Return to Birmingham Finds City Transformed...

In tranquil Kelly Ingram Park, the statues of a young boy and girl behind bars stand as a memorial to an army of children that defied police dogs and fire hoses to write the pivotal chapter in the history of the civil rights movement 30 years ago.

“Place of Revolution and Reconciliation,” reads the inscription at the entrance to the park, across the street from the new $8-million Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Revolution: The children’s crusade showed that nonviolent civil disobedience could be an effective tool in overturning the South’s debasing “Jim Crow” segregation laws.

“It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement,” wrote journalist-historian Taylor Branch in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.”

Reconciliation: In once-notorious Birmingham, which earned the sobriquet “Bombingham” during rampant Ku Klux Klan terrorism, blacks now dominate the city government and work harmoniously with their white neighbors in the suburbs across Red Mountain.

It’s a far cry from 1963, when Birmingham’s segregationist police commissioner, Eugene (Bull) Connor, turned his police dogs and fire hoses on swarms of marching, singing, clapping black schoolchildren, some as young as 6.

More than 1,000 of the young demonstrators were thrown in jail, with sometimes as many as 75 crammed into cells built for eight.

TV footage and newspaper photos showed children being hit by the high-pressure fire hoses, blasted against the sides of buildings, pummeled over the hoods of cars, rolled down the streets, chewed on by dogs.

A torrent of public outrage rejuvenated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s flagging civil rights movement like a thunderstorm on a parched cotton field.

The publicity helped draw 200,000 people to join in a march on Washington on Aug. 28, when King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Black leaders got a long-sought audience with President John F. Kennedy and the nation’s capital reverberated with the hymn of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”

Someday.

Just over two weeks after the march on Washington, on Sept. 15, a dynamite blast tore through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a staging ground for the children’s marches. Left mangled and dead were four girls, ages 11 to 14, who had been changing into their choir robes. Three of them were daughters of schoolteachers. Twenty other children were injured.

There was still a lot of marching to be done, and many Ku Klux Klan bombings and beatings and murders would follow, but the movement would reach its zenith with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Today, outside the Civil Rights Institute which opened in November, stands a bronze statue of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, typically in a marching stance.

“Birmingham’s civil rights freedom fighter,” the inscription says. “With singular courage he fired the imagination and raised the hopes of an oppressed people.”

A former truck driver and cement worker reared in the backwoods of Alabama--and once convicted of running the family still before he got the call to preach--Shuttlesworth was the unsung hero of the Birmingham confrontations.

Long before King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived on the scene, Shuttlesworth was taking on Bull Connor and others in the segregationist establishment through a group of preachers he organized as the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

He endured beatings and jailings and once barely escaped death when his Bethel Baptist Church was bombed. It was Shuttlesworth who persuaded King and the SCLC to make Birmingham their next target after demonstrations in Albany, Ga., had sputtered.

Shuttlesworth, now pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist Church in Cincinnati, is as feisty as ever at age 71.

“If I had not invited the SCLC and King to Birmingham, the SCLC would not have ever become a vibrant force, and King would not have a holiday in his honor today,” he said in a recent interview.

Chris Hamlin, the current pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, was only 4 when the church was bombed. He asked a group of fifth-graders who were touring the institute a few weeks ago if they knew who Fred Shuttlesworth was.

“Every one of them said no,” he said. “And I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I took the teacher outside and chewed her out. It was a black teacher.

“That’s always the case. The person who sparks the play may not get the credit that is due.”

Odessa Woolfolk, president of the institute’s board of directors and an assistant to the president of the University of Alabama-Birmingham, was a history teacher at Ullman High School in 1963. Like most of the other teachers, she stayed in the classroom while her students went off to demonstrate.

“They’d march, get arrested, and come back to school victorious, feeling they had made a contribution to their country,” she said.

As for Shuttlesworth, she said, “He was the bravest of them all.”

