Why We Can't Wait

In Chapter Six, King continues his narration of the most intense phase of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham. After their release from jail, King and other leaders plan their response to the legal cases against protestors for breaking the injunctions. Another important development is the SCLC’s decision to seek greater engagement with young people.

While most of the civil rights campaigns with which King had been involved were dominated by young people, Birmingham’s protestors tended to be adults. King knew that there was a danger of criticism if he recruited young people, but he was convinced at the time that their involvement would lead to greater success and provide young people with a way of participating in their own liberation.

Important staff members began to go out to talk to students in afterschool meetings specifically designed to reach young people. The response was overwhelming. Subsequent meetings focused on training in the philosophy of nonviolence and the importance of discipline. In retrospect, King believes that involving young people was “one of the wisest moves” they made in Birmingham (115).

As expected, there were objections to the involvement of young people. The national media attacked the decision to use children, causing a negative shift in the increasingly positive coverage the media gave to the protests in Birmingham. King saw these responses as hypocritical, since the media had failed to report on the impact that segregation had on the lives of children and young people prior to the protests. The most effective response was the enthusiasm of the children, a point King illustrates with several anecdotes.

With the participation of young people like these, the movement at last achieved the ability to “‘[f]ill up the jails,’” as Gandhi had in India (117). James Bevel, a key youth organizer, set May 2 as a D-Day, on which more than 1,000 young people would protest and volunteer to be arrested. Ignoring the efforts of school officials to prevent their participation, students overran the gates of their schools and contributed to the total of 2,500 demonstrators who were jailed (117).

In the second part of the chapter, King describes the impact of the protests on Commissioner for Public Safety Bull Connor. The pressure of overfull jails broke Connor’s resolve to respond to the protestors with restraint. On May 4, the national press carried images of women and children injured by beatings, dogs, and blasts from water hoses. The protestors responded to the uptick in violent responses with courage and discipline, although some bystanders were so incensed that they threw bottles and rocks at law enforcement. The discipline of the protestors inspired national indignation and got local African-Americans more involved.

King learned that Birmingham’s whites were also feeling the effects of the campaign. While ordinary white citizens in past campaigns had responded to protests with racist fury, most whites in Birmingham had a “strictly hands-off policy” that deprived Bull Connor of one avenue of response (119). King believed that their muted response signaled “shifting attitudes in the South” by whites (119). Even Connor’s own officers felt the impact of this shift. His men refused to turn the firehoses on a group of marchers as they headed for a prayer meeting outside the city jail.

Victories also came on the legal front. The protestors’ violations of the injunction against protesting had been answered with charges. One charge, criminal contempt, always led to a five-day jail sentence. A second type of charge, civil contempt, was a more serious charge that could lead to indefinite detention if the person charged refused to recant (i.e., admit wrongdoing). The court had originally charged King and several leaders with civil contempt. When it became clear that they “would never recant,” the court converted the charges to criminal contempt to avoid making these leaders into martyrs (121). King and his cohort were even given delayed sentencing and twenty days to appeal these charges.

In the third part of the essay, King discusses the ultimate goals of the campaign in Birmingham. The civil rights organizations in Birmingham wanted to negotiate with the city to desegregate public facilities, get more hiring and promotions for African-Americans in local businesses, drop all charges against protestors, and establish a “biracial committee to work out a timetable for desegregation in other areas of Birmingham life” (122).

Pressure on the White House to do something peaked on May 3. The next day, Attorney General Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, chief civil rights assistant, and Assistant Deputy Attorney General James Dolan to be the government’s voice in the negotiations. Although King initially worried that Marshall was merely there to get the protestors to agree to a “one-sided truce” (123), Marshall instead managed to open more lines of communications between the two sides. The civil rights leaders began to meet secretly with their white counterparts, the Senior Citizens Committee. After a difficult start to negotiations, they began to make progress.

This progress was almost derailed by street violence. Untrained bystanders threw objects at an armored car Connor had acquired, and Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the leaders of the local affiliate, was injured by the pressure of water hoses (he recovered enough to march again, however). These developments led local leaders to request the intervention of state troopers. Mass demonstrations, amplified by the protestors’ singing of freedom songs, on May 7 in downtown Birmingham convinced business leaders that they had to negotiate, however. Based on this progress, the protests were halted the next day. President Kennedy gave a national press conference urging all involved to resolve the situation and praised the dialogue between both sides.

The positive developments were again almost disrupted when King and Ralph Abernathy were jailed on old charges, though they were quickly bailed out and discussion continued. On May 10, the Senior Citizens Council agreed to essentially all the demands of the civil-rights leaders. The announcement of the agreement enraged white supremacist forces in Birmingham. On May 11, the Ku Klux Klan rallied outside of town, and both the home of King’s brother, A.D. King, and the unofficial headquarters of the movement were bombed. Martin Luther King was in Atlanta, so he was not injured.

The bombs went off close to midnight, timing calculated to coincide with the normal closing time for Birmingham’s African-American bars. African-Americans leaving these bars were not trained demonstrators. They fought back just as the bombers had hoped. Governor George Wallace’s law-enforcement officers responded with brutal beatings. That night, as King talked by phone with his brother about this seeming disaster, he heard movement followers singing “We Shall Overcome” in the background. An angry President Kennedy sent federal troops and promised to federalize the Alabama National Guard to maintain the agreement the civil-rights leaders of the Senior Citizens Committee had reached.

On May 20, another threat to the agreement came, this time because the Birmingham Board of Education expelled or suspended more than 1,000 of the students who had demonstrated. King was out of town when the news arrived, but he came back to explain to local leaders that he believed this action to be a trap designed to undermine the agreement. The NAACP provided legal representation to fight against the Board of Education.

Although the decision to punish the students was upheld by the local district judge on May 22, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge immediately struck down the decision and admonished the Board of Education for punishing students for the exercise of their constitutional rights. Even better legal news came when the Alabama Supreme Court resolved the refusal of Connor and other city commissioners to leave office by ending their terms.

Looking back on those days, King marvels at the financial support that came both from the Birmingham African-American community and the national African-American community, including celebrities. Financial support and legal representation also came from the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund. King believes the agreement in Birmingham represented “the climax of a long struggle for justice, freedom and human dignity,” a deathblow to a “system” that now only has the option to calculate “how costly they will make the funeral” of white supremacy (131). King closes the chapter on a hopeful note when he states that “Birmingham discovered a conscious” in 1963 (132).