Harold Titus's Blog, page 26

Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing -- A Horrendous Event

Fast forward past Governor George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door,” barring the admittance of two qualified black students June 11 to the University of Alabama.

Fast forward past the murder of Mississippi activist Medgar Evers, ambushed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, June 12.

Fast forward past Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “March on Washington” and “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial August 28.

Fast forward past Governor Wallace’s attempt September 9 to prevent black students in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee from entering five all-white elementary and secondary schools in those cities despite being ordered by federal judges not to interfere.

Fast forward past President Kennedy’s order September 10 that the Alabama National Guard be federalized and that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara use any of the nation’s armed forces he deemed necessary to enforce school desegregation in Alabama.

We stop to focus on a horrendous event that occurred on Sunday morning, September 15, at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Many of the civil rights protest marches that took place in Birmingham during the 1960s began at the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers like King.

KKK members had routinely called in bomb threats intended to disrupt civil rights meetings as well as services at the church (Birmingham 1).

… the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church … greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service (16th Street NPS 1).

On September 15, 1963, 14-year-old Cynthia Morris Wesley and three other members of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church youth choir left their Sunday school class to freshen up for their roles as ushers in the main service. The lesson for the day had been “The Love That Forgives.” Eleven-year-old Denise McNair met Cynthia and her classmates in the women’s lounge, in the northeast corner of the basement.

Carole Robertson, 14, was the most mature of the girls. She was wearing medium-high heels for the first time, shiny black ones bought the day before. Carole’s mother had gotten her a necklace to go with the shoes and put a winter coat on layaway for her.

Also in the lounge was 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins. One of eight children, Addie was a little on the shy side, but she looked radiant in her white usher’s dress. Cynthia and Carole also wore white. The three ushers were standing with young Denise by the window, which looked out onto Sixteenth Street at ground level. So elegant was this church that even the restroom window was made of stained glass.

Addie’s younger sister Sarah Collins stood at the washbowl. At the request of a Sunday school teacher, 15-year-old Bernadine Mathews came into the lounge to encourage the girls to return to their classrooms. Cynthia said she needed to push her hair up one more time. “Cynthia,” Bernadine chided her, “children who don’t obey the Lord live only half as long” (McWhorter 1-2).

Carolyn McKinstry was the 15-year-old Sunday-school secretary of 16th Street Baptist Church. In her book, While the World Watched: a Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement, she narrated this:

At the end of Sunday school, I would get up and make a report. Around 10:15 a.m. I got up to collect the reports. I started upstairs. You had to pass the girls’ bathroom. I paused at the doorway, because they [Addie Mae, Carol, Cynthia, Denise] were all standing there, combing their hair, playing, and talking. We were all good friends, and we were excited about two things that Sunday. It was Youth Sunday, and that meant we got to do everything. We were the choir. We were the ushers, the speakers. The second thing was, after church we were going to have a gathering with punch and dancing. I knew my report had to be done at a certain time, so I went on up the stairs. When I got to the office, the phone was ringing. The caller on the other end of the phone said, “Three minutes.” Male caller. But he hung up just as quickly as he said that. I stepped out into the sanctuary to get more reports, and I only took about 15 steps into the sanctuary, and the bomb exploded (Joiner 1).

Sarah Collins Cox, then 12, was in the basement with her sister Addie Mae, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, a friend, getting ready to attend a youth service. "I remember Denise asking Addie to tie her belt," Cox, now 46, says in a near whisper, recalling the morning of Sept. 15, 1963. "Addie was tying her sash. Then it happened." A savage explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite stashed under a stairwell ripped through the northeast corner of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. "I couldn't see anymore because my eyes were full of glass - 23 pieces of glass," says Cox. "I didn't know what happened. I just remember calling, 'Addie, Addie.' But there was no answer. I don't remember any pain. I just remember wanting Addie" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 1).

A motorist was blown from his car. A pedestrian calling his wife from a pay phone across the street was whooshed, receiver still in hand, into the Social Cleaners, whose front door had been whipped open.

Pastor John Cross moved toward the fog that clung to the northeast side of his church. There was a 7- by 7-foot hole in the wall of what had been the women’s lounge. The bomb had made a crater 2 1/2 feet deep and 5 1/2 feet wide, demolishing a foundation that had been a 30-inch-thick mass of stone facing over a brick-and-masonry wall (McWhorter 3).

Inside the church, a teacher screamed, “Lie on the floor! Lie on the floor!” Rafters collapsed, a skylight fell on the pulpit. Part of a stained glass window shattered, obliterating the face of Christ. A man cried: “Everybody out! Everybody out!” A stream of sobbing Negroes stumbled through the litter — past twisted metal folding chairs, past splintered wooden benches, past shredded songbooks and Bibles. A Negro woman staggered out of the Social Dry Cleaning store shrieking “Let me at ’em! I’ll kill ’em!”— and fainted. White plaster dust fell gently for a block around.

Police cars poured into the block — and even as the cops plunged into the church, some enraged Negroes began throwing rocks at them.

On top [of the rubble of bricks] was a child’s white lace choir robe. A civil defense captain lifted the hem of the robe. “Oh, my God,” he cried. “Don’t look!” Beneath lay the mangled body of a Negro girl.

Barehanded, the workers dug deeper into the rubble — until four bodies had been uncovered. The head and shoulder of one child had been completely blown off (Time 1).

“Lord, that’s Denise,” said Deacon M.W. Pippen, owner of the Social Cleaners. Denise McNair was Pippen’s granddaughter. Only then did Cross realize the corpses were girls. Pippen had recognized Denise’s no-longer-shiny patent-leather shoe. The clothes had been blown off the girls’ bodies.

Samuel Rutledge, looking for his 3 1/2-year-old son, instead found a female buried alive, moaning and bleeding from the head. He carried her through the hole toward the street. “Do you know who she is?” people asked one another. Again, Cross thought she had to be 40 or 45 years old. But Sarah Collins was only 12. After being loaded into an ambulance (colored), she sang “Jesus Loves Me” and occasionally said, “What happened? I can’t see.” The ambulance driver delivered Sarah to University Hospital and returned to pick up his next cargo, the corpse of her sister Addie Mae.

Approaching her father in the crowd on the sidewalk, Maxine Pippen McNair cried, “I can’t find Denise.” M.W. Pippen told his daughter, “She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.” Watching his daughter take in the significance of the shoe he held up, he screamed, “I’d like to blow the whole town up” (McWhorter 3-4).

The remains were … carried out to waiting ambulances. A youth rushed forward, lifted a sheet and wailed: “This is my sister! My God — she’s dead!”

The church‘s pastor, the Rev. John Cross, hurried up and down the sidewalk, urging the milling crowd to go home. “Please go home!” he said. “The Lord is our shepherd, and we shall not want.” Another Negro minister added his pleas. “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed,” he said. “We must have love in our hearts for these men.” But a Negro boy screamed, “We give love — and we get this!” And another youth yelled: “Love ’em? Love ’em? We hate ’em!” A man wept: “My grandbaby was one of those killed! Eleven years old! I helped pull the rocks off her! You know how I feel? I feel like blowing the whole town up” (Time 2-3).

Carolyn McKinstry recalled: When the bomb exploded, it felt like the building shook. Everything came crashing in, the glass and the windows in the church. I fell on the floor because someone said, “Hit the floor.” We were all on the floor for just a couple of seconds. And then I could hear people getting up and running out. I got up, and I went outside. I was looking for my two little brothers. One of the first things we noticed was that the church was already surrounded by policemen. People were in panic mode. They were everywhere looking for their family members.

When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb (Joiner 2-3).

“I will never stop crying thinking about it,” Barbara Cross, now 68, told TIME in an emotional phone conversation. Her father, John Cross, was the pastor at the church, which was Birmingham’s largest African-American congregation; she was 13 and in its basement the day that Ku Klux Klan members planted a bomb under the building’s stairs. The blast was strong enough to send stone shooting into cars parked across the street and to knock people off their feet in nearby buildings. And inside the church, things were worse.

The bombing killed four of Cross’ classmates who had gone to the bathroom: three 14-year-olds, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. (Sarah Collins Rudolph, often referred to as the “Fifth Little Girl,” lost an eye but survived her injuries.)

“Addie wanted me to come with her, but then the teacher stopped me and gave me a writing assignment that saved my life,” Cross recalls.

Soon after, she heard “the most horrific noises I had ever heard in my life.” That was followed by the smell of smoke.

Her first thought was that Birmingham had been attacked by Cuba, she says. “The building shook, and I was hit in the head with a light fixture. I remember everything getting dark,” she says, “and I thought the United States was being attacked.” A church official led her and her younger sister and brother out by the hand. Somehow, she made her way home, and stayed the night at the home of a neighbor who was a nurse, who removed the glass fragments from her scalp and treated the area.

Dale Long, now 66, was 11 and in the basement that day too. “Some of us boys should have headed upstairs [to services] by then, but we got carried away talking about who’s going to have the best football team,” he recalls. “Suddenly, the big floor-to-ceiling bookcases started moving, and we looked at each other and ran. Even though it was dark and dusty and smoky, I knew how to get out. I could see my dad running down the street. I had never seen my dad run before. He hugged us unlike anything I could ever remember and said we’ll be alright. He took us to his office in the motel, where reporters who were staying there were arguing over the two pay phones in the lobby that they were trying to use to report stories back [to their bureaus].”

“If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”

[Barbara] Cross says her father “blamed himself for the bombing.”

“My parents knew the church had bomb threats, but they never told us about them because they didn’t want to scare us from going to church,” she says. “My father took responsibility because he gave Dr. King permission to use the church for protests. When he got older, he’d cry when he talked about it. He carried those wounds to his grave” (Waxman 1-4).

The bomber had hidden under a set of cinder block steps on the side of the church, tunneled under the basement and placed a bundle of dynamite under what turned out to be the girls' rest room (16th Street NPR 1).


Works cited:

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” NPR. September 15, 2003. Web. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...

“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...

Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...

McWhorter, Diance. “The Stark Reminders of the Birmingham Church Bombing.”
Smithsonian Magazine. November 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...

Smith, Kyle; Wescott, Gail Cameron; and Craig, David Cobb. “The Day the Children Died.” People Magazine. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...

Time Magazine. September 27, 1963. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...

Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...

Birmingham 1963 -- Children's Crusade -- Resolution and Retaliation

On Monday, May 6, Comedian Dick Gregory arrived in Birmingham and marched with the young demonstrators. Like hundreds before him, he was arrested. Law enforcement officials were working over time to keep up with the arrests. … Once again, Bull Connor summoned his firemen. With no place to run, no trees for protection, the demonstrators were hit with the full force of the water. By Monday night, 2,500 demonstrators had been arrested, over 2,000 of them children. All jails in the city and county were filled (No 5).

Tuesday, May 7th. Fighting broke out between blacks and whites in the downtown area. Leading a group of child marchers, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was hit with the full force of a fire hose and had to be hospitalized. The situation was rapidly approaching the riot proportions that James Bevel had feared.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy [had] sent Burke Marshall, his chief civil rights assistant, to facilitate negotiations between prominent black citizens and representatives of Birmingham’s Senior Citizen's Council, the city’s business leadership. The Senior Citizen’s Council sought a moratorium on street protests as an act of good faith before any final settlement was declared … Marshall encouraged campaign leaders to halt demonstrations, accept an interim compromise that would provide partial success, and negotiate the rest of their demands afterward. Some black negotiators were open to the idea … Hospitalized Shuttlesworth was not present at the negotiations … On 8 May King told the negotiators he would accept the compromise and call the demonstrations to a halt.

When Shuttlesworth learned that King intended to announce a moratorium he was furious—about both the decision to ease pressure off white business owners and the fact that he, as the acknowledged leader of the local movement, had not been consulted. Feeling betrayed, Shuttlesworth reminded King that he could not legitimately speak for the black population of Birmingham on his own: “Go ahead and call it off … When I see it on TV, that you have called it off, I will get up out of this, my sickbed, with what little ounce of strength I have, and lead them back into the street. And your name’ll be Mud” (Birmingham Campaign 7).

Despite Shuttlesworth’s strong disapproval, the decision had been made and there was no going back. Even after Burke Marshall tried to calm the ACMHR leader, he continued to rant and rave. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this. You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T. I’m sorry, but I cannot compromise my principles and the principles we established.” Frustrated and disappointed, Shuttleworth went home (Jeter-Bennett 173-174; 349).

King made the announcement anyway, but indicated that demonstrations might be resumed if negotiations did not resolve the situation shortly (Birmingham Campaign 7).

Birmingham lawyer and social activist David Vann recalled: “After we reached the settlement, … to say we were going to take down the [segregationist] signs. We'd have a 60 day cooling off period and desegregate lunch counters and begin a program of employment in downtown Birmingham with at least three clerks hired. I think somebody in New York asked Reverend Shuttlesworth, did he -- Why he would settle for just three clerks in downtown Birmingham. And he said, ‘I meant three in every store.’ And the thing almost came unglued” (No 7).

The settlement [agreed upon May 10] called for desegregating lunch counters, department store dressing rooms, public restrooms and drinking fountains within the next 90 days; hiring and promoting African Americans on a nondiscriminatory basis, hiring blacks in stores and other industries by a newly appointed private fair employment committee within 60 days; releasing movement demonstrators on bond or “on their personal recognizance,” and creating an official biracial committee to convene two weeks later (Jeter-Barrett 179-180).

The next evening, May 11, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in the nearby town of Bessemer to express its outrage at and opposition to the accords. Grand Dragon Robert Shelton criticized white negotiators for their involvement. “These stores that want the Negro trade so much, these people who are selling out the whites, they don’t need our business.”

Threatening to harass those responsible for the recent settlement, Klansmen returned to Birmingham, raiding black neighborhoods, setting off a series of riots. At 10:45 p.m. a group of vigilantes bombed the home of Dr. King’s younger brother Reverent A. D. King in an attempt to kill the SCLC leader. Luckily, all seven members of his [A. D. King’s] family made it out safely. Nearby neighbors quickly ran to the scene of the explosion to check on the King family.

As news of the bombing spread, more than one thousand people converged on the site. A number of bystanders suggested retaliating against the vigilantes as well as the police officers who were trying to disperse the crowd. Afraid a riot might break out, A.D. King addressed the bystanders about the importance of nonviolence.

Just as the reverend and other church leaders worked to disperse the crowd, a second bombing occurred at the Gaston Motel. Vigilantes targeted Room 30 in hopes Dr. King would be there, but the SCLC leader had already left town to spend the weekend in Atlanta. Moments after the explosion a crowd of black onlookers formed near the motel (Jeter-Bennett 182-183).

When law enforcement arrived, bystanders broke into frenzy. “We threw rocks at white folks’ cars,” said Washington Booker, “roamed the streets, vandalized, burned anything the white folks owned.”

Once peaceful bystanders now began throwing bricks and bottles at police officers. Chanting, “lill ‘em, kill ‘em”, they took to the streets, attacking patrol cars, fire trucks and storefronts. As fires raged, Birmingham’s evening sky glowed in hues of red and orange.

Not everyone went downtown to riot. Some came out of curiosity. The Streeter family drove downtown that night. “We got into a car and we came downtown. It was scary – a full riot,” remembered Arnetta Streeter Gary. Audrey Faye Hendricks rode downtown as well. As they neared the Gaston Motel, they saw fires and turned around. “It was a dangerous situation,” Hendricks said. James Stewart’s parents decided not to go downtown, but he was aware of the rioting and what it all meant. “The battle intensified,” he said. “We went to jail … and we won-like a soccer game… The bombing were at a different level; they were trying to kill somebody.”

After having spent days in jail, some of the youth demonstrators were shocked by the amount of violence following the agreement. At its height, nearly 2,500 people vandalized white and black owned businesses, as well as looted grocery stores, liquor stores, and other businesses.

