Uncivil Wrongs III - Birmingham Explodes

By: Jerry Smith
Publisher: StClairCountyAl.com

Faced with the impending doom of our way of life, Alabamians anxiously elected George Wallace as governor. He ran on a ticket of pro-segregation and pro-states' rights, a sure winner in our part of the country. The blacks had already assembled a lot of major players; now we had one, too. Few could foretell the chaos that lay in store as the year 1963 rolled around.

To counter various local and national groups who sponsored the black movement, the Klan re-emerged in all its infamy, along with several pro-white groups, most of whom could only be called neo-Nazis. I attended one of these groups' rallies at an old Go-Cart track near Bessemer. There were burning torches, red flags with lightning bolts, and lots of buzz-cut gorillas wearing tan uniforms with Sam Brown belts, jackboots and riding pants. All that was missing were the swastikas and square mustaches, on which they probably figured the real Nazis still held a copyright.

The program was led by a local doctor (whom we found out later was actually a chiropractor) who roared and stomped around the stage for nearly two hours, spouting the worst kind of hatred I'd ever heard. Collection plates were sent around several times, confirming their actual agenda. Far from seeing these hyenas as their salvation, most white folks just added them to a growing list of problems.

The black population had already tried "sitting in" at local department store lunch counters, and received either very poor or no service at all. Old ways and authorities were being tested and challenged all over our genteel little city; black churches organized their flocks for trouble, and hordes of opportunists attached themselves to the black movement. What they had not counted on, however, was the firm resolve of those who were tradition-bound to oppose them. Birmingham was sitting on a powder keg of unimaginable potency. It didn't take long to ignite.

In 1963, SCLC and several other mis-leaders organized thousands of black school children for a march upon downtown Birmingham to protest everything in general. The hordes of demonstrators had assembled in Kelley Ingram Park to organize their riotous parade. Police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor was put into a tough spot: how to stop them without bloodshed.

His answer was fire hoses and police dogs. Fire trucks were brought in, and mounted with "monitor" nozzles which took in water from two big hoses. As young agitators stepped out onto Sixth Avenue North and began taunting the firemen and police officers, those big nozzles would be given careful aim and, once an imaginary line had been crossed, the incredibly powerful stream of water would knock its target off his or her feet and roll them all the way back to the curb, often deeply bruising them and tearing off their clothes in the process. Some friends and I cut work to view this spectacle, expecting to witness something really momentous and historic. What we saw instead was a bunch of firemen, cops and kids having one heck of a good time.

If a "runner" found that his presence in the forbidden zone had gone un-noticed he would holler at the firemen, who would then swing the monitors around and take aim. More than once I heard one of these crusaders yell something like, "Hey, mutha*****, I'm next. Bet you can't hit me!" This went on for hours, until the organizers realized their goal was being short-circuited and started urging their workers to get serious. That's when the real violence broke out, with clubs and police dogs. Heads got busted, blood was shed, and literally hundreds of trouble-makers were arrested on the spot and herded into special school buses with iron mesh welded over the windows.

From this park and other trouble spots, they were hauled en masse to every jail in the county until all were full. Then the lawmen started herding them into cattle barns at the State Fairgrounds. I saw several of these buses as they rolled out of downtown with their rowdy cargo of boisterous blacks along with a few white sympathizers, all singing "We shall overcome...", and everyone aboard except the guards and driver seemed to be having one heck of a good time. It's said that those two cattle barns hosted the biggest, loudest party ever seen in Birmingham, fueled with liquor sneaked past the guards by partisans outside.

That summer Governor Wallace kept an election promise and made his ludicrous schoolhouse door stand as black students tried to enroll at University of Alabama, as if the weather itself weren't already hot enough. Martin Luther King got himself thrown into a Birmingham jail for refusing to call off further demonstrations. He was eventually sprung with the help of President Kennedy himself, whose brother Bobby was also getting deeply involved in the whole integration mess.

A white power group in New Orleans actually offered to provide one-way bus tickets for any local black who would volunteer to move up North and not come back. About a hundred of these "reverse Freedom Riders" took the deal, but eventually most snuck back to Dixie after finding the northern racial climate even more restrictive than what they'd known here. As more and more incidents and counter-attacks took place, the real horrors began; bombings.

Homes of black leaders and businessmen were repeatedly dynamited, finally culminating in tragedy at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a building frequently used as a field headquarters by King, Shuttlesworth, the NAACP, CORE, SCLC and others. Unfortunately, in so doing they had turned this once-peaceful church into a war facility.

In September of 1963, a huge bomb ripped an entire corner off the sanctuary, killing four little girls and injuring more than twenty other folks who had gathered there for worship. More than any other single event, this senseless and cowardly act had taken away any honor we whites may have enjoyed in fighting for our way of life.

It was truly a Blast Heard Around the World. The Magic City became known as Bombingham. There was now no turning back. To learn what happened next, see next week's final installment, The Aftermath.