The Battle of Birmingham was a month-long wave of protests in 1963 that became one of the pivotal episodes in the struggle to overthrow the system of Jim Crow segregation in the southern United States. The outcome registered one of the most sweeping victories for that movement, forcing the barons of business and industry in this industrial city to sign an agreement for the rapid desegregation of public facilities and the hiring and promotion of Blacks in jobs from which they had been long excluded. The victory in Birmingham gave momentum to the civil rights movement going into the hard-fought battles in Mississippi and other states, which eventually forced the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year.

The state of Alabama and the city of Birmingham had been among the long-term strongholds of racist reaction. When a federal court ordered desegregation in public parks, city authorities closed down the parks rather than comply with the ruling. Alabama authorities had declared the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--the main civil rights organization at the time--a "foreign corporation," rendering its activities illegal. The Democratic States Rights Party, a collection of southern segregationists who walked out of the 1948 Democratic convention in protest of a pro-civil rights plank, held its founding convention in Birmingham.

Like most southern cities at the time, Birmingham was run by an all-white set of city commissioners. They were put in office through elections in which Blacks had limited, if any, franchise. Of the 80,000 registered voters in Birmingham in 1963 only 10,000 were Black. Among the city fathers was the infamous Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham’s Commissioner for Public Safety, who took pride in knowing how to "handle niggers" and "keep them in their place." Connor once ordered the arrest of a U.S. Senator, who was visiting the city to deliver a speech, because he walked through an entrance marked "Colored."

Connor would fill Birmingham’s jails with civil rights marchers. At the height of the battle an estimated 2,400 Blacks and their supporters had been jailed. On May 2, 1963, school children throughout the city left school and began to gather in a city park. By the end of the day nearly 1,000 youth ages six to eighteen were in jail. Having run out of police wagons, Connor ironically used school buses to transport the youth to jail. With the jails overflowing, hundreds were held at the county fairgrounds. When no more could be taken to prison, Connor ordered his thugs to use police dogs and high-powered water hoses on protesters.

Segregationist power was maintained with the most base acts of terror. From 1957 to the opening of the campaign to desegregate Birmingham, 17 bombings of homes and churches of Blacks remained unsolved--leading many to dub the city "Bombingham."

The federal government did little to protect Blacks against this violence and most often turned a blind eye. At the onset of the desegregation battle the administration of President John F. Kennedy claimed it had no authority to intervene in Birmingham. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, whose office was responsible to provide protection for civil rights workers in the south, was among the first to criticize the Birmingham campaign, saying it had "bad timing."

Unlike many cities in the South, Birmingham was a center of heavy industry with large steel plants and coal mines. In the 1960s it had the country’s highest percentage of factory workers. Most of the workers in these industries were Black, including 60 percent of the workforce in the coal mines and steel mills. These workers played an important role in the civil rights organizations that led the Battle of Birmingham.

As part of bringing history into the present, the Militant is reprinting below excerpts from an article by Fred Halstead, which was published in the May 13, 1963, issue of the paper on this battle. Halstead was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. He helped lead the party’s work in the civil rights movement. He is also the author of Out Now! A Participants Account of the Movement in the United States against the Vietnam War, published by Pathfinder Press.
 

Meanwhile the Kennedy administration persists in the ridiculous claim that the federal government doesn’t have the right to intervene in Birmingham because no federal court order is being violated.

Kennedy’s subterfuge is no longer being accepted by even the more conservative Negro leaders. The mass movement in Birmingham, and the picture of Negroes being bitten by police dogs, knocked down by fire hoses and arrested by the thousands for simply attempting to demonstrate peacefully for their rights, has unified the Negro community as never before behind the demand for federal intervention with troops in Birmingham.

The current wave of mass demonstrations began May 2 when some 700 young persons were arrested while walking in groups toward downtown Birmingham. The next day fire hoses and dogs were used against the demonstrators. At the very time this was taking place, Attorney General Robert Kennedy released a statement opposing, not the criminal and brutal acts of the Birmingham police, but the "timing" of the Negroes’ demonstrations.

The mass movement then proceeded to develop momentum. By Sunday, May 5, over 1,100 had been arrested. On May 6, large numbers of Negro school children stayed out of school to demonstrate. Some 1,000 were arrested. Comedian Dick Gregory, who led the first wave, was also jailed. On May 7, some three thousand persons, including many teenagers, infiltrated past the police cordon and demonstrated in downtown Birmingham. Police made very few arrests--the jails already being overfull with some 2,400 demonstrators--but used special high-pressure hoses against the demonstrators.

The intransigence of sections of the Negro leadership and the involvement of ever greater numbers of the Negro population in this heavily working-class city has brought a mass movement of unprecedented power into existence. And this in the Jim Crow capital of U.S. big cities. So far, the new mass movement has refused to subordinate to Washington’s policy. This has assured its success and has put every individual and organization in the country which is concerned with civil rights on the spot.

Due partly to a new mood among the Negro masses and partly to the nature of Birmingham itself--a large industrial city--the new mass movement has a logic of development which could transform the whole struggle for equal rights for Negroes in this country.  
 
 
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