Local law enforcement and sate patrolmen arrived downtown determined to restore order. They stormed the streets beating rioters, releasing police dogs, and threatening to shoot protestors. With so many rioters and onlookers crowding the roadways, it was impossible for firemen to extinguish burning buildings or for medics to care adequately for the injured. Bull Connor’s infamous whiter armored truck thundered across the city, with an officer blaring through its loudspeaker, “Everybody get off the streets now. We cannot get ambulances in here to help people unless you clear the streets.”

Witnessing the violence and the increasing danger, movement leaders began assisting police in their effort to restore calm. SCLC’s Wyatt Walker used a megaphone to speak to the crowd. “Please do not throw bricks anymore,” he pleaded. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you cooperate by going to your homes?” The rioters refused to comply. Some even yelled back: “They started it! They started it!”

A. D. King tried to reach the people. “We’re not mad anymore. We’re saying: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’” He voiced his vehement opposition to the use of violence claiming it was the “tactic of the white man” and asked the people to join him in prayer and song before returning home peacefully (Jeter-Bennett 368-372).

A few hours before dawn, the demonstrators finally made their way back to their homes. The riot, the first of its kind in the 1960s, was over. The uprising, though, illustrated to citizens, black and white, that it would require more than schoolchildren and nonviolent protests to fix Birmingham (Jeter-Bennett 183-184).

Only dismantling the city’s historic white power structure and the ideology of white supremacy would provide black citizens full rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Until then, the unholy trinity of economic, social, and political oppression continued.

On May 12 President John F. Kennedy ordered 3,000 federal troops into position at military bases near Birmingham and began to make preparations to federalize the Alabama National Guard.

On May 20 the Birmingham Board of Education announced all students who participated in the demonstrations would be either suspended or expelled. The SCLC and the NAACP immediately went to the local federal district court, where the judge upheld the ruling. On May 22, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision (King 8).

On May 23, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on the municipal conflict in Birmingham. The justices sided with Birmingham voters and declared Albert Boutwell and the rest of the newly elected city council the official governing body of the city. … Bull Connor’s career as a political leader was over (Jeter-Bennett 190). On the same day more than one thousand black student demonstrators were permitted to return to their classes.

Virulent supremacists were not done.


Works cited:

“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

“King, Children's Crusade sparked new dynamic in Civil Rights Movement.” The Philadelphia Tribune. January 8, 2016. Web. http://www.phillytrib.com/special_sec...

“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...

Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- Children's Crusade -- Crisis Conditions

Even with Bevel’s activist training, nothing could prepare the young people for their time in jail. “Jail was a totally different experience,” recalled Larry Russell. “I’d never been on the other side of the big wall before.”

Bull Connor ordered every demonstrator interrogated. Audrey Hendricks, who was 9-years-old at the time, recalled: “They were asking me a lot of questions about ‘Why did you march? Who told you to march? Did they force you to march?” By the end of the first day, one of the city jails had reached capacity. As a result of the overcrowding, other jails and the fairgrounds had to be used. Girls ages 13 to 18 were housed at the 4-H Club building, while the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail took in the young boys.

Police held those children younger than thirteen in the same cellblocks as the older children. “We was in there about two weeks. About two weeks, and we be singin’. Oh my God we be singin’,” said Mary Hardy Lykes. “When they put us in jail, the guys was in one side and the girls in another side, and you could hear them. And they would sing songs, then the girls would sing a song to answer them back.”

When a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of black girls at the Jefferson County Detention Home and asked if they wanted to go home they all replied, “Yes!” 12-year-old Anita Woods, however, added that she would do it all again. “I’ll keep marching till I get freedom.” The reporter then asked her what is freedom and she answered, “It’s equal rights. I want to go to any school and any store downtown and sit in the movies. And sit around in a cafeteria.” Freedom for her meant enjoying the same rights and privileges afforded whites.

Not every demonstrator remembered his or her time in jail fondly.

James W. Stewart recalled being in a cell with close to three hundred boys and deplorable toilet facilities. “You went to the bathroom in front of three or four hundred people. The only ventilation was a screen that ran across the ceiling, high up over the toilets, and the ceiling was very high.”

An article written in the Chicago Daily Defender reported that it took officers over four hours to serve a breakfast to grits, applesauce, and bacon to the demonstrators. “It took from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. to feed the 1,319 persons, which included 800 demonstrators, breakfast at [one particular] jail.” According to chief city jailer Robert Austin, one jail “ran out of food and had to provide a slim diet for breakfast.” When no more beds were available, prisoners, both male and female, slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the jailhouse floors.

Some of the children had the fortune of sleeping with a blanket, but others had only the clothes they wore, and the body heat of a nearby demonstrator to keep them warm.

When the jail cells reached maximum capacity, which meant the officers could not cram another soul into the space, they started putting children in isolation chambers. Miriam McClendon recalled being placed in a “sweat box” as a form of punishment. “The sweat box was a little small room, closet size and you had to step down into it. Just a few inches, not far and they had water at the bottom of it. It was like a steel coffin.”

McClendon was forced to stand in the “sweat-box” with a group of girls. It was so tightly packed, the warden and a guard had to use their own body weight to shut the door. She remembers feeling the heat from the other bodies and hearing the other girls cry and moan from discomfort and fear. A similar experience took place at the south side jail where officers placed male protesters into “The Pit,” a “three-story high room with a concrete floor where drunks usually dried out.”

“The ladies had a lot of stories of being mistreated – not abused necessarily, but just mistreated,” said Carolyn Maull McKinstry. “Many felt deprived, disrespected.” She recalled stories of imprisonment from a female classmate that included a young woman stationed at the state fairgrounds who shared with an officer her need for certain personal products but no one tended to her requests during the five days she spent in jail Reports of these types of conditions worried parents and others. Then again, filling up the jails strained the city’s financial and personnel resources. The jail-in put added pressure on the city to negotiate (Jeter-Bennett 155-158: 309-318).

Gloria Washington Lewis…recalled peanut butter sandwiches, and an attempted rape.

She had her own reasons for protesting. ''I wanted to know why I couldn't ride a train, why I couldn't see a duck in a park,'' she said. ''Those are wounds that don't ever heal.'' And her father, a coal miner afraid of risking his job, winked. ''He had a little look in his eyes: 'I can't go, but you can,' '' she said.

She was arrested at City Hall after sneaking through police lines and finally pulling a poster from her pants. ''Free at Last,'' it said. She had just turned 16, but gave her age as 15, hoping for more lenient treatment. She did not get it.

At the state fairgrounds where Ms. Lewis and hundreds of other girls were jailed and fed peanut butter sandwiches, she shared a bunk bed with one girl who arrived disheveled, ''a mess, her clothes torn off.''

The girl said the officer who arrested her had raped her in the back of a police wagon. That night, a man in uniform tried to attack the same girl, Ms. Lewis said. She and a few other girls fended him off, but the next day they were charged with attacking him and taken to the county jail.

She said she spent two weeks in the stifling ''sweat box,'' then waited even longer for someone to figure out where she was and get her. ''Every time somebody would get out, I'd say, 'Call my daddy,' '' she said. ''But the jail kept saying I wasn't there'” (Halbfinger 7).

The morning newspapers that landed on Kennedy’s breakfast table showed students braving the assaults on the front lines. In one shot, a uniformed officer in round shades and a narrow tie yanked on high school sophomore Walter Gadsden’s sweater while a German shepherd lunged toward the student’s stomach with mouth open, fangs bared.

Gazing at the images of water cannons and police dogs, Kennedy was disgusted. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later noted the students’ impact: “What Bull Connor did down there, and the dogs and the hoses and the pictures with the Negroes, is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done.”

It was then that the president and the attorney general began considering a path toward comprehensive civil rights legislation. Until students took to the streets, John Kennedy had failed to act; for two and a half years, he had been slow to recognize the plight of blacks in America. Throughout his brief term, he had been focused on other matters: foreign affairs, the national economy, the space program. But now his eyes had been opened (Levingston 5).

Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington, D.C. anti-trust lawyer Burke Marshall to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Marshall’s task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham city officials and business leaders to facilitate attainment of a compromise settlement that would restore order to the city. Urged by Marshall, the opposing parties began negotiations.

On Sunday, May 5th, a mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church (Sixth Avenue and 10th Street South). The rally culminated with a march to the Southside jail and a massive demonstration in Memorial Park across from the jail.

Black adults became more involved in the campaign. A number of them joined youth marchers on the front lines, while others continued to stand on the sideline, showing support through their presence. … From behind the fence parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. Emma Smith Young remembers her granddaughter going to jail for marching without a permit. “One of my grandchildren was jailed at Fair Park. She started calling back to her mother, saying that she wanted to get out of that place. They had her in there in the rain. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them. They put them out there in that [jailhouse] yard with the high fence. Up so high, they couldn’t get over the fence.

Several [parents] had visited the fairgrounds where the police held more than 800 children in hog pens. Separated by high barbed wired fences, parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. As they stood yelling out to their children, it began to rain. Police officers walked to their cars and sat inside to stay dry. With nothing to keep the children from being rained upon, parents grew increasingly concerned about their children’s safety and demanded that the ACMHR-SCLC leaders address the situation (Jeter-Barrett 166-167; 322).

Freeman Hrabowski, previously arrested, was held for five days. When the jails became full, he and many other children were confined at the fairgrounds. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement officials visited the grounds outside where they were incarcerated.

I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand (Birmingham 5).


Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...

Halbfinger, David M. “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.” The New York Times. May 2, 2003. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us...

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...

Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- Children's Crusade -- Fire Hoses and Police Dogs

On May 3, more than 3,000 student protesters and onlookers filled the streets of Birmingham. Unlike the day before, Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor wanted his officers to keep the marchers away from the downtown business sector without arresting anyone because the city and county jails were filled to capacity. Toward this end, Conner ordered Captain G. V. Evans of the Birmingham Fire Department to use fire hoses on the demonstrators. The fire hoses, explained, Connor, “were equipped with monitor guns that had the ability to remove bark off a tree at a distance on one hundred feet.

Capt. Evans warned the marchers to disperse, and when they ignored his command, he signaled the firemen to hose the schoolchildren. In the nonviolent workshops conducted by James Bevel and other movement organizers, the children learned to protect themselves by placing their hands on their faces and tucking their bodies into a ball. But the pressure from the hoses forced many demonstrators to retreat. “The little bit of training we had did no good,” said Arnetta Streeter Gary. “I can remember us balling up hugging together, and the water just washing us down the street. … Forceful. It was like pins maybe, sticking you in your arms and legs and things. The water was very, very forceful (Jeter-Bennett 147-150; 285).

To fight the high-powered blasts, some children joined hands trying to keep their balance in a human chain. But the torrents were too fierce; hit by the rocket-bursts of water the kids whirled one way, then the other, dragging down their comrades.

To supercharge the water jets, firefighters had funneled the flow of two hoses into one nozzle, Gpacking it with such ballistic fury it dislodged bricks from buildings. These jets were driven across the kids’ bodies, lacerating their flesh, tearing clothing off their backs; hitting the elm trees in nearby Kelly Ingram Park, the blasts ripped off the bark. The children, knocked to the pavement, crawled away; some struggled to their feet with bloody noses and gashes on their faces (Levingston 4).

Captain Evans had now ordered all marchers and onlookers to evacuate Ingram Park. One person reported having seen “two girls run through Kelly Ingram Park clad in their undergarments after the water streams ripped away their outer clothing.”

“Once that water … hit me,” said Gwendolyn Sanders, “I didn’t know if I was going to survive it or not because the pressure from that hose was so great that it would knock your breath away” (Jeter-Bennett 148-149; 288).

Carolyn McKinstry recalled: The water came out with such tremendous pressure and, uh, it’s a very painful experience, if you’ve never been hit by a fire hose and I thought, whoa. You know, I got knocked down and then we found ourselves crouching together and trying to find something to hold onto. People ran, people hid, people hugged buildings or whatever they could to keep the water hoses from just…just knocking them here and there (Birmingham 6).

The water hose hurt a lot. I was hit with the water hose on this side running from the water. I had a navy blue sweater on. The water tore a big hole in my sweater and swiped part of my hair off on that side. I just remember the sting and pain on my face. It was very painful, and you couldn’t escape. There were a few points where we were trying to stand up and hold onto a wall. It was a terrific pain from the force, which I later learned was something like one hundred pounds of force per inch. That was the point at which I started thinking, ‘Do I really want to be a part of this, or do I have what it takes to continue on this level?’ … I honestly was afraid of dogs, did not like being wet up. I felt very disrespected when I was wet up with the water and my hair. We were just marching (Jeter-Bennett 148).

As marchers screamed, firemen could be heard yelling, “Knock the niggers down.” Some of the spectators grew angry at the sigh of young people being knocked down by the torrents of water.

Arnetta Streeter Gary’s parents witnessed it all. “My daddy and mother, a lot of adults, came around. … Little did my daddy know I was participating. When he saw the firemen putting water on me, he got upset,” she said. “He was going to … turn the water off. My mother, she was struggling with him to keep him from going over there. They would have killed him. That’s what she told me. … ‘You could have gotten your father killed.’”

While Mrs. Streeter successfully restrained her husband, other bystanders began to retaliate by throwing rocks, soda bottles, and bricks at the officers and firemen. Washington Booker III had not attended the nonviolent workshops and there was no one there to restrain him and his friends. “We would throw a brick, a bottle, and then we’d take off … That’s what we were doing while everybody else was peacefully marching – looking for opportunities to strike a blow” (Jeter-Bennett 150, 292).

Washington Booker, … a student at Ullman, … had been reluctant about participating in the marches — not because he didn't believe in the cause, but because he knew what could happen. Booker grew up in the projects in a place called Loveman Village. "It was nothing for the police to call you over to the car and tell you to stick your head in the window so they could tell you something. Then they would roll up the window on you," he said. "Rarely did a day go by when you didn't hear about a black man or a black boy being abused by police (King 3).

[Bull] Connor responded [to the rock and brick throwing] by ordering the police department’s K-9 unit to the park. “All you gotta do is tell them you’re going to bring the dogs. Look at ‘em run. … I want to see them dogs work. Look at those niggers run,” said the police commissioner.

Mary Gadson, a teenager demonstrator, vividly remembered Bull Connor threatening to sic dogs on her and some other marchers. “We were in a group that was supposed to march downtown, but we never made it because the police stopped us. Bull Connor was right out on Sixth Avenue. He had the dogs out there, and he said if we marched, he was going to turn the dogs on us. They had the fire hoses also. The water was strong. It could knock you down. And he let ‘em go and sprayed us. I got wet and almost got bitten” (Jeter-Bennett 151, 296).

The next day [Saturday, May 4], King offered encouragement to the parents of the young protesters in a speech delivered at the 16th Street Baptist Church. According to biography.com, he said, “Don’t worry about your children; they are going to be all right. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are not only doing a job for themselves, but for all of America and for all of mankind” (King 4).

President Kennedy had already called Dr. King to ask him to remove children from the protests. King had refused, recognizing that “the welfare of the black schoolchildren afforded the Birmingham movement the leverage it needed to move the state and federal governments to act in their favor.” King had announced that the demonstrations would continue through the weekend, that the ACMHR and SCLC “remained committed to the cause and refused to quit until city officials met their demands.”

By now, some children had been in jail for forty-eight hours and stories about rat bites, inadequate food, a lack of beds, and aggressive interrogations were beginning to circulate. “Don’t worry about them,” he told the parents. “They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this a better nation” (Jeter-Bennett 308).

Marchers concealed their involvement in the movement by hiding in the crowd; they looked like ordinary pedestrians and spectators. The goal was to confuse Bull Connor and policemen so they could make their way downtown before being stopped and sent to jail. Movement organizers referred to day 3 as “Operation Confusion.” As students exited Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the staged protesters began making their way downtown. This made it difficult for Connor and his officers to contain the protesters and prevent them from entering Birmingham’s business district. Arnetta Street-Gary’s mother and family friend Mrs. Robey and other “movement mothers “ drove youth demonstrators to the white business district.