Shuttlesworth’s Birmingham of 30 years ago was a grimy, grubby steel-making city of 350,000 people--40% of them black--surrounded by dismal coal-mining communities, the “Pittsburgh of the South.”

King called it the most segregated big city in the South, the Johannesburg of North America.

The city had gained infamy on Mother’s Day, 1961, when a mob of Klansmen and members of the National States Rights Party, armed with clubs and bicycle chains, attacked a busload of Freedom Riders aboard a Trailways bus as Connor’s cops turned their backs.

Between 1957 and 1963 there were 50 unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods, earning one neighborhood the nickname “Dynamite Hill” and inspiring a headline writer to coin the word “Bombingham.”

Singer Nat King Cole was beaten on stage during a performance in the city in 1956. On Labor Day, 1957, a carload of drunken Klansmen grabbed a black man off a street corner, took him to a country shack and castrated him with razor blades, dousing the wound with turpentine.

The NAACP had been outlawed in the state since 1956 and Connor’s cops were used to break up black political meetings.

In 1962, the city closed 68 parks, 38 playgrounds, six swimming pools and four golf courses to avoid complying with a federal court order to desegregate public facilities.

1963 began with George C. Wallace sworn in as governor, vowing: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” The Klan was running amok.

A frequent speaker at Klan rallies was Theophilus Eugene (Bull) Connor, who referred to King as “Martin Lucifer Coon.” But Connor would soon be out of office. The voters had recently voted to abolish the three-commission form of city government and installed as mayor a moderate named Albert Boutwell.

It was against this backdrop that Shuttlesworth and King and the rest of the SCLC began their demonstrations, much to the distress of a group of white moderates working behind the scenes with black businessmen to try to keep a lid on the city. The Kennedy Administration, through a shuttling Burke Marshall of the Justice Department, also had tried to head off a confrontation.

Volunteers would march off daily from the black churches to the downtown businesses to sit at segregated lunch counters, expecting to get arrested and fill up the jails. King himself was arrested and from his cell wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

The leaders of the Birmingham demonstrations would become legend in the civil rights movement: Andrew Young, Wyatt Walker, Ralph D. Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, Bernard Lee.

Less-remembered today is James Bevel of Itta Bena, Miss., a self-described “chicken-eating, liquor-drinking, woman-chasing Baptist preacher.” Bevel always wore bib overalls and a yarmulke on his shaved head, he said, to confuse Mississippi sheriffs.

It was Bevel who recruited hundreds of schoolchildren to fill up the jails after the number of adult volunteers dwindled, partly because they had jobs to hold down.

On May 2, the first waves of the children’s crusade began spilling out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, spiritedly singing “We Shall Overcome” and carrying signs that said “Segregation Is a Sin” and “No Eat, No Dollars.”

About 600 were herded off to jail that day. Asked her age as she was climbing into a paddy wagon, one tiny girl called out that she was 6.

Blocking the streets outside the church the next day was an army of uniformed policemen massed in front of fire apparatus, police cruisers and school buses. Especially ominous were the fire department’s monitor guns, two hoses to force water through a single nozzle mounted on a tripod. It could take the bark off a tree at 100 feet.

With the jails already overflowing--many of the children were being held at the Alabama State Fairgrounds--Connor wanted to keep the demonstrators out of the downtown area without making arrests.

The singing turned to screaming as the monitor guns pummeled the marchers. Bystanders began to hurl rocks.

Watching from his office in the nearby Gaston Building was A. G. Gaston, the city’s leading black businessman who had helped put together a shaky alliance with the white moderates and was opposed to King’s tactics. When they turned on the hoses, he was talking on the phone with David Vann, a white attorney who helped bring down Bull Connor.

“But lawyer Vann,” Gaston exclaimed, “they’ve turned the fire hoses on a little black girl. And they’re rolling that girl right down the middle of the street.”

