Birmingham Campaign (1963): Children's Crusade and Bull Connor

The Birmingham campaign was a series of nonviolent protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in April and May 1963. Led by Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), it produced King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, the Children’s Crusade and televised images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on young Black demonstrators. The national outrage pushed President John F. Kennedy to propose the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Background: “Bombingham”

Birmingham was Alabama’s largest city and a centre of steel production. It was also one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the South. Black residents were excluded from most skilled jobs, served only at separate counters if at all, and kept out of public facilities. City parks had been closed rather than desegregated.

Violence enforced the system. Dozens of racially motivated bombings of Black homes and churches between the late 1940s and early 1960s earned the city the nickname “Bombingham”, and none led to convictions. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), had survived the bombing of his home in 1956 and a beating in 1957.

The city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, controlled the police and fire departments and was a fierce defender of segregation. In 1961 his police had allowed a white mob to attack Freedom Riders at the city’s bus station.

Shuttlesworth invited King and the SCLC to Birmingham. The SCLC had recently suffered a setback in Albany, Georgia, where a long campaign in 1961–1962 had failed to win clear gains, and its leaders wanted a decisive victory.

Project C begins

The SCLC’s executive director, Wyatt Tee Walker, drew up a plan called Project C, for “Confrontation”. It aimed at downtown businesses during the Easter shopping season, through sit-ins at lunch counters, marches and a boycott of stores.

The campaign was delayed by city politics. Voters had changed Birmingham’s form of government, and on 2 April 1963 the moderate segregationist Albert Boutwell defeated Connor in the mayoral run-off. Connor and the other commissioners refused to leave office, and for several weeks the city had two governments until the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against them in late May.

Sit-ins began on 3 April 1963. Marches and arrests followed, but the numbers at first were small. On 10 April a state court issued an injunction banning further demonstrations.

King in jail and the letter

King decided to defy the injunction. On Good Friday, 12 April 1963, he and Ralph Abernathy led a march and were arrested. King was held in solitary confinement for part of his time in jail.

On the day of his arrest a Birmingham newspaper published a statement by eight white Alabama clergymen calling the demonstrations “unwise and untimely” and urging Black residents to rely on the courts. King wrote a long reply, first in the margins of the newspaper and on scraps of paper smuggled out by visitors. Dated 16 April 1963, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” argued that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, explained why Black Americans could not keep waiting, and distinguished between just and unjust laws.

The letter was little noticed at first but was soon widely reprinted and became one of the classic texts of the civil rights movement. King was released on bond on 20 April.

The Children’s Crusade

By late April the campaign was running short of adult volunteers willing to risk jail and their jobs. The SCLC organiser James Bevel proposed recruiting high school students, and even younger children, who had been trained in nonviolence in church workshops. The decision was controversial, both inside the movement and among parents.

On Thursday 2 May 1963, hundreds of young people walked out of school and marched in groups from the 16th Street Baptist Church. Police arrested them by the hundreds; estimates for that first day range from about 600 to nearly 1,000. School buses were used to take them to jail.

On 3 May, with the jails filling, Connor ordered firefighters to use high-pressure hoses on marchers and onlookers in Kelly Ingram Park, and police brought in dogs. Photographs of children knocked down by the water and of a teenager, Walter Gadsden, being seized by a police dog appeared in newspapers across the world, including on the front page of The New York Times. Television brought similar scenes into American homes.

Marches continued over the following days. By early May well over 2,000 people were in custody, and the city’s jails could hold no more.

The agreement and the backlash

Under pressure from falling sales and the national publicity, local business leaders entered negotiations, encouraged by Burke Marshall of the US Justice Department. On 10 May 1963 Shuttlesworth and King announced an agreement. Lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms and drinking fountains in downtown stores were to be desegregated within 90 days, Black workers were to be hired and promoted, jailed protesters were to be released, and a biracial committee was to be set up.

Segregationists struck back. On the night of 11 May bombs exploded at the home of King’s brother, the Reverend A. D. King, and at the A. G. Gaston Motel, where King and other leaders had been staying. Angry crowds clashed with police and some buildings were set on fire. Kennedy ordered federal troops to bases near the city, and the agreement held.

The local school board expelled more than 1,000 students who had joined the marches, but a federal appeals court soon ordered them reinstated.

Consequences

The campaign changed the national debate. On 11 June 1963, after Governor George Wallace’s stand at the University of Alabama, Kennedy told the nation in a televised address that civil rights was a moral issue and announced a comprehensive civil rights bill. Birmingham also helped inspire the March on Washington in August.

Change in Birmingham itself was slow and violently resisted. On 15 September 1963 a Ku Klux Klan bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four girls. Yet the campaign’s national impact was lasting: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations across the country.

Today the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, created in 2017, includes the Gaston Motel, Kelly Ingram Park and the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Timeline

• 1963, 2 April: Albert Boutwell defeats Bull Connor in Birmingham’s mayoral run-off.
• 1963, 3 April: Project C begins with sit-ins at downtown lunch counters.
• 1963, 12 April: King and Abernathy are arrested for defying an injunction.
• 1963, 16 April: King dates his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.
• 1963, 2 May: The Children’s Crusade begins; hundreds of young marchers are arrested.
• 1963, 3 May: Police use fire hoses and dogs against demonstrators in Kelly Ingram Park.
• 1963, 10 May: A desegregation agreement is announced.
• 1963, 11 May: Bombs hit A. D. King’s home and the Gaston Motel.
• 1963, 11 June: Kennedy announces a national civil rights bill.

Why it matters

The Birmingham campaign showed how nonviolent protest could expose the violence behind segregation to a national and international audience. The images from Birmingham turned civil rights into an urgent national issue, King’s letter became a lasting statement of the case for civil disobedience, and the campaign led directly to the federal legislation that ended legal segregation.