Once again, Conner resorted to police dogs and fire hoses to coral marchers. Protesters and onlookers ran in the streets and around Kelly Ingram Park to avoid being attacked. Other police officers arrested demonstrators. Freeman A. Hrabowski III squared off against Bull Connor in front of the steps of City Hall. “My heart was pounding, and my head was swimming with fear (Jeter-Barrett 320).

The police looked mean, it was frightening. We were told to keep singing these songs and so I’m singing, [sings] I ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, keep on a walking, keep on a talking, marching on to freedom land. And amazingly the other kids were singing and the singing elevates when you can imagine hundreds of children singing and you feel a sense of community, a sense of purpose.

There was Bull Connor, and I was so afraid, and he said, “What do you want little nigra?” And I mustered up the courage and I looked up at him and I said, “Suh,” the southern word for sir, “we want to kneel and pray for our freedom.” That’s all I said. That’s all we wanted to do. And he did pick me up, and he did, and he did spit in my face, he really…he was so angry (Birmingham 5).

At 16, Cardell Gay had watched his father get involved in the movement, helping to guard Mr. Shuttlesworth's home at night. Then he began attending the Monday night meetings himself. When the call went out for student volunteers, he responded -- in spite of, and because of, his teachers at Hayes, an all-black high school.

''In class, they'd say, 'Don't leave campus or you'll be expelled,' '' Mr. Gay recalled. ''But in private, they'd say, 'Go on. I can't do it, I'd lose my job. But do it up. Keep it up.' ''

The first time he marched, he was picked up by the police near a hot dog stand on Second Avenue. The next day, he was arrested for praying and blocking the entrance to the Pizitz department store, and spent three days in the city jail.

The third time he went [Saturday], he got wet. ''The hoses were so strong,'' he said. ''And it was warm water, too. It would knock us all over the place, send you tumbling' (Halbfinger 3).

On Saturday, the dogs and water hoses provoked [more] angry responses from bystanders, some of them carrying weapons. Seeing the beginnings of violence, James Bevel borrowed a bull horn from a nearby policeman.

So I took the bull horn and said, "Okay, get off the streets now. We're not going to have violence. If you're not going to ... (inaudible) policemen, you're not going to be in the movement and, you know." So it was strange, I guess, to them. I'm with the police talking through the bull horn and giving orders and everybody was obeying the orders. [laughter] It was like, wow. But what was at stake was the possibility of a riot and that once in a movement, once a riot break out, you have to stop, takes you four or five more days to get reestablished and I was trying to avoid that kind of situation (No 4).

While King faced criticism for exposing children to violence—most notably from Malcolm X, who said that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line”— King maintained that the demonstrations allowed children to develop “a sense of their own stake in freedom” (King 4).

Media coverage from the second day of the Children’s March generated sympathy and outrage nationally and internationally. Dr. King and other movement organizers timed the protests to take advantage of the deadlines for nightly news programming and print media.

Images and film footage of young protesters being strayed with high pressure hoses and attacked by police dogs drew attention to the “horrors of segregation and the moral authority of southern black folk.”

This was exactly what ACMHR/SCLC had intended when they organized D-Day and Double D-Day; they wanted to expose America’s racial dilemma. “We knew we were being mistreated by our society and we wanted a different world,” said Freeman Hrabowski. “We wanted society to look us in our faces and treat us as human beings worthy of respect. We deserved respect; we were American citizens. We were asking our country to live up to its Constitution” (Jeter-Bennett 299-301).


Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...

“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

Halbfinger, David M. “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.” The New York Times. May 2, 2003. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us...

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

“King, Children's Crusade sparked new dynamic in Civil Rights Movement.” The Philadelphia Tribune. January 8, 2016. Web. http://www.phillytrib.com/special_sec...

Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...

“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...

Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- Children's Crusade -- D-Day

In order to sustain the campaign, SCLC organizer James Bevel proposed using young children in demonstrations. Bevel’s rationale for the Children’s Crusade was that young people represented an untapped source of freedom fighters without the prohibitive responsibilities of older activists (Birmingham Campaign Stanford 1).

Who was James Bevel?

Born in the Mississippi Delta in 1936, one of seventeen children, Bevel came to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1957 to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary to become a preacher. Along with John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette, he attended James Lawson’s workshops that introduced the principles of non-violent direct action. Bevel participated in the Nashville sit-ins in 1961, became a leader of the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and married Diane Nash. Bevel selected the student teams that rode the Freedom Ride buses from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, and was arrested in Jackson for attempting to desegregate the Jackson bus terminal’s white waiting room. While in the Jackson jail, he and Bernard Lafayette started the Mississippi Voting Rights Movement. They, Nash, and others stayed in Mississippi to work on grassroots organizing. In 1962, following James Lawson’s suggestion, Bevel was invited to meet with Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. Bevel and King agreed to work together on an equal basis, neither having veto power over the other, on projects under the auspices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They agreed to work together until they had ended segregation, obtained voting rights, and ensured that all American children had a quality education. Bevel became SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education to augment King's positions as SCLC's Chairman and spokesperson.

Bevel believed that, unlike their parents, children were immune from economic retribution.

Most adults have bills to pay -- house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills -- but the young people . . . are not hooked with all those responsibilities. A boy from high school has the same effect in terms of being in jail, in terms of putting pressure on the city, as his father, and yet there's no economic threat to the family, because the father is still on the job" (Cozzens 1).

Interviewed before his death in 2009, Bevel had much to say about his decision to use children.

In ’63 in Birmingham most adults felt that segregation was permanent. That it was just that way, a permanent system. People’s homes and churches had been bombed, people had been lynched and killed and there was no process by which you could gain redress to your grievances.

I had come out of the Nashville movement and the Mississippi movement, where we had basically used young people all the time. And at first King didn’t want me to use young people in Birmingham, because I had 80 charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor against me in Jackson, Mississippi, for sending young people on the Freedom Ride.

At that point that was about only five to ten, twelve adults who would go on demonstrations each day. My position was, you can’t get the dialogue you need with so few people. Besides, most adults have bills to pay, house notes, rents, car notes, utility bills.

We said to them [high school students] you’re adults, but you’re still sort of living on your mamas and your daddies. It is your responsibility, in that you don’t have to pay the bills, to confront the segregation question. We went around and started organizing say like the queens of the high schools, the basketball stars, the football stars, so you get the influence and power leaders involved. And then they in turn got all the other students involved. . . .

First thing we did, there’s a film, The Nashville City and Story. It was an NBC White Paper. We would show that film in all of the schools. Then we would say to the students, you are responsible for segregation, you and your parents, because you have not stood up.

Our position was that, according to the Bible and the Constitution, no one has the power to oppress you if you don’t cooperate. If you say you are oppressed, then you are also acknowledging that you are in league with the oppressor. Now it’s your responsibility to break league with the oppressor.

They responded beautifully. Your first response is from the young women. I guess, from about 13 to18. They’re probably the more responsive in terms of courage, confidence and the ability to follow reasoning and logic. Nonviolence to them — it’s logical that you should love people, you shouldn’t violate people, you shouldn’t violate property. There’s a way to solve all problems without violating. Nonviolence is uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient. But if you maintain your position, the threat goes away.

Then the elementary students. They can comprehend. I guess the last guys to get involved was the high school guys. Because the brunt of the violence in the South was directed towards the young males. The females didn’t have the kind of immediate fear, say, of white policemen, as the young men did. So their involvement was more spontaneous (James 1-4).

Martin Luther King, released from jail April 20, was hesitant, fearing for the children’s safety. He prayed and reflected and finally accepted that putting children in danger could help determine their future.

King had witnessed the youthful energy that propelled the 1961 Freedom Rides. As John Lewis, who at age 21 was beaten bloody during the rides, recalled: “We considered it natural and necessary to involve children — adolescents — in the movement. We weren’t far from being teenagers ourselves, and we shared many of the same basic feelings of adolescence: unbounded idealism, courage unclouded by ‘practical’ concerns, faith and optimism untrampled by the ‘realities’ of the adult world. (Levingston 2).

Student participants recalled the following.

“We were told in some of the mass meetings that the day would come when we could really do something about all of these inequities that we were experiencing. And we were calling it D-Day. That was May 2, 1963,” remembers Janice Kelsey. Kelsey was one of thousands of young people who participated in a series of non-violent demonstrations known as the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, during the first week of May 1963. For many African-American children in Birmingham, the Civil Rights Movement was already part of their lives. They had witnessed their parents involvement through mass meetings organized at churches like the 16th Street Baptist Church. While many parents and Civil Rights leaders were cautious about involving young people in the protests, it turned out that the brave actions of these children helped make lasting change in Birmingham at a key turning point in the movement (Gilmore 1).

Doing volunteer work at her church, Sixteenth Street Baptist, Carolyn McKinstry, 14, overheard the ministers calling on children to march. “It was such an excitement in the air I knew I wanted to be part of it.” She did not tell her parents, especially her strict father. “I know if I had asked he would have said no. … We were told what to expect when we marched, if we did encounter the police. They might hit you, they might spit on you, they will have dogs and billy clubs but the only appropriate response ever is no response, or a prayerful response.”

Freeman Hrabowski was 12 when he was forced by his parents to attend a meeting at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Years later he recalled: “I was not a courageous kid. I did not get into fights. The only thing I would attack was a math problem. … Children knew, children of color were well aware we were considered second class.” Sitting in the back of the church doing his math homework, he heard Martin Luther King make the call for child volunteers: “… if the children participate in this demonstration, in this peaceful demonstration, all of America will see that even children understand the difference between right and wrong and that children want the best possible education.” He asked his parents’ permission to participate. They adamantly refused.

I was very upset, and I said to them, “Then you guys are hypocrites. You told me to go and listen to the minister. I did. I want to do what he suggested and you’re saying no.” But at that time you did not say that to your parents. So my father said very calmly, “Go to your room.”

The next morning his parents sat next to him on his bed.

I could tell they had been crying. I’d never seen my parents cry. And they said they’d been praying all night. And they said this to me: “It wasn’t that we didn’t trust you. We simply didn’t know who’d be responsible for you and how you’d be treated if you were placed in jail.” And so they thought about it and they said, “But we have decided to leave it in God’s hands” (Birmingham 3-5).

It was King’s words that inspired 16-year-old Raymond Goolsby to participate in the march.

“Rev. Martin Luther King stood right beside me,” remembers Goolsby... “He said, ‘I think it’s a mighty fine thing for children, what you’re doing because when you march, you’re really standing up; because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.’ And, boy, I mean he talked so eloquent and fast, after he finished his motivational speech, I was ready” (Joiner 2).

A second reason parents had for not wanting their children participating in any demonstration was that they were concerned that they might be fired from their jobs.

“I wanted to [participate in the Children’s March], and asked my parents and they said no,” recalled Mary Bush, who was 15-years-old in 1963. “My father said no. One, [it was] too dangerous. And two, the other had to be my father’s concern about his job. And his ability to support us if anything happened to his job because jobs were threatened.

Bush’s father was not the only one concerned about job security. Mary Gadson’s mother, who worked in white homes as a domestic, was grilled incessantly by her employer. “They were constantly asking, “Is your child involved in this stuff? I hope she isn’t.”

James Stewart, who was 16 years of age when the marches took place, remembered having been disappointed by his parents’ lack of involvement in the movement. “I had some feeling about that. At that age, I felt everybody should be involved -- we should all go down, the entire city. Even when we began to demonstrate, I saw a lot of older black adults not going, and I judged them at that time. But I began to understand when I got older that they had jobs. I found out that under no uncertain terms, if you were absent, if you were arrested, if you were anywhere near the civil rights movement demonstrations on [D-Day] or any time after, you would be fired. So they had families and mortgages and things like that. And I think that is why [the] youth provided a certain strength and energy to the movement.”

Stewart was right. The majority of black adults worked for businesses owned and operated by whites. With their family’s well-being at stake, most parents distanced themselves from the movement, although many supported it secretly. Despite their parents’ warning, Stewart and others carried on (Jeter-Bennett 244-248).

On the morning of Thursday, May 2, 1963, local WENN disc jockey Shelley “Playboy” Stewart took to the airwaves to remind his youthful audience that “there’s going to be a party at the park.” He told them not to “forget your toothbrushes because hot luncheon will be served.” Only those who knew about the protest march scheduled for later that afternoon could decipher Playboy’s encrypted message. And they took heed. As the students prepared for school, they added a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bar of soap to their knapsacks.

Some parents knew what was going on, but certainly not all. Many children hid their involvement in the movement from their parents, and for good reason. The thought of children squaring off against police officers and possibly white reactionaries could be overwhelming. Fearing what awaited young demonstrators, some adults forbade their children to march. Gwen Webb’s mother ordered her to go to school and stay clear of the march. “I told my mother, ‘I hear you.’ We were raised not to lie. So I didn’t tell her a lie, and say I wasn’t going. I said, ‘I hear you.’”

At approximately 11 a.m. students began gathering outside of Birmingham’s black public schools holding homemade signs that read, “It’s time!” As word spread, students began pouring out of their schools, exiting any and every way possible, hopping out of windows even. “Ullman High School had over twelve hundred kids at that time, and eleven hundred of us were over the fence. We were gone!” said Mary Gadson.

Teachers responded differently to the mass exodus. Jerome Taylor recalled that his schoolteacher Mrs. Cleopatra Goree looked away as students fled her classroom. “Our teacher Mrs. Goree turned her back as we got up, and we took it from there.” Turning her back to the students was taken as a sign of solidarity. In fact, Goree, and many teachers like her, would have loved to join the students, but she knew she would be fired if she did. Instead she lived vicariously through them; she was happy to see them go. And before she knew it, only two kids remained in her classroom. Miss Woolfolk also turned around and looked at the chalkboard while students marched out the room. “I was teaching American government, what the Constitution guarantees what democracy should be about,” she said later. “And sitting in a segregated school system and going to the back door of restaurant-it made sense for students to take a stand (Jeter-Bennett 243, 255-257).

… some 800 students skipped class, high-schoolers all the way down to first-graders. Sneaking over the fences, they scampered to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the march’s staging ground (Levingston 2).

Once the students arrived at Sixteenth Street Baptist, the level of excitement intensified. Much like a school pep-rally, Bevel and his associates led the throng of demonstrators in song. “Ain’t gonna let no body turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. … Walking on to freedom land,” they sang, along with other cheers and chants. While movement organizers worked to excite the young demonstrators, others collected vital statistics – names, ages, parents’ names, and home addressed – from the children. They also passed a basket and instructed students to dispose of their weapons. “They asked us if we had any weapons,” James Stewart recalled. “They passed the basket around. … Nobody put anything in it.” Again, the organizers passed the baskets and on the second go around, “it was full of pocket knives; somebody had brass knuckles, any little thing that people thought would give an edge.” Shuttlesworth reminded the children, “[Your are] freedom fighters, as much as those in the army. But without weapons. … Still you are expected to be as disciplined as soldiers” (Jeter-Bennett 265-266)

The youngsters then emerged from the church under its brick arch and proceeded down the front steps: girls in dresses and light sweaters; boys in slacks and walking shoes; some wore hats; some had pants held up with suspenders; they were laughing and singing and carrying handmade picket signs reading “Segregation is a sin” and “I’ll die to make this land my home” (Levingston 2).

The students were given signs to carry in the march. Shirley Holmes Sims, a graduate of Parker High School, recalls her sign: "We Shall Overcome." "My mother had told me not to march and said I'd better not go to jail. But this just felt like something we were supposed to do," she said. "I didn't have sense to be afraid. I thought about our lives at the time. You look back and think, my God."

Sims had listened to the speeches on nonviolence but admits that it was difficult to remain nonviolent while being taunted. "Not long after the march, I was boarding a bus to ride home, and a little white boy spat on me," she said. "It was all I could do to keep from slapping him, but I knew that was something I could not do" (Stewart 3).

