Demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama (1 Apr 1963 Jahr – 1 Mai 1963 Jahr)

Beschreibung:

The first civil rights law in the nation’s history, guaranteeing equality before the law, came in 1866 just after the Civil War. Its provisions were long ignored. A second law, forbidding the segregation of public spaces such as trains and hotels, was passed during Reconstruction in 1875 but struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. For nearly ninety years, southern Democrats in Congress had blocked any further civil rights legislation, save for a weak, largely symbolic act passed in 1957. But by the early 1960s, with legal precedents in their favor and nonviolent protest awakening the nation, civil rights leaders believed the time had come to pass a serious civil rights bill. The challenge was getting one through a still-reluctant Congress.

The road to such a bill began when Martin Luther King Jr. announced demonstrations in what he called “the most segregated city in the United States”: Birmingham, Alabama. King and the SCLC sought a concrete victory in Birmingham through their strategy of nonviolent direct action. In May 1963, thousands of black marchers protested employment discrimination in Birmingham’s department stores. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, ordered the city’s police troops to meet the marchers with violent force: snarling dogs, electric cattle prods, and highpressure fire hoses. Television cameras captured the scene for the evening news.

While serving a jail sentence for defying a court order prohibiting the march, King, scribbling in pencil on any paper he could find, composed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In time, the letter became one of the defining documents of nonviolent direct action, read around the world. “Why direct action?” King asked. “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth,” he began his eloquent answer. The civil rights movement sought, King continued, “to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension.” Grounding his appeal in equal parts Christian brotherhood and democratic liberalism, King argued that Americans confronted a moral choice: they could “preserve the evil system of segregation” or take the side of “those great wells of democracy … the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Outraged by the brutality in Birmingham and embarrassed by King’s imprisonment for leading a nonviolent march, President Kennedy finally decided to act. On June 11, 1963, after newly elected Alabama governor George Wallace barred two black students from enrolling at the state university, Kennedy went on television to denounce racism and promise a new civil rights bill. Many black leaders felt Kennedy’s action was long overdue, but they nonetheless hailed this “Second Emancipation Proclamation.” That night, Medgar Evers, president of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Jackson by a white supremacist. Evers’s tragic murder and martyrdom became a spur to further action

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