaigners had learned the price and worth of photographic opportunities."

The young demonstrators returned each day that week, as did the hoses and the dogs. The resulting photographs, video, and written accounts dominated the news in the United States and in much of the world. Faced with the greatest provocation, most demonstrators remained nonviolent. James Bevel roamed the streets, shouting through a bullhorn: "If you're not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, then leave." By May 6, Bull Connor was housing thousands of child prisoners at the state fairgrounds.

A New York Times editorial expressed the feeling of growing numbers of Americans:

No American schooled in respect for human dignity can read without shame of the barbarities committed by Alabama police authorities against Negro and white demonstrators for civil rights. The use of police dogs and high-pressure fire hose to subdue schoolchildren in Birmingham is a national disgrace. The herding of hundreds of teenagers and many not yet in their teens into jails and detention homes for demanding their birthright of freedom makes a mockery of legal process.

In Washington, D.C., one very important reader shared this sentiment. As King biographer Marshall Frady relates:

One news photo of a policeman clutching the shirtfront of a black youth with one hand while his other held the leash of a dog swirling at the youth's midsection happened to pass under the eyes of the president in the Oval Office, and he told a group of visitors that day, "It makes me sick."

On May 7, Fred Shuttlesworth was injured by a fire hose stream that hurled him against the side of his church. Arriving a few minutes later, Bull Connor declared: "I'm sorry I missed it. ... I wish they'd carried him away in a hearse."

By May 9, Birmingham's business leaders had had enough. They negotiated an agreement with King and Shuttlesworth. Birmingham businesses would desegregate their lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains. They would hire and promote black employees. The jailed protestors would be freed, and charges dropped. Bull Connor called it "the worst day of my life."

The triumph of the Birmingham movement reflected the bravery and discipline of the African-American protestors. It spoke to the inspiring and hard-headed leadership of men like Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and others. It forced Americans to confront squarely — in their newspapers and on their televisions — the reality of Jim Crow brutality. And it reflected an idealism that had survived both slavery and segregation, and also an impatience over promises long deferred. On May 8, a Birmingham juvenile court judge conducted a hearing on the case of a 15-year-old boy arrested during the May 3 demonstrations:

JUDGE: I often think of what the Founding Fathers said: "There is no freedom without restraint." Now I want you to go home and go back to school. Will you do that?

BOY: Can I say something?

JUDGE: Anything you like.

BOY: Well, you can say that because you've got your freedom. The Constitution says we're all equal, but Negroes aren't equal.

JUDGE: But you people have made great gains and they still are. It takes time.

BOY: We've been waiting over 100 years.

The March on Washington

Birmingham was a real victory, but a costly one. The long-term solution could not be for African Americans to defeat segregation one city at a time or by absorbing beatings, dog bites, and hosings. Even as the civil rights movement scored real gains, each advance came over dogged opposition. Federal troops were needed to ensure the admission of James Meredith, the first black to study at the University of Mississippi, in 1962. The following year, Alabama's governor, George Wallace, whose inaugural address promised "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," staged a "stand in the schoolhouse door." Only the intervention of federal marshals ensured the enrollment of African Americans Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama. The very next day, Medgar Evers, leader of the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was murdered outside his home in Jackson. And in Birmingham itself, on September 15, 1963, three Klansmen planted 19 sticks of dynamite in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the unofficial headquarters of the Birmingham movement. Four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair — were killed and 22 injured.

On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy told the nation that he would submit to Congress legislation prohibiting segregation in all privately owned facilities: hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and the like. "We are confronted primarily," the president said, "with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution." But the obstacles to passage of effective civil rights laws remained imposing.

A number of black leaders determined to change the political reality in which members of Congress would consider civil rights legislation. One was A. Philip Randolph. Now well into his 70s, Randolph had earlier organized and for decades led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. African Americans had long supplied large numbers of rail car attendants. These were among the best jobs open to blacks in much of the country, and Randolph, as leader of these porters, had emerged as an important figure in the American labor movement.

Back in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sought to boost U.S. defense production in anticipation of possible U.S. entry into the Second World War. Randolph confronted Roosevelt, demanding an end to segregation in the federal government agencies and among defense contractors. Otherwise, Randolph warned, he would launch a massive protest march on Washington, D.C. Roosevelt soon issued an executive order barring discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee. After the war, pressure from Randolph contributed to President Harry S Truman's 1948 order desegregating the American armed forces.

Now Randolph and his talented assistant Bayard Rustin contemplated a similar march, hoping "to embody in one gesture civil rights as well as national economic demands." A "Big Six" group of civil rights leaders was formed to organize the event. Included were Randolph, King, Roy Wilkins (representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), James Farmer (Congress of Racial Equality), John Lewis (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and Whitney Young Jr. (Urban League). They fixed the date for the march as August 28, 1963, and the site of the main rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" would be the largest political demonstration the nation had ever seen. Chartered buses and trains carried marchers from throughout the nation. A quarter-million Americans, and by some estimates even more, gathered that day, among them at least 50,000 whites. On the podium stood a stellar assemblage of civil rights champions, Christian and Jewish religious leaders, labor chiefs, and entertainers. The black contralto Marian Anderson, who had performed at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after being refused permission to perform at Washington's Constitution Hall, sang the national anthem. Each of the Big Six addressed the crowd that day, except for Farmer, who had been arrested during a protest in Louisiana.

The best-remembered moment would be King's. Considered by many the finest oration ever delivered by an American, King's "I Have a Dream" speech drew on themes from the Bible and from such iconic American texts as the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. King structured his remarks in the style and structure of a sermon, the kind he had delivered at many a Sunday morning church service.

The speech began by linking the civil rights cause to earlier promises unfulfilled. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, King said, appeared to the freed slaves as "a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity." But 100 years later, he continued, "the Negro ... finds himself an exile in his own land." When the nation's founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, "they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable rights' of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' "

America, King continued, had defaulted on that promissory note, at least to her citizens of color.

We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

"There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights," King warned, but he also noted that

in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

Some believe that King spoke extemporaneously as he delivered the "dream" portion of his address. The legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was on the stage while King spoke, and she addressed him during the speech: "Tell them about the dream, Martin," she said. And he did.

... and so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

As the words and images of the day's events sped across the nation and around the world, momentum for real change accelerated. But there were battles still to be fought, and victory, while ever closer, still lay in the distance.