When police officers approached the initial group of marchers, they informed them of the court injunction prohibiting public demonstrations, and soon began arresting and loading them into paddy wagons for violating the order. “When they put us under arrest, we stepped up into the paddy wagons,” Bernita Roberson said. “I looked back at my daddy. He kind of smiled in support because he knew that somebody from the family was going. And it was his baby child. … I wasn’t afraid. I felt good that I could make a difference. I did not want to be intimidated by whites.”

Although arresting demonstrators had become routine for Birmingham policemen, they had not anticipated so many demonstrators. “[The] first group came out of the church quietly singing, ‘O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, and before I be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free,’” said Myrna Carter. “They went down Sixteenth Street and immediately WHRRRR, you could hear the motorcycles rev up and start out after them. Then the police arrested them.”

As the police arrested the first batch of marchers, another group immediately took their place, followed by another group and then another. “While they (the police) were busy doing that, the leaders gave us signs and told us to go out Sixth Avenue in the opposite direction.”

Bevel released the groups of marchers in such a way as to give the appearance of one large group. “The police thought the first group was all there was going to be that day. So my group got downtown to Newberry’s. … When the police realized what happened, someone called the paddy wagon. They lined us up and snatched our signs from us.”

The police crammed a dozen or more youth demonstrators into paddy wagons that were meant to hold a maximum of eight people. “Two in each of the four cubicles that they had,” recalled James Stewart. “They crammed three and four of us into one cubicle, and they continued to press the door until they got it shut and locked.”

The city police ran out of paddy wagons within the first hour and began transporting children in school buses. It was quite the sight. Children in school buses waved merrily from the window while being hauled off to jail. “The children were being arrested in wholesale numbers,” said police officer James Parsons. It also surprised policemen to see these school children unafraid. According to demonstrator Gwen Webb, the police “had strange looks to see that we were happy and singing and glad to be arrested” (Jeter-Bennett 275-281).

Washington Booker, … a student at Ullman, was one of the students arrested.

"We knew what the police would do. I was thinking, let's just let the little middle-class kids go down there and march. I had planned on just doing as I did before — standing behind the crowd and chunking bottles and bricks at the police," he said.

But the more he heard about plans for the May Children's March, the more he became caught up with the idea of participating.

"They told us this would be a nonviolent movement, but when I went into the church that day, I was carrying a pocket knife. They passed a collection basket, and we were told to put all of our weapons in the baskets. I dropped my pocket knife in, but I wished I had tucked it under a pew so I could have come back to get it" (Stewart 4).

Bevel called off the day’s demonstrations at 4 p.m.

Later that evening, thousands of men, women, and children gathered at the Bethel Baptist Church to hear from ACMHR-SCLC movement organizers. … The meeting began as usual with a series of songs, prayers, and offerings followed by words from Dr. King. In his remarks to the crowd the leader of the SCLC said, “I have been inspired and moved today. I have never seen anything like it.”

Cheers and words of praise rang out as people celebrated the demonstration. He went on to announce that close to one thousand children had participated with more than half arrested on charges of parading without a permit. [Some 75 children had been crammed into cells meant for eight adults] Without delving into next-day details, Dr. King said, “If they think today is the end of this, they will be badly mistaken.” After informing the crowd that comedian-activist Dick Gregory would join them soon, and discussing other movement news, he welcomed Bevel to the pulpit.

Looking out at a room full of supporters he [Bevel] shouted, “There ain’t gonna be no meeting Monday night, because every Negro is gonna be in jail Sunday night!” The church erupted with applause as people began walking up and down the aisles in song and praise. Day one of the Children’s March proved to be a success (Jeter-Bennett 146-147; 282-283).


Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...

“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

Cozzens, Lisa. “Birmingham.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...

Gilmore, Kim. “The Birmingham Children's Crusade of 1963.” Biography. February 14, 2014. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/black-...

“James Bevel: Why the Children Did Lead Us” Community Organizing: Why the Children Did Lead Us.” February 5, 2015. Web. https://breachofpeace.com/blog/?p=583

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...

Joiner, Lottie L. “How the Children of Birmingham Changed the Civil-Rights Movement.” Daily Beast. May 2, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the...

Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...

Stewart, Denise. “Children's March 1963: A Defiant Moment.” The Root. May 1, 2013. Web. https://www.theroot.com/childrens-mar...

Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- SCLC Comes to Town

Birmingham, Alabama, was a major industrial hub of the South due to the wartime industries of previous world wars. Birmingham was very attractive to all races, as many of the factories and shipyards that supplied the war effort employed thousands.

President F. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941 and integrated industries that supplied the WWII effort. For the first time, African Americans were able to work alongside their White counterparts, and were eligible for promotions to supervisory positions. However, this also made Birmingham a battle ground where the antebellum past and the Civil Rights Movement collided in violence and protest.

The more African Americans moved into the middle class, and in turn began to live middle class lifestyles, the City of Birmingham dug their heels in to prevent their progress. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had a long standing hold on the city, and it was their job to reinforce the social mores that governed everyone. African Americans needed to remember their place, and in times when they asserted their rights and ventured outside of the social caste system created for them, there was violence (Harris 1).

Martin Luther King described Birmingham as “America’s worst city for racism. … the KKK had castrated an African American; [had actually] pressured the city to ban a book from book stores as it contained pictures of black and white rabbits and wanted black music banned on radio stations” (Trueman 1).

For decades Birmingham had represented the citadel of white supremacy. No black resident was ever secure from the wide sweep of racist terrorism, both institutionalized and vigilante. Conditions in the state had become even worse with the election of Governor George Wallace in 1962, who stated upon taking his oath of office, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Wallace vowed that the federal government would not dictate racial policies in his state. For years, civil rights activists had conceived of plans to attack Birmingham's Jim Crow laws; now it seemed the utmost priority (Birmingham Desegregation 1).

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had fought the segregated system for more than a decade.

Having witnessed the organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Shuttlesworth organized his own group, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in June 1956 after the state outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In December 1956, when the federal courts ordered the desegregation of Montgomery's buses, Shuttlesworth asked the officials of Birmingham's transit system to end segregated seating, setting a December 26 deadline. He intended to challenge the laws on a bus on that day, but on the night of December 25, Klansmen bombed Bethel Baptist Church and parsonage, nearly assassinating Shuttlesworth (Eskew 1).

They blew the floor out from under my bed, spaces I guess 15 feet. The springs I was lying on, we never found. I walked out from this and instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klansmen, I said to the Klansmen police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast as I could." I said, "Officer, you're not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there (Walk 1).

Shuttlesworth emerged out of the rubble of his dynamited house and led a protest the next morning that resulted in a legal case against the city's segregation ordinance.

Coinciding with school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, Shuttlesworth arranged a challenge to Birmingham's all-white Phillips High School in September 1957, nearly suffering death at the hands of an angry mob. Segregationist vigilantes again greeted Shuttlesworth when he desegregated the train station. In 1958, Shuttlesworth organized a boycott of Birmingham's buses in support of the ACMHR legal case against segregated seating. Shuttlesworth's aggressive strategy of direct action alienated him from Birmingham's established black leadership. Many people in the black middle class found as too extreme the intense religious belief held by ACMHR members that God was going to end segregation.

Prompted by the national sit-in movement begun by four black college men in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, a group of black students in Birmingham from Miles College and Daniel Payne College held a prayer vigil. Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR supported their efforts. When a national group of black and white demonstrators undertook the Freedom Rides in May 1961, Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR provided assistance, rescuing the stranded protesters outside Anniston as well as those who suffered a Klan attack at the Birmingham Trailways Station. In spring 1962, Birmingham's black college students initiated the Selective Buying Campaign and, with support from Shuttlesworth and ACMHR, it became the catalyst for the spring 1963 demonstrations.

Chosen as secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it organized in 1957, Shutttlesworth had been an active member of the region's leading civil rights group. But he was frustrated because he believed that the SCLC lacked clear direction under King's leadership. Shuttlesworth watched the SCLC intervene in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and fail to successfully challenge segregation in a manner that forced reforms in local race relations. Aware that King's reputation had suffered from this defeat, Shuttlesworth invited the SCLC to assist him and the ACMHR in Birmingham. Believing that a success would restore his reputation as a national civil rights leader, King agreed. Shuttlesworth hoped King's prestige would attract the black masses and thus mobilize Birmingham's black community behind the joint ACMHR-SCLC campaign (Eskew 2-3).

In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. As ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth stated in the group’s “Birmingham Manifesto,” the campaign was “a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” (Birmingham Campaign 1).

As 1963 began, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC were coming off a campaign in Albany, Georgia, which the New York Herald Tribune called "one of the most stunning defeats of King's career." SCLC had spent over a year in Albany attempting to integrate the city's public facilities. Although the president of the Albany Movement, Dr. William Anderson, said that the campaign was "an overwhelming success, in that there was a change in the attitude of the people involved," King felt that, "we got nothing." The schools remained segregated; the city parks were closed to avoid integration; the libraries were integrated, but only after all the chairs were removed. SCLC official Andrew Young remembered King as being "very depressed." He was looking to start another campaign, and he badly needed a victory (Cozzens 1).

Birmingham had had an election. The city’s three-member commission system was to be replaced by a mayor and city council system. Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Conner, recognizing that his position was about to be axed, had run for mayor and been defeated by Albert Boutwell April 2. When the newly elected officials were to be sworn into office, the three commissioners, including Conner, refused to step down. Suddenly there were two systems of government exercising power. Connor continued to exercise his power as Public Safety Commissioner.

Leaders from the ACMHR met with SCLC officials to plan strategy. Having learned from prior mistakes, King's lieutenant, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, proposed a limited campaign of sit-ins and pickets designed to pressure merchants and local business leaders into demanding the city commission repeal the municipal segregation ordinances (Eskew 4).

Interviewed by Eyes on the Prize years later, Walker revealed his detailed planning. : Learning by the Albany circumstance, I targeted three stores. … And since the 16th Street Baptist Church was going to be our headquarters, I had it timed as to how long it took a youngster to walk down there, how long it would take an older person to walk down there, how long it would take a middle aged person to walk down there. And I picked out what would be the best routes. Under some subterfuge, I visited all three of these stores and counted the stools, the tables, the chairs, etc., and what the best method of ingress and egress was (Walk 2).

Twenty-one demonstrators were arrested on April 2, the first day of protest. Until the courts decided which city government was the legal one, Bull Connor remained in charge of the police and fire departments. Connor adopted Albany sheriff Laurie Pritchett’s restraint in making arrests. Actions expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county building to register voters. Hundreds were arrested.

{Yet], from the outset, the campaign confronted an apathetic black community, an openly hostile established black leadership, and Bull Connor's "nonviolent resistance" in the form of polite arrests of the offenders of the city's segregation ordinances. With no sensational news, the national media found nothing to report, and the campaign floundered.

…

Shuttlesworth led the first of many protest marches on City Hall to emphasize the refusal of the city commission to issue parade permits to the protestors. As the number of demonstrations increased, police arrested more ACMHR members, consequently draining the financial resources of the campaign. Black bystanders gave the campaign the appearance of mass support, but the vast majority of Birmingham's black residents remained uninvolved. A more serious threat came from established black leaders who opposed the civil rights campaign and actively worked to undermine Shuttlesworth by negotiating with the white power structure (Eskew 4-5).

Moderate White lawyer David Vann told his Eyes on the Prize interviewer: “I was upset with Dr. King because he wouldn't give us a chance to prove what we could do through the political processes. And a year and a day after Connor had been elected with the largest vote in history, a majority of the people of this city voted to terminate his office. And when he ran for mayor, they rejected him” (Walk 3)

The Kennedy administration also thought that the demonstrations were ill-timed.

On April 10th, Birmingham obtained a state court injunction, ordering an end to the demonstrations. Discouraged, Dr. King worried that the campaign, as in Albany, would stall. Interviewed by Eyes of the Prize, Andrew Young revealed the movement’s situation.

We had about five or six hundred people in jail, but all the money was gone and we couldn't get people out of jail. And the business community, black business community and some of the white clergy, were pressuring us to call off the demonstrations and just get out of town. And we didn't know what to do. And he sat there in room 30 in the Gaston Motel and Martin didn't say anything. And then finally, he got up and he went in the bedroom and he came back with his blue jeans on and his jacket and he said, "Look," he said, "I don't know what to do. I just know that something has got to change in Birmingham. I don't know whether I can raise money to get people out of jail. I do know that I can go into jail with them." And not knowing how it's going to work out, he walked out of the room and led his demonstration and went to jail.

Local white clergy were criticizing King and the campaign. Young reported: The ministers published in the newspapers a diatribe against Martin calling him a troublemaker and saying that he was there stirring up trouble to get publicity. And he sat down and took that newspaper and he had no paper, and he was in solitary confinement. And he started writing an answer to that one page ad around the margins of the New York Times (Walk 4-5). His rebuttal, titled “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was subsequently printed in newspapers across the country.

King made salient points.

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

…

Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

…

There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

…

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. … The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

…

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

…

The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history (Letter 1-3)

King’s request to call his wife, Coretta Scott King, who was at home in Atlanta recovering from the birth of their fourth child, was denied. After she communicated her concern to the Kennedy administration, Birmingham officials permitted King to call home. Bail money was made available, and he was released on 20 April 1963 (Birmingham Campaign 3).

Although King's decision to seek arrest marked a turning point in his life as a leader, it did little to increase support for the faltering ACMHR-SCLC campaign. …after a month of exhaustive demonstrations, the stalemate with white authorities suggested another Albany and the looming defeat of the Birmingham Campaign (Eskew 5).


Works cited:

“Birmingham Campaign.” Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...

“The Birmingham Desegregation Campaign.” Armistad Digital Resource. Web. http://www.amistadresource.org/civil_...

Cozzens, Lisa. “Birmingham.” Watson.org. Web. http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhist...

Eskew, Glenn T. “Birmingham Campaign of 1963.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Web. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/...

Harris, Joanna. “The 1963 Birmingham Campaign: Events & Impact.” Study.com. Web. https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-...

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]" African Studies Center – University of Pennsylvania. Web. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles...

“No Easy Walk.” Amazon AWS. Web. http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/...

Trueman, C. N. “Birmingham 1963.” The History Learning Site. Web. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1963 -- The Murder of Medgar Evers

By the time Medgar Evers was 28, he had lost a family friend to a lynch mob. He had been turned away from a voting place by a gang of armed white men. He had been denied admission to a Mississippi law school because he was black. Nevertheless, Medgar Evers loved Mississippi. He fought in World War II for the United States “including Mississippi,” he told people. And he returned from overseas with a commitment to steer his home state toward civilization.

That determination and a great deal of personal courage would carry him through many trials during the next nine years. Evers became the first NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, and he spent much of 1955 investigating racial killings. Evers’ research on the murders of George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till and others was compiled in a nationally distributed pamphlet called M is for Mississippi and for Murder.

There was immense danger and little glory attached to civil rights work in Mississippi—even for the NAACP’s highest state official. Medgar Evers was the one who arranged the safe escape of Mose Wright after the elderly black man risked death to testify against the white killers of Emmett Till. It was Medgar Evers who counseled James Meredith through the gauntlet of white resistance when Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When there were no crises to respond to, there were long hours on the road organizing NAACP chapters (Bullard 1-2).

The Evers family lived under constant threat of violence. I can recall that, in the days just preceding the Meredith-Oxford crisis in September, 1962 -- all sorts of legal maneuvers were going on in the Federal district and Fifth Circuit courts -- my wife and I [Hunter Bear] went one Saturday night to the Evers home. We knew Medgar was probably in New Orleans where the Fifth Circuit was then grinding away, and we thought we should see his wife, Myrlie. We parked, went to the door, and knocked. Medgar's police dog was barking in the back yard (fenced up). There was no answer to our knock and I knocked again. Then the door opened, only a crack, and I could see a gun. I called my name and Medgar opened the door, instantly apologetic. He had come to Jackson for the weekend. Inside the Evers home, furniture was piled in front of all of the windows. At least a half dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen. The children were in bed and Medgar and his wife and Eldri and myself visited for a good while. The barricaded nature of the Evers home was not uncommon for a civil rights person in Mississippi; what was uncommon was the fact that both Medgar and his wife were mighty calm. It was a very pleasant visit -- unusually so considering the fact that, next perhaps to Meredith, no one was any more prime a target in the Deep South at that time than was Medgar.