Police deployed eight K-9 units at a corner of Kelly Ingram Park, across from the church. Some children and bystanders fled in terror; others taunted the dogs. Three teen-agers were bitten severely enough to require hospital treatment.

An Associated Press photographer was there when one of the dog handlers grabbed a 15-year-old boy and whirled him around into the jaws of a German shepherd. The picture landed on Page One across the country.

A few days later, Shuttlesworth, with King and Abernathy at his side, would be able to tell a news conference, “The city of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience.” He detailed an agreement for the formation of a biracial committee and a schedule for integrating public facilities.

With that, Shuttlesworth fainted from exhaustion from his fire-hose bruises and was taken to a hospital.

But Klan nightriders went about their business as usual. Bombs hit black churches, the homes of influential black leaders--such as attorney Arthur Shores and A. G. King, the rights leader’s brother--and the Gaston Motel.

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Sept. 15, a passing car slowed down near the north wall of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, then sped away. Moments later an explosion ripped through the building.

The congregation--some praying, some cursing--fled, their clothes torn and blood streaming from cuts and gashes. Blacks from nearby homes hurried to the church, where police with shotguns attempted to hold them back.

One of the three men that a witness saw in a car parked outside the church early that morning was a Klansman named Robert E. Chambliss, a barely literate auto mechanic known to police as “Dynamite Bob.” Chambliss had a long record of confrontations with blacks, including a charge of “flogging while masked.”

Come dark that Sunday, the streets of Birmingham turned dangerous, with gangs of blacks roaming the streets and hurling rocks at the cars of whites. The fires of torched and bombed buildings lit the nighttime sky.

Five hundred National Guardsmen were called out and Connor’s cops patrolled the streets with their dogs and shotguns. Police fatally shot one black teen-ager among the rock throwers and another riding his bicycle. Two others, one black and one white, were wounded.

Gov. Wallace, under court order to end the violence, offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the church bombing. An anonymous donor mailed in some Green Stamps and a $100 Confederate note to boost the reward. No one came forward to collect.

It would be 14 years before justice was served in the bombing. In November, 1977, after a crusading young state attorney general named Bill Baxley reopened the case, “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Similarly, Jesse B. Stoner, a disbarred Georgia attorney and head of the National States Rights Party, was extradited from Georgia and convicted in 1980 of the bombing of Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church. Because no one was injured in the blast, he was sentenced to 10 years.

Is Fred Shuttlesworth satisfied with the progress made in civil rights these past 30 years?

“I don’t think anybody could be totally objective and say they are happy with it,” he said. “But sometime people get a little taste of something and they want so much more until they forget the discipline that the movement had.

“The young generation has become rebellious and contemptuous of what we did.”

The Struggle for Civil Rights

Key events in 1963, the pivotal year in the civil rights movement:

Jan. 14: George Wallace is sworn in as the governor of Alabama, pledging “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

May 3: With the Birmingham, Ala., jails already overflowing with young civil rights demonstrators, Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor orders his officers to turn back protesters with police dogs and fire hoses.

June 11: Two black students, with the protection of federalized National Guard troops, enroll at the University of Alabama despite Wallace’s futile effort to “stand in the schoolhouse door.”

June 12: Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader and secretary of the NAACP, is murdered by a sniper in Jackson, Miss.

Aug. 28: More than 200,000 people take part in a massive march on Washington in the name of civil rights and racial equality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Sept. 2: Wallace prevents the integration of Tuskegee High School by surrounding the building with state troopers.

Sept. 10: Twenty black students enter public schools in Tuskegee, Birmingham and Mobile after a standoff between Wallace and federal authorities.

Sept. 15: A dynamite bomb tears through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls ages 11 to 14. The church had been the staging ground for civil rights rallies and protest marches. Two more blacks are killed by police in the ensuing riots.

Nov. 22: President John F. Kennedy is shot by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald, in Dallas and dies within the half-hour.

Source: Associated Press