“The American people have never before, not in such numbers, heard anything as, or even one tenth, radical,” wrote Murray Kempton in The New Republic, describing King’s speech on the dream. Norman Mailer stated in Esquire that American blacks, the group with the greatest potential for violence in America, have shown that they “also have the highest capacity for order and discipline in the nation.” Their “act of revolutionary genius” on the Mall in Washington, D.C. “developed a movement.”
As a result of the March on Washington, a nationwide protest movement grew, just as King expected. In Birmingham, over 3,600 black people registered to vote in two months, an unprecedented number. In St. Augustine, Florida, the Rev. C. T. Vivian, a member of the SCLC staff, began planning how to challenge the city’s segregation laws along the lines of what had been done in Birmingham. “Martin Luther King was becoming an increasingly important figure, and that was exactly what I wanted,” Vivian recalled years later.
Even within their own homes, in social relationships, people began to act differently and bolder after the March on Washington. Walter Stovall, a white man from Georgia, has decided to be more open with his colleagues about his marriage to a black woman, Charlayne Hunter. “I can finally wear my wedding ring all the time,” Stovall wrote. “I used to only wear it on weekends.” In California, a white real estate agent, Richard S. Hallmark, resigned because his company would not rent or sell properties to blacks. “I’m not a martyr or a crusader, but I felt ashamed,” he said.
Colored people aren’t going anywhere, so you better get used to them.
King’s popularity had never been greater, but he was not basking in the euphoria of the March on Washington. As Dorothy Cotton recalled: “It often happened to Dr. King that when he received positive feedback, as after this speech, he would become reticent because such response also placed an additional burden on him.”
During the staff retreat, King and other SCLC leaders considered which cities might host the next large protests. “I’m increasingly convinced that our next attack has to be about more than just trying to integrate the cafeteria or get a store to take down a discriminatory sign,” King said. “I feel like we’re going to have to launch an attack on the entire system of segregation in our community.” However, the integration movement again encountered resistance, in part from radical black activists, including Malcolm X, who claimed that King had been won over and weakened by the Kennedys. Malcolm said he was as impressed with the March on Washington as he would have been with the Rose Bowl Game, an American football game. King’s speech was moving, but “King had dreams while the rest of us blacks had nightmares.” An even more violent reaction came from nervous whites, mainly in the South, who heard King use the words “attack” and “advance” and decided to resist.
On September 4, seven days after the March on Washington, a white man, Robert Chambliss, drove from Birmingham to the nearby town of Daisy to buy dynamite. He said he needed a hundred and forty to clear the land the Ku Klux Klan had just purchased. “If you’re gonna blow some niggas, I’ll throw in a few extra,” the salesman told Chambliss.
Chambliss, known to some as Dynamite Bob for his skills with explosives, placed the dynamite in the trunk of his blue Ford Falcon and returned to Birmingham.
According to Alabama segregationists – called segs by northern white reporters – their preferred lifestyle was under constant attack. Governor George Wallace vowed to use the Alabama National Guard to prevent school integration, while President Kennedy threatened to federalize the guard to protect black students. The same evening that Robert Chambliss bought the dynamite, an explosion destroyed the home of Arthur Shores, a black lawyer from Birmingham.
This incident sparked riots in the Smithfield district of Birmingham, during which twenty-one people were injured, including four policemen. A twenty-one-year-old black man named John Coley, an Army veteran, was shot, perhaps because he resembled Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also at the scene. Police initially said Coley was shot after he jumped out of the house with a gun in his hand. When investigators determined that Coley was an unarmed bystander, police changed their testimony and said he was an accidental victim of shotgun shells fired over the heads of the crowd. Convoys of cars drove through the city and white protesters waved Confederate flags.
On September 13, after a fiery speech by a segregationist, over a hundred white students stormed City Hall. One of them stood on Albert Boutwell’s desk, waving a Confederate flag, while others threw lit cigarettes on the carpet. A police officer asked one of the students to read City Ordinance No. 63-17, regarding demonstrations and riots, but no one was arrested. The mayor told students they had his support. “The whole issue of integration is distasteful to me,” he said. “I believe the good Lord had reasons to create racial differences. I believe they will be preserved.”
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First the clock started ticking, then there was an explosion.
Doors broke, walls shook, stained glass windows were shattered. The roof was on fire. Cries and screams filled the air, then the sound of a siren.
It was September 15, 1963, Youth Day at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the same church where young men and women had gathered months earlier, prayed and sang, and then taken to the streets to face police dogs and cannons. water. Fifteen pieces of dynamite blew up the eastern side of the red brick temple. When rescuers reached the basement, they found four dead children under the rubble. The victims were eleven-year-old Denise McNair and fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson. Twenty other people were injured, including Addie Mae Collins’ twelve-year-old sister, Sarah, who lost sight in one eye. It took officials fourteen years to convict Chambliss of involvement in the attack. It took thirty years for two other participants, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., to be convicted. and Bobby Frank Cherry.
King learned of the tragedy as he prepared to enter the pulpit at Ebenezer. “Dear God, why?” – he asked himself. He flew to Birmingham that same day, but not before sending two telegrams. The first went to President Kennedy – King warned that there would be “the worst racial holocaust ever seen in this country” if the federal government took no action. He addressed the second telegram to Governor Wallace. He wrote: “The blood of our little children is on your hands.”
He was filled with feelings of sadness and bitterness. He noticed that the face of Jesus Christ had literally been knocked out of the stained glass window and wondered if this was a sign that evil had corrupted his message. He asked himself: “If people are so brutal, was it all worth fighting? Is there hope? Is there any way out?”
City officials did not attend the funeral of the victims of the attack. Governor Wallace claimed that the explosion may have been the work of communists or publicity-seeking people from the civil rights movement. At the same time, fifty-three white Birmingham lawyers published a statement calling for support for integration bills. One of the white lawyers, Charles Morgan, speaking to the Young Men’s Business Club [Klubu Biznesowego Młodych Mężczyzn]stated:
Who did it? The answer is: we all did it […]. Every person in this community who has contributed in any way to furthering hate is at least as guilty or more guilty than the deranged fool who planted this bomb.
King delivered his funeral oration in a packed church in Birmingham, calling the victims “heroines of the holy crusade for human freedom and dignity.” He continued, answering his own questions about whether there was hope, whether there was a way out. The children “did not die in vain,” he said. “Good still has a way of growing out of evil. The blood of these little girls must serve as the lifeblood of this dark city.”
These words were not enough for everyone. “As I watched the impotent moral outrage of black Southern preachers, the cold coverage of the white media, and the posturing of John F. Kennedy’s White House, my entire vision of the world was shaped,” recalled Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a 16-year-old and then-high school basketball star. using the name Lew Alcindor. “My faith was blown up […]. I would gladly kill whoever killed those girls.”
Sixty-eight days after the Birmingham murders, a sniper shot President Kennedy in Dallas. King was at home in Atlanta. When he heard the news on TV, he called Coretta. Together they prayed for Kennedy’s survival. When he learned that the president was dead, he sat in silence for a long time.
“It will happen to me too,” he finally said. Coretta held her husband’s hand. She wanted to say something to comfort him, but she couldn’t find the words. “I couldn’t say, ‘It won’t happen to you,'” she recalled. “I felt like he was right.”
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Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
