BY FRED HALSTEAD
The following article is reprinted from the May 13, 1963, Militant.

MAY 8 - One of humanity's great battles is taking place in Birmingham, Alabama. Five weeks ago, for the first time in the history of the South's steel city, Negroes there began exercising the right of peaceful protest against segregation by means of picket lines, sit-ins and marches. For five weeks the city officials of Birmingham -utilizing mass arrests, fire hoses and dogs -have shown the world that the elementary civil liberties such as free speech and assembly do not exist for Negroes in Birmingham.

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.

The NAACP has pointed out that the federal government can intervene in Birmingham under the United States Code 242, Title 18 which makes it a punishable federal offense for anyone "under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation or custom" to willfully deprive any citizen of any rights protected by the U.S. constitution. This is only one of the many broad powers enabling Kennedy to act, but which he chooses to ignore.

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. In effect he publicly rebuked the demonstrators.

Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, head of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which began the demonstrations five weeks ago, rejected Kennedy's suggestion and together with Rev. Martin Luther King declared: "We are ready to negotiate, but we intend to negotiate from strength . . . We want promises plus action."

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.

One special high-pressure stream caught Rev. Shuttlesworth as he led a group of some 300 Negro children outside a church. He was hospitalized.

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.

This has produced "dismay" and "frustration" in Washington, according to newsmen there. It is explained that the administration was counting on no new civil-rights "disturbances" until next fall's school-desegregation cases. Even there, Kennedy hoped to arrange for some token integration and thus forestall any need for taking action which would embarrass him with his Dixiecrat friends.

The Kennedys, several reports make clear, were counting on cooperation from Rev. King in the Birmingham situation. But they didn't get what they wanted and hence their frustration. Ted Lewis's May 7 Washington column in the Daily News says: "The advice of Attorney General Kennedy obviously would have been that King should go slow on demonstrations until the `moderate' city administration took office . . ." Lewis says that "why King moved in so fast with his direct action campaign is the vital question .. King, it's believed here, felt that if he had waited, some other Negro leader would move in and get the demonstration rolling."

Actually, the demonstrations were already set when King got to Birmingham early in April. They were sparked by Rev. Shuttlesworth, who has been fighting for years in Birmingham, and by students at Miles college who have cooperated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Shuttlesworth's organization is affiliated with King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

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.

Already certain symptoms have begun to appear. A case in point is the incident which occurred on Saturday, May 4, after police worked over an area filled with demonstrators with hoses for about an hour. The demonstrators retreated to the front of a church they had used as a headquarters and then hoses were set up across the street ready to spray the church.

The Rev. James Bevel, an official of the SCLC, borrowed a loudspeaker from police and urged the crowd to disperse. According to reporters on the scene, this met argument "from a group, that wanted to meet force with force."

"Go home," the group told Rev. Bevel, "They don't even want us standing at our church. How far do you want us to back down?" Rev. Bevel replied: "As far as `Bull' Connor (Birmingham police commissioner) says until the Federals get here." The crowd finally dispersed following Rev. Bevel's pleadings. But it is clear that the question of self-defense is already an issue in the new mass movement in Birmingham, and that the new movement will develop the flexibility of tactics appropriate to an independent and working-class-based movement whose demands are bound to go deeper than surface integration.

All major civil-rights groups - including the NAACP, SNCC, CORE and even the Anti-Defamation League - have joined in the demand for federal action in Alabama. The NAACP has called for mass demonstrations in all major Northern cities in support of this demand. A picket line called by the NAACP at New York's City Hall May 7 demanded action from Kennedy. Slogans carried included: "Bobby Kennedy, No More Cool Off, Federal Troops to Alabama," "Action Sí, Compromise No," and "Call Off the Dogs, We Demand Federal Protection."

Meanwhile, ten Freedom Walkers arrested May 3 upon crossing into Alabama on the William Moore Memorial Trek are remaining in jail. The trek was sponsored by CORE and SNCC in memory of the integrationist shot down while walking alone on Highway 11 in Alabama last month.  
 
 
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