… he was cool: I recall leaving Greenwood with him one night at midnight -- and we left at 90 mph -- with Medgar casually talking about a rumor he'd heard to the effect that a segregationist killer outfit in Leflore Co. had installed infra-red lights on the cars, which could allow them to see the highway, but which couldn't be spotted by whoever they were following. By the time he finished discussing this, we were going about 100 mph! But he was driving easily and well and his talk was calm in tone, if not in content.

But Medgar did not take chances, and no one could seriously accuse him of consciously or unconsciously seeking martyrdom. … Medgar always insisted on people not standing in the light; he, himself, stayed in the shadows -- took every safety precaution. …

No matter how discouraged he might feel, Medgar was always able to communicate -- or at least made a hell of an effort to communicate -- enthusiasm to those with whom he was working. In the early days of the Jackson Movement, our "mass" meetings were tiny affairs, yet Medgar always functioned as though the meetings were the last crucial ones before the Revolution broke in Mississippi: he met each person on an equal to equal basis, smiled, joked, gave them the recognition of human dignity that each human being warrants; by the time the meeting began even the little handful of faithful felt it was worth holding. …

But Medgar Evers could, privately, get discouraged. In his neighborhood for example, lived many teachers. Most would scarcely talk to him -- they were scared to death to even see him. Many of the clergymen in Jackson were afraid to exchange words with him. One evening Medgar came out to our home at Tougaloo; he'd spent the day trying to draw some teachers into the NAACP. They had turned thumbs down on it; had even told him, in effect, that the state's Negro community would be better off without him. He had had it that day and, I recall, talked then -- as he always did when he got discouraged -- about giving up the NAACP field secretary job and getting into the Ole Miss law school in the fall. … He'd get discouraged, privately -- never publicly, but a day or so later, he'd be back in form.

…

As the boycott went on into the spring, we broadened it into an all-out desegregation campaign -- picketing, sit-ins, massive marches. This was in May and June, 1963. It was the first widespread grassroots challenge to the system in Mississippi -- was the Jackson Movement -- and there was solid opposition from [Governor] Barnett right on down. Mass arrests and much brutality occurred each day; lawmen from all over the state poured into Jackson to join the several hundred Jackson regulars, the Jackson police auxiliary, state police, etc. Hoodlums from all over the state -- Klan-types, although the KKK as an organization was just formally beginning in Mississippi -- poured into Jackson. The National Office of the NAACP, which had reluctantly agreed to support our Jackson campaign, became frightened -- because of the vicious repression and because it was costing money -- and also the National Office was under heavy pressure from the Federal government to let Jackson cool off. A sharp split occurred on the strategy committee. Several of us, the youth leaders, myself, Ed King and a few others, wanted to continue, even intensify the mass demonstrations; others, such as the National Office people and conservative clergy wanted to shift everything into a voter registration campaign (meaningless then, under the circumstances.) There was very sharp internecine warfare between our militant group and the conservatives. Medgar was caught in the middle. As a staff employee of the National Office, he was under their direct control; as a Mississippian, he knew that only massive demonstrations could crack Jackson. (And we knew if we cracked Jackson, we had begun to crack the state.) The stakes were high and everyone -- our militant faction on the strategy committee, the conservative group, the segregationists, Federal government -- knew it.

The NAACP National Office began to cut off the bail bond money; and also packed the strategy committee with conservative clergy. It was a hell of a situation. Despite everything that I and Ed and the youth leaders could do, the National Office was choking the Jackson Movement to death. It waned almost into nothing in the second week in June.

I saw Medgar late one afternoon, Tuesday, June 11. He was dead tired and really discouraged -- sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but too much a staff man to openly challenge it. … We had a long talk and, despite the internal situation, an extremely cordial one. But he was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be. Later that evening, we were all at a little mass meeting… it was announced by the National Office people that the focus of the Jackson Movement was now officially voter registration -- no more demonstrations. The boycott, out of which it had all grown, would continue -- but no more demonstrations. NAACP T-shirts were being sold. It was a sorry mess. Medgar had no enthusiasm at all; said virtually nothing at the meeting; looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die (Bear Letter 1-7).

On the night of June 12 President Kennedy announced that he would be sending to Congress legislation that would make it illegal to refuse service to people of color at any "public accommodations," including hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment. "It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service … without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street," Kennedy told a nationwide television audience. "[W]hen Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. … Next week," he declared, "I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law" (O’Brien 2-4).

Interviewed in 1986 Sam Block stated: Medgar had just left us, you see, the same night that he was shot. He bid us farewell and told us that he had just stopped by, he had heard about all of the great things that were going on here in Greenwood and he stopped by to let us know that he was 200 percent with everything that was going on and if there was anything to do just let him know and he will come running anytime day or night and he would be there. He let us know that he loved us and keep up the good work. It was a short speech and he left and went into Jackson and later on that same night ... I guess he had just gotten home (Interview Block 51).

Evers watched the presidential address with other NAACP officials. Greatly encouraged, they held a strategy session lasting late into the night. When Evers finally arrived home, it was after midnight. He pulled into his driveway, gathered up a pile of NAACP T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go,” and got out of his car.

Myrlie Evers had let her children wait up for their father that night. They heard his car door slam. “And in that same instant, we heard the loud gunfire,” Mrs. Evers recalled. “The children fell to the floor, as he had taught them to, and I made a run for the front door, turned on the light and there he was. The bullet had pushed him forward, as I understand, and the strong man that he was, he had his keys in his hand, and had pulled his body around the rest of the way to the door. There he lay" (Bullard 4-5).

The bullet had struck Evers in the back, just below his shoulder blade.

Across the street on a lightly wooded hill, another man jumped … in pain. The recoil from the Enfield rifle he had just fired drove the scope into his eye, badly bruising him. He dropped the weapon and fled (Medgar 1).

Neighbors lifted Evers onto a mattress and drove him to the hospital, but he was dead within an hour after the shot.

…

Myrlie Evers had often heard her husband counsel forgiveness in the face of violence. But the night he was killed, there was only room for grief and rage in her heart. “I can’t explain the depth of my hatred at that point,” she said later. The next night, with newfound strength, she spoke before 500 people at a rally. She urged them to remain calm and to continue the struggle her husband died for (Bullard 5-6).

Interviewed later, Hunter Bear provided this information.

Our role was clear. Our militant group met immediately. We were up all night and into the next day. The national office people came back, but for the moment we had the momentum. We began having very substantial demonstrations. And all of this was pointing ultimately toward a funeral, which would be held on Saturday, June the 15th.

On one of the demonstrations the police charged several of us who were standing there. Most of the demonstrators were Tougaloo students of mine or Youth Council kids, or their parents. It was on Rose Street. I was standing right next to them. The police charged me particularly, and several people with me, but not the demonstrators, who had been arrested. Several people who were with me at that point ran, but I refused to run … I faced them, they surrounded me and clubbed me into unconsciousness in a bloody mud puddle on Rose Street.

… I was thrown into a paddy wagon, and there was a kid in there who wanted to try to escape and I said don't do it, they'll kill you. And so I kept him from doing that, which would have been very foolish, — ill timed.

… And lots of people were arrested in that Rose Street march. The police had turned out en masse, and so as they were arresting [the marchers], you also had this flying wedge of cops who focused on me. And we all wound up together in the fairgrounds.

An odd thing happened. I was lying in the paddy wagon and they turned the heat up, closed the windows, turned the heat up as high as it could go. And a man came and opened the door to let air in. It was M.B. Pierce, the chief of detectives. And he said to me very quietly, he said, "Professor, I'm sorry about this whole thing." And this was the first indication that something was reaching the other side. …

I was then taken to a hospital and later to the city jail and bonded out pretty quickly, — many stitches and bloody shirt. I made a very dramatic entrance at the Blair Street AME Church and spoke briefly to a cheering throng. But the real action occurred in the pastor's study, when Bill Kunstler and I called Martin King and asked if Dr. King could come to the funeral. And Dr. King said he could and would.

…

On Saturday, I picked up Dr. King at the airport. Kunstler rode with me and Dr. King, and I think Ralph Abernathy was in our car. Wyatt Walker and some others were in another car. We were given a grudging police escort, it was two miles to the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street where the funeral was being held. Jackson was inflamed, the whole state was inflamed, everything was ablaze, so to speak in that sense. Metaphorically.

As I drove my little Rambler with Dr. King sitting on the front seat, I was struck by how cool he was, — how cool we all were. The police hated us with a passion. The escort was very grudging. Snipers could be anywhere. We had a very interesting, matter of fact conversation. We might have been driving from say, Salina Kansas to Abilene or something like that. So we were all very cool. What else could we be?

So I let Dr. King off at the Masonic Temple, and the street was full of Black people going in. I let him and his party off, and Kunstler and so forth, and I went down a ways and parked and came back. By the time I got there, there was no space for me. I went upstairs, where a number of our militant wing of the strategy committee were gathered in a kind of attic that could look down and so we could see the situation. What we didn't see was this deplorable scene where the NAACP national officers tried to keep Martin King off the platform. … eventually they had to let him go up there.

So it was a dramatic funeral. As it developed, there were 5,000-6,000 people who had come from all over the state. Many notable luminaries from afar, — Ralph Bunche was there, others. We had a march then for about two miles, from the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street. It was very hot, there were police at every intersection, every juncture.

… it was a legal march. The Mayor had grudgingly, — the day before, — announced that he'd give a parade permit.

We marched for two miles, there are many photos of it. I was in one of the very first ranks, Dr. King was pretty much right in front of me. And Kunstler behind. I'm wearing bandages from the police beating. It was very hot. When we went through the Black neighborhoods, people were out in force. Some joined the march. They certainly were not intimidated by what was happening.

When we went through the white neighborhoods, the people watched up from their porches, — they were scared, frightened. For our part, we were a well-dressed group of people, there just happened to be five or six thousand of us marching through Jackson, Mississippi.

We got to the Collins Funeral Home and people had massed in front. Space was limited on Farish Street, but there were people on all the side streets. Nobody wanted to go home. Bill [Kunstler] came up to me and said Dr. King had to get back to where he was, and so Bill borrowed my car and took King and the others to the airport. It was obvious that there wasn't going to be any chance of his joining us. [Bear believed that the national NAACP had put pressure on him to leave].

… we stayed. It was very hot. You had several thousand people gathered there and it was very hot. You had the police all around the edges.

We started to sing, "Oh Freedom," and then everyone began to sing. And then one large group broke from the mass, and we, — I say "we," because I was part of it, — left and went down Farish Street toward Capitol Street. Now we moved down toward Capitol Street, with the police running from our demonstration, running...

Away from us, — they were scared. The police were running and then they massed down there. When we had crossed Capitol in the funeral march, the police were massed on both sides so we couldn't turn onto Capitol Street, — they were afraid of that. And in this second demonstration there was a great deal of interaction. There was very little violence in the mass crowd. There were hundreds, — there may have been much more than that, — I can only give you a sense that there were a hell of a lot of people but not the whole group that had been in the funeral march. And the police were heavily massed down there in all kinds of blue helmets, brown helmets, this and that, and so forth. We had a large, singing, surging demonstration.

[Rev.] Ed King, who'd been actively involved in things was there. The police massed down there, and they began to start pushing us back. They couldn't arrest everybody, they picked out 29 people, including me and Ed King, and 27 others and threw us in the paddy wagons. So from the paddy wagon I was able to look out this little barred window and had a bird's eye view of what was occurring.

I saw hundreds of police coming now back up Farish Street to regain lost ground. I watched police dogs, — which were inflamed, — biting the policemen. Tear gas was all over, the cops were firing shots. All sorts of things were happening. It was not a riot on our part. Non-violence had been preserved even if by the barest of threads sometimes, but we encouraged non-violence, and fought for tactical non-violence. We certainly didn't want people to play into the hands of our enemies who were only too happy to have a Sharpeville if they could have had it. That's what they wanted. [In 1960 police in the South African township of Sharpeville opened fire on a peaceful protest march and killed 69 men, women, and children.]

… The police accused me of inciting to riot and things of that sort. When we got out early in the evening and got back to Tougaloo, we learned that there had been an emergency strategy meeting, which the national office had nominated. And I had been blamed, along with Ed King and some other people, of inciting the "riot."

… all that had happened had been that a few kids had thrown some stones at the police. At that point Doar had come forward in something that was later grossly exaggerated to his advantage, and quote "calmed the throng" unquote. All this had been just a few rocks thrown by some angry kids. No matter what anybody may say to the contrary, that was it, — it was not a riot. And the kids were throwing rocks only after people had been beaten and slugged right and left. And horribly mistreated, and as far as they knew, people had been shot, I mean, it could have happened. I don't think it did, but given the shooting that was going on, it was only by a miracle.

So Doar persuaded people to disperse and go home. And from that point on, it was clear that we had profoundly serious problems. Many people were afraid of what happened, the Governor sent the National Guard into Jackson that night, and they were patrolling the streets along with the other hordes of folk, — enemies. There was an uneasy strategy committee meeting on Monday, where we heard about Federal involvement very openly, — that the President and the Attorney General were going to become involved (Interview Bear 22-29).

Leading the investigation, the local police immediately found the rifle and determined that it had been recently fired. Back at the station, a fingerprint was recovered from the scope and submitted to the FBI (Medgar 2).

On June 23, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder (NAACP 4).

With the obvious motive, his fingerprint on the weapon, the injury around his eye, his planning, and other factors, Beckwith clearly appeared to be the killer (Medgar 2).

During the course of his first 1964 trial, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.

All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith’s guilt, allowing him to escape justice.

In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others [such as how he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers]. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly excellent state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the murder. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January of 2001 (NAACP 4-5).

The horrific murder, after Kennedy's impassioned plea for reason and civility, stunned the nation. Evers's funeral attracted more than 5,000 mourners and hundreds more greeted his body in Washington, DC, where it had been transported by train for a hero's burial at America's final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. Evers had been a decorated soldier in World War II, and his widow, Myrlie Evers, had been coaxed by NAACP officials into allowing him to be buried in that most hallowed of spaces to make a statement about the vast injustices being committed on American soil.

It was on the very day that Evers was laid in the ground that President Kennedy sent his civil rights legislation to Congress, leveraging whatever empathy that moment inspired to make good on his promise from the week before. The next day, he invited Evers' widow and her children to visit him at the White House to express to them personally his sympathies for the loss of their beloved husband and father. He handed Mrs. Evers a copy of the just-delivered bill, which would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (O’Brien 3-4).

A year before his death, Evers told an interviewer why he devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights: “I am a victim of segregation and discrimination and I’ve been exposed to bitter experiences. These things have remained with me. But I think my children will be different. I think we’re going to win” (Bullard 7).


Works cited:

Bear, Hunter. “Letter to Ms. Polly Greenberg, New York September 27, 1966.” Medgar Evers: Reflection and Appreciation. Web. http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm

Bullard, Sara. “Medgar Evers.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Interview with Sam Block.” Digital Education Systems. December 12, 1986. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_... pages 51-53

“Medgar Evers,” FBI, History. Web. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-ca...

“NAACP History: Medgar Evers.” NAACP. Web. https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-m...

O’Brien, M. J. “Medgar Evers & Civil Rights Act of 1964 Linked.” Clarion Ledger. July 1, 2014. Web. https://www.clarionledger.com/story/j...

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1963 -- Jackson Movement, January -- June

Our Youth Council was growing [interviewed years later, Hunter Bear commented]. By March and April of '63, we could pull together over 100 kids. ... We were impressed with what Martin King and Fred Shuttlesworth had accomplished in Birmingham.

…

The[ Jackson] Citizen's Council refused to let any businessman, — white businessman, — consider any kind of negotiation. They threatened to boycott them out of business. [In other words, if a store eased segregation in response to the boycott by Blacks, the White Citizens Council would coerce their suppliers to boycott them, and the banks that held the mortgages would foreclose.]

The problem was where were we going to get the backing? King's treasury was exhausted [from providing bail money and legal defense for the thousands arrested in the Birmingham campaign], SNCC never had any money anyway, — bless its soul. CORE was very limited. [James] Farmer was very sympathetic to us, and sent a couple of good letters, things like that, and I thought highly of him. But they had their hands full, and were small. The NAACP had money, but the NAACP didn't like to spend money.

…

…our real target was the downtown business thing. If we could crack that, if we could win things there, then we could also force the business sector to put pressure on the politicians. That was our basic analysis. And I worked pretty hard on building support for a broader [campaign] that would be lots of pickets, sit-ins, maybe mass marches (Interview 11-12).

By Easter, 70% of Black shoppers are supporting the boycott of Jackson's white-owned stores. College and high school students are clandestinely distributing 10,000 leaflets a month in Jackson and the surrounding area — a total of 110,000 by the end of May. Most of Jackson's Black churches allow boycott leaders to speak at Sunday services. Underground boycott committees are active in many of Jackson's Black neighborhoods and there are secret student committees at the three Black high schools, Lanier, Brinkly, and Jim Hill. Supporters in the North are mounting sympathy pickets against Woolworths and other chain stores in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

The boycott is energized and sustained by the young activists of the NAACP Youth Councils. But against the entrenched resistance of the White Citizens Council backed by state and local government, they know that the boycott alone is not strong enough to break segregation in Jackson Mississippi. Inspired by the Birmingham Movement [posts about which I will soon make], they are convinced that similar mass protests are necessary in Jackson. NAACP state Field Director Medgar Evers shares their views, but the NAACP's national leaders prefer lawsuits and voter education to mass direct action, and they control the purse-strings. Though they reluctantly accept the necessity of a few pickets being arrested to publicize the boycott, they adamantly oppose sit-ins, mass marches, or other tactics that they associate with Dr. King, whom they view as an upstart rival.

As an employee of the national organization, Medgar is prohibited from endorsing or participating in mass direct action. But the other NAACP activists in Jackson are unpaid volunteers and thus have more freedom to chart their own course. On May 12, Jackson boycott leaders send a letter to the white power-structure demanding fair employment, an end to segregation, and biracial negotiations with officials and community leaders. Large-scale, Birmingham-style, direct action is threatened if the city refuses to meet with Black leaders. The letter is signed by Medgar, Mrs. Doris Allison who is President of the Jackson NAACP, and Hunter Bear (John Salter) the NAACP Youth Council's adult advisor.

Led by Mayor Allen Thompson, the power-structure adamantly refuses to make any concessions or to meet with Black leaders (Jackson Sit-Ins 1-3)

Thompson … replied in a televised speech to blacks: “You live in a beautiful city … where you can work, where you can make a comfortable living … do not listen to false rumors which will stir you, worry you and upset you.”

The mayor’s speech only angered blacks more. The television station granted Evers equal air time. “History has reached a turning point, here and over the world,” Evers said. He compared black life in Jackson to the lives of black Africans. “Tonight, the Negro knows … about the new free nation in Africa and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck.”

The bold speech made Evers the focus of racial tensions in the city. Young blacks became more impatient as city officials stubbornly refused to listen to civil rights demands (Bullard 3).

One week later, on Tuesday, May 28, after training in the tactics of Nonviolent Resistance by Dave Dennis of CORE, young activists Lois Chafee, Perlena Lewis, Anne Moody, Memphis Norman, Joan Trumpauer, and Walter Williams sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter on Capitol Street in downtown Jackson. They are joined by youth advisor Hunter Bear. Mercedes Wright (NAACP Georgia youth advisor) and Tougaloo Chaplin Reverend Ed King act as observers.

The boycott pickets outside are immediately arrested as usual. But, surprisingly, the cops do not bust those who are sitting in. Instead, a mob of white teenagers and young men are allowed (encouraged) to enter Woolworths to attack the sit-ins, cursing, punching, covering them with mustard, ketchup, & sugar. Water mixed with pepper is thrown into their eyes. Jackson Police Captain Ray and dozens of cops do nothing as Memphis Norman is pulled from his stool, beaten and kicked. After he loses consciousness, the cops arrest him. Joan too is beaten, kicked, and dragged to the door, but with steadfast, nonviolent courage she manages to resume her seat. FBI agents observe, and as usual do nothing (Jackson Sit-Ins 1-4).

Hunter Bear (John Salter) described what happened:

On a comical note, as I was moving to the front of the thing, an old white man who was sort of a Klan type, who didn't spot me for what I am, said, "Hit them, boy, hit them hard." And then I sat down.

Then people suddenly realized who I was, and I was a lightning rod, I drew the wrath of the [mob]. I was struck many times, burned with cigarettes and things. I have a very thick skull, — believe me, — incredibly thick. And I have a high pain threshold. So I was cut with broken sugar glasses and cut with brass knuckles, different things like that. The young women had condiments poured all over them, and I had some poured on me, but mostly I was hit.


Down at the other end, why a lot of stuff was dumped on people too. Walter Williams was hit, but got up and rejoined the group on his end of things. You know, we stuck it out, it went on for about three hours. It was a horrible Goddamn scene when you stop to think about it, but actually Annie and Joan and myself talked about an exam that I'd given, which they thought was a little hard, and I said, "It was really very fair because I gave you all the questions before we had the test, you just had to ..."

… I didn't feel any great venom toward the attackers, — although there were a few points where I did. But in any event, what happened then is that they began to tear up the store after about three hours, and we went outside. There were a lot of newsmen all over. We hadn't realized it at that point, but this had gone all over the world. Outside there was a huge mob waiting. We also had people who were picketing, but they were arrested immediately. The police grudgingly gave us safe passage. We went off to our respective physicians (Interview 13-16).

The Mayor meets with the Black "leaders" selected by him and tells them he will desegregate public facilities such as parks and libraries, hire some Negro cops, and promote a few Black sanitation workers.

That night, more than 1,000 people attend a mass meeting at Pearl St. Church to support the boycott and the sit-ins. The young activists call for mass protest marches like those in Birmingham. But at the urging of the more conservative Black ministers, the young activists agree to temporarily halt demonstrations while the Mayor's promise is tested.

The next day, Wednesday May 29, the Mayor denies that he made any concessions at all. He announces that protests will not be tolerated and hastily deputizes 1,000 "special officers" drawn from the ranks of the most virulent racists. A mob of whites and over 200 cops prowl Capitol Street ready to pounce on any pickets or sit-ins. Woolworths and other stores close their lunch counters and remove the seats. Pickets led by local NAACP chair Doris Allison are immediately arrested …

That night a firebomb is thrown at Medgar's home. The police refuse to investigate, calling it a "prank." The following day, Thursday May 30, more pickets and sit-ins are arrested.

With the public school term ending the next day (Friday, the 31st), high school students begin mobilizing for mass marches to begin as soon as school lets out. At Lanier and Brinkley High, Youth Council activists lead several hundred students singing freedom songs on the lawn during lunch break. Cops force the Lanier students back into the building with clubs and dogs. The school is surrounded, and parents are beaten and arrested when they try to reach school.

…

As soon as school lets out for the summer on Friday May 31st, close to 600 Lanier, Brinkley, and Jim Hill high school students join students on summer break from Tougaloo and Jackson State at Farish Street Baptist Church for the first mass march. Their plan is continuous marches like Birmingham with jail-no-bail for those arrested (there is no money for bail bonds, and the cost of incarcerating hundreds of protesters will put pressure on the authorities).

Hundreds of cops, troopers, "special deputies," and sheriffs surround the church. Whites in cars prowl the city waving Confederate flags. Led by NAACP youth organizer Willie Ludden, the students march out of the church two-by-two on the sidewalk. Carrying American flags, they start towards the downtown shopping district on Capital Street. The cops block the street. They grab the flags from the marchers and drop them in the dirt. Beating some of the marchers with clubs, they force them into garbage trucks and take them to the animal stockade at the nearby state fairgrounds. "Just like Nazi Germany," observes World War II veteran Medgar Evers who is not allowed to participate in the march by his NAACP superiors. U.S. Department of Justice officials observe, and do nothing.

That night 1500 people attend a huge mass meeting. Though the students planned to go jail-no-bail, NAACP lawyers who oppose mass marches convince many of them to bond out. And the minors are forced to sign a no-demonstration pledge before being released. But a hard core of protesters over the age of 18 hold out, refusing to sign the pledge.

On Saturday, June 1st NAACP national head Roy Wilkins, Medgar Evers, and Mrs. Helen Wilcher of Jackson are arrested for picketing downtown stores. It is Wilkins first-ever civil rights arrest, and the three are quickly bonded out. A number of national NAACP leaders are now in Jackson vigorously opposing mass marches and mass arrests. They argue for voter registration and continuing the boycott in the same manner as the past six months. Despite their opposition, late in the day 100 students and adults march. The cops are caught by surprise, and the marchers manage to get several blocks through the Black community before being surrounded and hauled to the fair grounds stockade in garbage trucks.

On Sunday June 2nd, the Jackson NAACP offices are locked up tight and there is no place for marchers to gather. Using their control of funds, the national NAACP leaders oust the student and Youth Council activists from the democratically elected strategy committee and replace them with conservative ministers and affluent community "leaders" who oppose Birmingham-style mass action. The new, reconstituted, committee agrees to refocus on the boycott, voter registration, and court cases.

Over the following days the national NAACP leaders prevent any new mass marches. Without the sustaining energy of mass action, morale sags and attendance at mass meetings drops, though a hard core of students are still holding out in the stockade, refusing to be bonded out (Jackson Sit-In 6-12).

By June the 6th the movement had dipped because bail bond had been cut off largely, and lots of other inhibiting things were being done [Hunter Bear disclosed]. Some of us were talking about making an invitation to Martin King, which enraged the NAACP people. In the middle of all of this, we were hit with an injunction.

...

It had three levels [of prohibition]. [First was] actually doing something like picketing or demonstrating, sit-ins or pray-ins, or things of that sort. Then conspiring to do those things. And then the third level was doing anything to consummate conspiracies. Of course, we had no intention of complying with it, and we began to immediately violate the thing as much as we could (Interview 18).

On Thursday, June 6th, a Hinds County court issues a sweeping injunction against all forms of movement activity. Though the injunction blatantly violates Constitutionally protected rights of free-speech and assembly, the national NAACP leaders who have taken over the Jackson movement choose not to defy it with direct action. Discouraged and disheartened, the last students accept bond and leave the stockade. Noted comedian Dick Gregory, who had come to Jackson to participate in demonstrations returns to Chicago saying: "The NAACP decided to go into the courts — and I'm no attorney. I came down here to be with that little man in the streets; and I was willing to go to jail for ten years, if necessary to get this problem straight " (Jackson Sit-Ins 13).

Hunter Bear: So the point is that the strategy committee was split. The Youth Council was strong for continuing. Many of the younger ministers were strong for continuing. Many of the younger Black businessmen wanted to continue, but the old guard ministers were with the national office, and the [NAACP] national office was on a puppet string with the Kennedys, — or at least they had a string on each other.

And the point is that it was a very confusing situation. … But the reality was that it was a completely fucked up situation in every possible way. … But it was very difficult. The Youth Council couldn't quite understand until we'd gone a ways why the national office, — which was supposed to be all for these things, — was turning into an albatross.

The other side figured we were about done for. [On the] Flag Day demonstration, the flags were all confiscated, the kids were arrested, you know, that sort of thing. We had a National Flag Day, and we had about 15 kids with flags.

We were reluctant to get a large number of people arrested unless we had some guarantee of their getting out at some point. … the movement had hit a very low point, and we decided we'd better contact Martin King.

By that time I'd sent Eldri [his wife] and Maria, my oldest daughter, out of Jackson under an assumed name. Threats were being made to blow up our home at Tougaloo. Lug nuts on my car had been loosened while it was parked at the airport. Things like that. … Eldri didn't want to go, but I made her go. And so she was in the North.

I went home on the night of June 11 to an empty house. We'd had a small mass meeting, — they were getting smaller. Medgar had loaned me his old 44-40 [rifle], — I had other firearms, but I liked the idea of a Winchester 44-40, I'd had several. And I'd just barely gotten to sleep, when somebody was pounding on the door, it was George Owens, the business manager of Tougaloo. And he said Medgar has been shot, he's probably dead (Interview 19-21).


Works cited:

Bullard, Sara. “Medger Evers.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Jackson Sit-In & Protests (May –June).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement History and Timeline, 1963 Jan-June. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.h...

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi Early 1963 -- Violence and Death in and near Greenwood

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

Defying generations of white-supremacy, a small trickle of Leflore county Blacks continue to show up at the courthouse even though they know they won't be allowed to register. For sharecroppers and farm laborers in the Mississippi Delta, winter is the lean time, the hard time. With no work and nothing to eat, they rely on federal surplus food commodities for survival. The White Citizens Council strikes back — at poor people in general, not just the few Blacks trying to register. The Council controls Greenwood politics, no politician can win election without their support, and as winter closes in they order the County Board of Supervisors to stop distributing federal food aid to 22,000 Leflore County citizens — most of them Black, a few poor white or Choctaw.

In this era before Food Stamps, the federal "commodity" programs staved off starvation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided basic food commodities — bags of flour, rice & beans, boxes of canned goods, dairy products, and so on — to states, counties, and private welfare agencies who distributed them to poor and hungry families. …

By mid-winter, conditions are desperate. Sam Block and Wazir Peacock inform SNCC headquarters in Atlanta:

Saturday, January 19, 1963. ... these people here are in a very, very bad need for food and clothes. Look at a case like this man, named Mr. Meeks, who is thirty-seven years old. His wife is thirty-three years old, and they have eleven children, ages ranging from seventeen down to eight months. Seven of the children are school age and not a one is attending school because they have no money, no food, no clothes, and no wood to keep warm by, and they now want to go register. The house they are living in has no paper or nothing on the walls and you can look at the ground through the floor and if you are not careful you will step in one of those holes and break your leg.

…

SNCC sends word to its supporters on college campuses and in Friends of SNCC chapters throughout the country — and people respond. Comedian Dick Gregory charters a plane to deliver emergency food supplies to Greenwood. He becomes a Movement stalwart, raising funds, participating in demonstrations, enduring beatings and arrests in the cause of Freedom.

Michigan State students Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor drive a truckload of food, clothing, and medicine 1,000 miles down into the Mississippi Delta over the Christmas holidays. The local cops are tipped off — perhaps by some federal agency — and the two are busted in Clarksdale for "possesion of narcotics." The supposed "narcotics" are actually aspirin and vitamins. They are held on $15,000 bail (equal to $115,000 in 2012). After 11 days in jail, a nation-wide protest gets them released, but the confiscated food, clothing, and medicine mysteriously disappears from police custody before it can be returned to them. Ivanhoe is not intimidated, in the following months he delivers a dozen truckloads of food to embattled Greenwood and goes on to become a SNCC field secretary.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration and U.S. Department of Justice do nothing effective to protect the voting rights of Black citizens. With legal support provided by Dr. King, SNCC sues Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in January of 1963 demanding that they enforce existing federal voting rights laws. Rather than performing their Constitutionally-required duty to protect the rights of all citizens, federal lawyers quash the suit.

But violence, intimidation, beatings, arrests, and federal dereliction, all fail to halt the growing movement. And the food blockade backfires.

Whenever we were able to get a little something to give to a hungry family, we also talked about how they ought to register. The food was ...identified in the minds of everyone as food for those who want to be free, and the minimum requirement for freedom is identified as registration to vote. — Bob Moses (Greenwood Food 1-2).

In late February, an anonymous caller warns that the new office SNCC was finally able to rent is going to be destroyed. Four adjacent Black businesses are burnt in a bungled arson attempt, but they miss the SNCC office. When Sam [Block] describes the fire as "arson" at a mass meeting he is arrested for "statements calculated to breach the peace." It is his seventh Movement arrest in Greenwood (Marching 1).

Over one hundred local Black people angrily packed the courthouse. “They were drinking out of the [white] water fountain. They really had their chests stuck out. They came to get Sam out of jail,” recalled SNCC’s Willie Peacock. Part of their anger was caused by the devastating impact of the cut-off of the commodity supplemental food program in retaliation for the growing voter registration campaign. As Bob Moses noted, “For the first time they were seeing the connection between political participation and food on their table (Sam 3).

More than one hundred Black protesters show up at City Hall on the day of Sam's trial — the first mass protest by Greenwood Blacks in living memory. Sam is sentenced to 6 months in jail and a $500 fine. The Judge offers to suspend the sentence if Sam agrees to leave town and halt efforts to register Black voters. Replies Sam: "Judge, I ain't gonna do that." He is released on bond pending appeal, and that night addresses a mass meeting of 250 people — the largest mass meeting to date (Marching 1).

… throwing me in jail and holding me like that and charging me with arson [Sam Block recalled] people came from everywhere, out of the cotton fields with dirty boots on. And they had my trial in a little kangeroo court … And that is when the movement really began to take off. … I refused to leave. And that again instilled the faith in the people that were there around me (Interview 42).

On Tuesday, February 26, more than 200 Blacks line up at the Courthouse to register to vote. They know they will not be allowed to register, but attempting to do so has become for them a symbol of both pride and defiance. And the white power-structure recognizes it as such. The police order them to disperse. They hold their ground, remaining in line. The Registrar delays and evades, admitting only a few to fill out the application and take the so-called "literacy test." Those few who manage to take the test are rejected. But in Leflore County fear is beginning to lose its grip.

That night, KKK nightriders ambush a SNCC car on the road, firing 13 rounds from a .45 caliber machine gun at Jimmy Travis, Bob Moses, and VEP Field Director Randolph Blackwell. [Travis had been driving] Jimmy is hit twice, in the neck and shoulder [Moses had had to take the wheel], and has to be rushed to the nearest hospital willing to treat Black freedom fighters. From around the nation demands for protection and enforcement of federal voting rights laws are sent to Washington. The Kennedy administration takes no noticeable action (Marching 1-2).

Sam Block narrates:

Bob and Randolph and Jimmy came over from Greenwood and about 8:30 or 9:00 that night Bob and Randall and Jimmy decided that they would leave and go back to Greenville. … Bob had noticed this car circling the block prior to their leaving but he didn't tell us. So they left and stopped at the 82 Grill to get something to eat and the car trailed them and it was then Bob called Willie and I back to tell Willie and I that we should close up the office and try to go on home immediately because he had noticed this white car with four men in it wearing dark shades circling the office quite frequently and he didn't know what they were up to.

So they left and they took a back road into Itta Bena going on to Greenville. And just as I understand they got, approached Itta Bena, the car pulled up aside them, went by them at a high speed and recognized them and went up the highway and turned around and came back and fired at the car with a submachine gun. …

So we went to the hospital and by the time Willie and I got there Jimmy was lying on the table and I understand they refused to wait on him because they said they didn't have proper facilities. But one of the persons who was there said one of the reasons was they really didn't want him there anyway. And we had to take him to Jackson. So we didn't have any money to get an ambulance. We had to wait until the next morning. The man wouldn't transport him to Jackson, it was a black ambulance driver, unless we had the funds or something. Anyway the next morning we took him to Jackson and that is where Jimmy was operated on (Interview 30-31).

After Travis was stabilized and transferred to Jackson University Hospital, the doctor there told the twenty-year-old Travis that he had barely survived the bullet lodged in his spinal cord (Jimmy 2).

COFO calls on all voter-registration workers in Mississippi to concentrate on Greenwood to show that Klan terror cannot halt a growing freedom movement. By early March, dozens of SNCC organizers, plus some CORE field secretaries and SCLC staff members are working out of the Greenwood SNCC/COFO office in defiance of Klan terror, police repression, and Citizen Council economic retaliation. Whites shoot at a car containing Sam, Wazir, and local students working with the movement (Marching 1-3).

Sam described the incident.

So this particular night [March 6] -- I had asmatha, I am an asmathic-- we are at the church and I said, "Look I have to have my medicine." Peacock said, "Man, do you have to have it right now." I said, "Yes, I have to have it right now." So we got in the car with his girlfriend and my girlfriend--they were two sisters. I was driving, we drove back to the office across the tracks over to MacLaurin. And my girlfriend said, "Sam, look don't get out of the car, please don't get out of this car." I said, "Why?" She said, "I just feel that something is going to happen." I said, "Look, I have got to have my medication."

And I went to open the door of the car and six white men drove up in a station wagon and fired into the car shooting deer slugs at close range. Shot directly through the front window and the bullet went into a house and there was a lady and a baby lying in bed there and it went directly into the mattress. Had the shots been fired just an inch or so higher they would have killed those people because the deer slugs did not spread until they got out. But Peacock hit the floor and I hit the floor and said I had been hurt, been shot. I just had glass and stuff in my face.

Anyway we called the police. And one thing, the first policeman to arrive was Captain Usser and he told Peacock' girlfriend,, said, "Essie, you know I know you." She said, "Yes sir, I know you do." "Don't you know these two niggers right here are going to get you killed?" She aid, "Well, yes sir, I see now." "You had betterstop hanging around these two niggers right here. If you don't you are going to end up dead."

So the police came then and instead of taking us to the hospital they wanted to take us to jail because they accused me of plotting the shooting to receive cheap publicity. So we went to the hospital and the glass was removed from my face and we came back and continued to work and people began to give out the food and stuff and people were going down to the courthouse then in mass droves (Interview 27-28).

… gunfire punched 27 holes in the car. Peacock jumped out of the vehicle and began throwing bricks at the car that had attacked them as it sped away. They later discovered that a local policeman, who worked with one of the women in the car, had fired at them (Willie 3).

Though he knows full well who is responsible, Greenwood mayor Charles Sampson denies that white racists are the perpetrators. He falsely accuses SNCC of faking the attack to garner support. On March 24th the Klan finally succeeds in fire-bombing the office. It is destroyed. The Movement continues.

... Dewey Greene takes a leading role in encouraging voter-registration, son George and daughter Freddie are leaders among the local students. On the night of March 26, the Klan shoots into the Greene home, narrowly missing three of the children. The Greenes are a well- respected family in Greenwood's Black community and instead of intimidating people the shooting does just the opposite.

“Now the morning of the march we were at the church there and began singing. [James] Forman came by; he was actually on his way out of town, he was driving. So he suggested that maybe we ought to go down to City Hall and protest the shooting. We did not anticipate that the police would react as they did. We were simply going to the police station and request a conference with the police chief asking for police protection in light of the shooting. And they met us there with the dogs and with guns and so forth and I guess, as Jim says, they simply went berserk for a little while. ...” — Bob Moses

The marchers — men, women, and children — are singing and praying as they approach City Hall. Suddenly, they are attacked by police dogs and beaten by club-wielding cops. SNCC leaders Bob Moses, Jim Forman, Wazir Peacock, Frank Smith, and six Greenwood activists are arrested. …

The Greenwood Movement is not intimidated by dogs or cops or arrests. Where a year earlier local Blacks feared to be seen in the company of Sam Block or Wazir Peacock, now a thousand or more are involved in the Movement in one way or another — protesting, canvassing, trying to register, attending meetings, housing and feeding organizers, providing bail money, and so on. By 10am the next morning there are 50 Blacks lined up at the courthouse to register, by noon more than 100. A small army of helmeted police confront them. Again they attack with dogs and clubs. SNCC field secretary Charlie Cobb reports:

With the events of the morning of the 28th, the issues in Greenwood broadened beyond voter registration and became more basic. The issue now was, Did people have a right to walk the streets which they had paid for, with whomever they please, as long as they are orderly and obey all traffic laws? The city's answer was, Not if you're a nigger! There was a very direct link between this issue and voter registration, because for years attempting to register to vote for Negroes meant preparing alone to suffer physical assault while making the attempt, economic reprisals after the attempt, and sometimes death. To go with friends and neighbors made the attempt less frightening and reduced the chances of physical assault at the courthouse, since cowards don't like to openly attack numbers. It also reduced the chance of economic reprisal, since the firing of one hundred Negro maids would put the good white housewives of Greenwood in a bind ('tis a grim life for Miss Ann without Mary, Sally, or Sam).

Photos of police dogs savaging nonviolent protesters and news describing denial of basic voting rights flash across the world, embarrassing the Kennedy administration on the world stage and undercutting his "Free World" diplomacy at the United Nations. Moses and the others arrested on the 27th are convicted of "disorderly conduct" and given the maximum sentence, four months in prison and a $200 fine. Hoping to force the Department of Justice to file suit against the county's interference with the right to vote, they refuse to pay the fine or pay bail while the case is appealed.

But the Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert Kennedy cuts a deal instead. Eager to halt the embarrassing news stories coming out of Greenwood, the Feds agree not to file a voting rights suit against local officials. In return, the Greenwood power-structure agrees to release Moses and the others without bond while their case is appealed, and to stop using police brutality against Blacks trying to register. The county also agrees to resume food distribution so long as it is paid for by the federal government (in other words, the Feds supply not only the food, but also pick up the distribution costs which everywhere else in the nation are carried by the county). This allows Leflore politicians to assure their segregationist supporters that local taxes are not being used to "reward uppity Blacks" with free food (Marching 4-7).

Sam Block continues his story.

What happened after Jimmy's shooting I got on the road a lot and began to raise money, spent a lot of time around Chicago and New York and California speaking to raise money for the movement and to try to get other people involved.

…

I wanted to be in Greenwood. But they thought too and felt that I had become battle fatigued. I had almost been killed by a speeding truck, I had to jump behind a telephone poll to escape death. Oh, I had been beaten in the genesis in Greenwood real bad, been pushed under a car and left for dead .... {Short break} The people themselves did not want me to leave but it was a necessity. They felt that if anyone could tell the story about what was going on in Greenwood it was me because it was my project, I was the first to go into Greenwood. From there, as you know, we got Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and others began to pull food into Greenwood. And the mass marches really began to take place then (Interview 32, 33).

With the cops no longer attacking Blacks trying to register to vote, embarrassing photos stop coming out of Greenwood, which relieves the Kennedys. But the deal only halts police repression. The KKK continues to threaten Black voters with terrorist violence and the Citizens Council continues to coerce Blacks with economic terror, firing and evicting those who try to register. And without federal voting rights enforcement, the Registrar is free to continue rigging the application and "literacy test" to prevent most Blacks from actually registering. In the following months, 1500 Blacks risk life and economic survival by journeying to the courthouse, but only a handful are added to the voting rolls. By the end of 1963 there are only 268 Black voters in Leflore County compared to 10,000 white voters, even though 65% of the population is Black (Marching 4-8).

After the Greenwood cops agree to stop assaulting Blacks trying to register and LeFlore county resumes food distribution, voter registration organizers once again expand outward into surrounding counties. Greenwood becomes the hub of activity for the Delta counties of LeFlore, Holmes, Carroll, Tallahatchie, Sunflower, and Humphreys. And organizers return to the areas around Laurel, Meridian, Hattiesburg, Holly Springs, and Vicksburg.

White resistance remains vicious. In Holmes county, Hartman Turnbow, a farmer, is one of the first Blacks to try to register since the end of Reconstruction. He leads 12 others to the county courthouse. Klan nightriders surround his home, firebomb it, and then shoot at him, his wife, and daughter when they try to escape the burning building. Turnbow grabs his rifle and returns fire, driving them off. The county Sheriff arrests Turnbow, accusing him of firebombing his own house and shooting it full of holes to win sympathy from Northern movement supporters. Bob Moses and three other SNCC organizers are also arrested. A local court convicts them — without a shred of evidence — but the charges are eventually dismissed when appealed to federal court.

The Movement carries on, and people of courage respond. In Sunflower County, Fannie Lou Hamer, 46 years old, mother of two children, a sharecropper and plantation worker all her life, steps up to register after talking to SNCC organizers and attending a voter registration mass meeting. She and almost 20 others go down to the courthouse in Indianola. The cops stop the old bus they are using, and arrest the driver because the bus is "the wrong color." When Mrs. Hamer returns home she is fired from her job and evicted from her home of 18 years. Klan marauders shoot up the house of a friend who gives her shelter. Fannie Lou Hamer is not intimidated, she commits her life and soul to the Freedom Movement, first as an SCLC Citizenship School teacher, then as a SNCC field secretary and MFDP candidate for Congress (Voter Registration 1-2).


Works cited:

“Greenwood Food Blockage (Winter).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Interview with Sam Block.” Digital Education Systems. December 12, 1986. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_...

“Jimmy Travis Shot in Greenwood.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-...

“Marching for Freedom in Greenwood (Feb-Mar).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement History and Timeline, 1963 Jan-June. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.h...

“Sam Block.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/sam-bl...

“Voter Registration Movement Expands in Mississippi.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement History and Timeline, 1963 Jan-June. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.h...

“Willie Peacock.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/willie...

Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1962 -- Movement Leaders Refuse to Quit

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

After being released from jail in December of 1961, Bob Moses and the other SNCC organizers analyze the successes and failures of the McComb voter registration campaign. It is clear that racist opposition to Black voting rights in Mississippi is so ferocious, so violent, so widespread, that only by uniting all of the state's civil rights organizations into a coordinated effort is there any hope of success.

Moses and Tom Gaither of CORE circulate a memo proposing formation of a coalition. They are determined not to repeat in Mississippi the unproductive conflicts between national civil rights organizations that have so often occurred elsewhere. Statewide NAACP Chairman Aaron Henry agrees with them. In February [1962], representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, along with local community leaders, create the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to be a vehicle through which civil rights organizations working in Mississippi can work together. The name is taken from an earlier coalition effort to support the Freedom Riders. A grant request to fund COFO voter registration activities is submitted to the Voter Education Project (VEP).

The national leaders of the three organizations initially oppose the idea out of fear that each will lose visibility within it — with consequent loss of northern funds. But the local activists and leaders on the ground in Mississippi, those who are closest to the suffering of the people and the necessities of the struggle in that state, insist that success — indeed, survival — require organizational cooperation rather than competition.

In August, a meeting is held in Clarksdale to formalize COFO. Attending are Moses, Jim Forman and a dozen other SNCC workers, Dave Dennis of CORE, James Bevel of SCLC, and others. NAACP leader Aaron Henry is elected President, Rev. R.L.T. Smith is named Treasurer, attorney Carsie Hall becomes Secretary, and Bob Moses is appointed the COFO state-wide Project Director. An agreement is made that CORE will focus its registration efforts in Mississippi's 4th Congressional District centered around Meridian and Canton, SNCC will work the other four districts including the Delta region around Greenwood and the Pearl River area around McComb. For their part, SCLC will continue its Citizenship school program throughout the state, and the NAACP will concentrate on the judicial aspects of the struggle.

In September, VEP funds COFO organizing projects in the Mississippi Delta counties of Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, and Sunflower where SNCC field secretaries are already working. Over the following year VEP gives more than $50,000 (equal to $380,000 in 2012) to a number of voter registration projects in Mississippi (Council 1-2).

When the arrested SNCC field secretaries are finally released from jail in Pike County, they join other SNCC organizers — many newly hired with VEP money — in resuming voter registration work. Bob Moses, Paul & Catherine Brooks, James Bevel & Diane Nash (newly married), and Bernard Lafayette in Jackson; Lester McKinnie in Laurel; Charles McLaurin, Dorie Ladner, and Colia Lidell in Ruleville; James Jones in Clarksdale, Mattie Bivens in Cleveland, Frank Smith in Holly Springs; Emma Bell in Greenville; and Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins in Hattiesburg.

Sam Block, a young Mississippi native and SCLC Citizenship School teacher, is assigned to Greenwood, the seat of Leflore County and the unofficial capitol of the Mississippi Delta. Here, cotton is still king, 800,000 bales pass through Greenwood each year. For the most part the work is still hand-labor, plantation-style — but under the urging of the White Citizens Council, land owners are now bringing in machines to replace and displace Black field-hands. With the rise of the Freedom Movement and increased Black assertiveness, "Negro-removal" is now the strategy of Mississippi's white power-structure. Between 1950 and 1960, some 200,000 Blacks are forced to leave the Delta, by 1964 the number of Black sharecroppers is roughly half of what it was six years earlier. Most of those forced off the land migrate to the urban ghettos of the North.

Those who still remain endure grinding poverty and unyielding oppression. According to the 1960 Census, annual median income for rural Blacks in the Delta is just $452 (equal to $3,800 in 2017). On average, white children in the Delta receive 10 years of public schooling, Blacks less than 5 years in schools that are so ill-equipped that few are accredited. Segregation remains absolute and the effects are stark.

For Blacks, segregation, exploitation, and abuse permeate every aspect of life. Though almost two-thirds of the county is Black, 131 of the county's 168 hospital beds are reserved for whites-only. More than 80% of Blacks live in dwellings rated "sub-standard," but their tar-paper shacks with a single light bulb are charged more for electricity than whites living in modern homes.

In Leflore County, almost 100% of whites are registered to vote, compared to just 268 Blacks (2%). In the seven years since the Brown decision, only 40 Blacks have been allowed to register (compared to 1,664 whites (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 1-2).

In 1961, Mississippi-native Sam Block was stationed at an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, as Freedom Riders streamed into Mississippi. He watched them excitedly. “I just wanted to be part of it,” recalled Block, “to be part of a movement that was doing something to eradicate the conditions that I was forced to live in all my life but wasn’t able to do anything about.”

After leaving the Air Force, he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Mississippi and soon ran into an old family acquaintance and movement stalwart, Amzie Moore. “Get involved with the Movement,” Moore urged Block. With Moore’s help, Block, then 23-years-old, quietly set up a group of semi-underground citizenship schools around town.

This work caught the attention of SNCC’s Mississippi project director Bob Moses, who was planning to expand SNCC’s voter registration efforts into the Delta region. He asked Block where he would like to work. “Greenwood, Mississippi,” Block responded, thinking back on the lynching of Emmett Till in nearby Money, Mississippi. Moses asked again if Block was sure that he wanted to work in Greenwood, a bastion of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council. Again, Sam said yes.

He entered the cotton processing city without an established network of contacts. He remembered “hanging out in the pool halls, wherever people were, the Laundromat, run around the grocery stores,” to meet people. He also went from door-to-door “sort of testing the pulse of the people.”

It did not take long for his presence to become known. His landlady received threatening phone calls and asked Block to move. He lived out of an abandoned car for a time and had difficulty finding enough food to eat. But he was committed. “If I got a chance to do anything to help people, especially black people, then I was gonna do it.” (Sam 1-3).

Sam is soon joined by Rust College graduate Willie (Wazir) Peacock, and then Luvaugn Brown, and Lawrence Guyot.

Sam Block: I canvassed every day and every night until I found about seven or eight people to carry up to register ... We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, "Nigger, where you from?" I told him, "Well, I'm a native Mississippian." He said, "Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? ... I know you ain't from here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy." I said, "Well, you know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?"

He got angry. He spat in my face and walked. So he came back and turned around and told me, "I don't want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack your clothes and get out and don't never come back no more." I said, "Well, sheriff, if you don't want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, 'cause I'm here to stay, I came here to do a job and this is my intention, I'm going to do this job."

White racists attack the SNCC office, and the SNCC organizers barely escape over the roof tops. The building is trashed, and the frightened landlord evicts them. The fear is so intense that people cross to the other side of the street rather than walk past Sam or Wazir and risk whites observing them in proximity to the "race-mixing agitators." It is months before anyone else in the Black community will rent space intended for voter registration work.

Sam and Wazir dig in deep, and hold on. They continue organizing in Greenwood without an office. Fear is pervasive among Greenwood Blacks. Fear of being fired. Fear of being evicted. Fear of beatings, bombings, and murder. Fear that the SNCC workers will stir up trouble and violence and then leave. But gradually, week by week, month by month, as Sam and Wazir hold on, trust is built and their courage inspires first the young students and then their parents (Mississippi Voter 3-4).

About defying white Greenwood police, “They knew we were Mississippians, and to see us facing up to them and standing up to them, they couldn’t understand what had happened, what had gone wrong,” Peacock remembered (Willie 1).

As Block sunk his roots into Greenwood’s Black community, he recognized that there was a hidden anger and desire for change. Local people “were looking for someone who could give form and expression to ideas and thoughts they had had for years,” reflected Block (Sam 3).

Wazir Peacock: Greenwood was so organized — there was not one block that we couldn't have — it was like guerrilla war, we could stop anywhere and duck out of sight, go into somebody's house. At every block in the Black neighborhood. So that's one thing that kept us alive 'cause they would see us at night and the cops would think it was an opportunity to get us, speed up and try to turn around. When they turned around we'd be watching out a window somewhere, see them come back to try to find us.

A new office is finally rented, a church dares to open its doors for a voter registration meeting, and the community begins coming together. Slowly, one by one, two by two, a few Leflore County Blacks begin to make the dangerous journey down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. But in the first six months, only five Blacks of the dozens who try are actually registered (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 5).

Jackson is Mississippi's capitol and most significant urban area. In 1960, 40% of its 150,000 residents are Black, and Blacks are a clear majority in the surrounding rural areas of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties. Jackson is totally segregated, and Blacks are restricted to the lowest-paid menial jobs in the public and private sectors. Jackson is a White Citizens Council stronghold and the Council dominates the local political scene. Mayor Allen Thompson is a rabid segregationist, as are the Governor and state legislators. A miasma of fear lays heavy over the Black community, ruthless police brutality is common, and Klan terrorists lurk in the shadows ready to strike down anyone who challenges the racial order.

In the fall of 1961 and into early 1962, SNCC organizers try to organize protests and register voters in Jackson, but make little headway against police repression and the grip of fear. SNCC moves its main focus into the Mississippi Delta region around Greenwood where there is more hope of success. This leaves the NAACP as the main civil rights organization with an ongoing presence in Jackson. But the Jackson NAACP is largely moribund, most of its Youth Councils are dormant, and only the heroic efforts of NAACP State Field Director Medgar Evers keeps the organization barely alive.

The NAACP's national leadership shun direct-action protests in favor of lawsuits in federal Court, but unlike Alabama where Federal Judge Frank Johnson often rules in favor of civil rights, Mississippi Federal Judge Harold Cox (appointed by President Kennedy) is an ardent segregationist. He almost always rules against the NAACP, forcing them to appeal each case to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans, a process that slows and limits progress.

The national NAACP also emphasizes voter registration, but unlike SNCC who work with the masses of Black sharecroppers, maids, and laborers, the NAACP concentrates their efforts on the small Black elite — ministers, professionals, teachers, business owners. But in Mississippi, the Black elite are vulnerable to the economic terrorism of the White Citizens Council. With some notable exceptions, in 1962 most of them are still unwilling to risk attempting to register.

Back in the fall of 1961, Tougaloo student Colia Lidell (later Colia Lafayette) and Tougaloo teacher Hunter Bear (John Salter) began reactivating and rebuilding the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council (NJYC). By early 1962 it has slowly begun to make headway against the palpable fear (Jackson 1-3).

Hunter Bear was the product of a racially mixed marriage. Adopted by a family named Salter, Hunter’s father was essentially a full-blooded Indian of the Northeast. His mother was an Anglo, mostly Scottish. He had experienced extreme racism while being raised amongst the Navaho in Arizona. Following the Freedom Rides, wanting to immerse himself in civil rights work in the South, possessing a master’s degree in Sociology, he had sought a teaching position at a Black college in the South and had been hired to instruct at Tougaloo College near Jacksonville. Colia Lidell, a student, had heard him give a speech about American government and “how we needed to become involved in the world outside the campus.” Colia invited him to give a speech in North Jackson about the Interstate Commerce Commission and the meaning of its desegregation order.

I went off to that evening and I spoke. And it was a well-prepared speech. The Interstate Commerce Commission had just issued an order desegregating interstate bus traffic as a result of the Freedom Rides. And on the basis of that there was a little chink [in the social walls of segregation] here and there, but there wasn't much. Mississippi's approach, and that of much of the hard core South, was to just ignore things. But anyway, that was my pioneer voyage into the Mississippi civil rights waters, and everybody was very pleased. So pleased that Colia asked if I'd be the adult advisor to the North Jackson Youth Council. And I said I would.

Medgar Evers, — who I had not yet met, — had expressed great pleasure to Colia that I agreed to do it. He'd heard of me, knew something about my labor background, things like that. I hadn't yet met him. So he was all for it. Before long I met him, and we became good friends and remained close colleagues, comrades you would say (Interview 2-4).

When school resumes in the fall of 1962, they are joined by Tougaloo student Betty Anne Poole, expelled Jackson State students Dorie and Joyce Ladner who have transferred to Tougaloo, and white exchange students Karin Kunstler and Joan Trumpauer. The NJYC continues slow but steady growth, moving their meetings from living rooms to the attic of Virden Grove church. Made up mainly of students from Tougaloo and Jackson State and from Lanier, Hill, and Brinkley high schools, along with some school dropouts and young professor Hunter Bear as their "adult" advisor, they begin distributing the North Jackson Action, a mimeographed newsletter [printed in Memphis and smuggled into Jackson] (Jackson 4).

You know, things occurred that certainly gave the measure of Mississippi's intransigence. The shooting of Corporal Roman Duckworth, Jr. at Taylorville, — Black corporal, military police, five children, wife getting ready to give birth to the sixth child in Laurel. He was asleep in the bus when it crossed from Tennessee into Mississippi. And in Tennessee you could sleep fairly safely in the front of the bus. And the only reason he did that, I think, was a space thing, but in Mississippi, — He was sound asleep in the front of the bus, and they went all the way down and pulled into Taylorville, where a marshal named Kelly shot him to death in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses.

The Free Press, pioneered in that story and many others stories. But these things were happening with a dreary frequency.

At the same time, Meredith, — James Meredith — was making his bid to enter 'Ole Miss. And that was beginning to heat up. I mean, the word was that he just might make it

When we looked at things in late September of '62 we saw that the state was inflamed by the imminent admission of Meredith. People were being knocked off, — Blacks, — in such things as cars hitting them at night when they were walking along the road, — things of that sort. It was a very dangerous time. I mean, these weren't accidents, this was deliberate murder (Interview 4-6).

In early October, Jackson hosts the annual state fair, a major harvest festival. It is completely segregated, the first week is for "whites only," followed by 3 days for "colored." The NJYC calls on Blacks to boycott the "second-hand fair." Any public demonstration, such as picketing, will result in immediate arrest and there is no money for bail. Anyone caught distributing boycott leaflets will also be jailed. Like resistance fighters in occupied territory, the word has to be spread secretly, through clandestine meetings and passing flyers covertly from hand to hand. A telephone tree is organized and sympathizers are asked to call their friends. October 15 is the first day of the "Negro Fair." The boycott is 90% effective, Black fair goers are few and far between to the financial discomfort of white vendors and concessionaires.

Buoyed by the success of the fair boycott, the NJYC and the revived Tougaloo NAACP chapter begin organizing a Christmas boycott of Jackson's downtown merchants (all white, of course). They adopt four key demands:

1. Equality in hiring & promotion

2. End segregation of restrooms, water fountains, lunch counters

3. Courtesy titles such as "Miss," Mrs," "Mister"

4. Service on first-come first-served basis

Medgar Evers tries to negotiate with the merchants but they refuse to meet with him. The boycott targets 150 white stores including all the "downtown" stores. The plan is to start with a small group of pickets whose inevitable arrest will dramatize the boycott, and then follow up with a campus meeting to mobilize support. Despite pleas by Medgar — who is NAACP state Field Director — the national NAACP leadership is unwilling to provide any bail funds. But enough bond money for six protesters is contributed by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), NY attorney Victor Rabinowitz, and Dr. King's Gandhi Fund.

On Saturday December 12, the first civil rights demonstration in Jackson since the Freedom Rides takes place on Capitol Street, the main drag of the downtown shopping district. Led by Hunter Bear, the six pickets raise their signs and a swarm of 50 cops immediately arrest them (Jackson 5-6).

There seemed to be good sentiment for this if we could actually show that we were serious. And to show that we were serious, we decided we had to do two things. We had to distribute masses of leaflets, which like the sale of the Free Press was a "subversive" activity, punishable by arrests and fines and things of that sort. [Under Mississippi law it was a crime to boycott, or advocate boycotting businesses].

And we also had to put ourselves on the line publically. And so Eldri and myself and four Black students [decide] to picket on December 12th in front of the Woolworth's store on Capitol Street (Interview 8).

The mass meeting is held on the Tougaloo campus that night. The next day the NJYC and Tougaloo and high school students begin clandestinely distributing leaflets through Jackson's Black neighborhoods and to Blacks in Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and Yazoo counties. But the end of December, 15,000 flyers have been passed from hand to hand. The telephone tree is activated, speakers are assigned to address church meetings, and "undercover agents" (Black students posing as shoppers) patrol Capitol Street quietly informing out-of-area Black shoppers about the boycott.

Enough bail money is raised for a second team of pickets — Tougaloo students Dorie Ladner and Charles Bracey — to be busted on Capitol Street on December 21. That night, Klan nightriders fire into Hunter Bear's home narrowly missing his baby daughter. Armed guards are posted on the Tougaloo campus (Jackson 7).

At night somebody shot up our house. A bullet missed my daughter Maria, went through her crib, just barely missed her. There was no point depending on the Madison County Sheriff's office for anything other than trouble, and so a number of us stood armed guard on the Tougaloo campus, something which we were to do on a number of occasions. There were points where we even fired a shot or two, — in fact, we fired more than a few shots. But we didn't publicize that part of it Interview 9).

NY attorney William Kunstler (father of Tougaloo exchange student Karin Kunstler), Gandhi Fund lawyer Clarence Jones, and local Jackson attorney Jess Brown devise a new legal strategy. Pointing out the obvious fact that civil rights demonstrators cannot possibly receive a fair trial in segregated state courts that only allow whites to serve on juries, they petition to have the picket cases transferred to federal court under an old Reconstruction Era statute. The racist Federal Judge Harold Cox denies their petition and they appeal his ruling to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. While the case is working its way through the judicial system, the pickets are free on bail and their trials are postponed. The removal petition eventually succeeds, setting a precedent for transferring civil rights cases from all over the South to federal court where they enter a legal limbo and are never brought to trial.

The Christmas boycott is surprisingly effective, honored by roughly 60% of the Black population. And once the pressure of providing Christmas gifts to children is past, the boycott gains strength as it continues into 1963. In tacit admission of the economic hardship being suffered by the white merchants, the City waives the annual property taxes for businesses being boycotted. But despite their economic losses, the white business owners refuse to negotiate with Blacks or make any changes in segregation. And the White Citizens Council stands ready to foreclose mortgages, stop supplies, and mobilize a white boycott against any merchant who wavers in steadfast support of segregation (Jackson 8-9).


Works cited:

“Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Formed in Mississippi.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Jackson MS Boycotts.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Mississippi Voter Registration – Greenwood.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Sam Block.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/sam-bl...

“Willie Peacock.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/willie...