The Gospel in Action: Birmingham

After Montgomery, King commits to seeking widespread change in the Jim Crow South. He helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to this end. They became active in Albany, GA seeking to change injustice for Black residents, but they were largely unsuccessful. Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth then invited the SCLC to Birmingham, guaranteeing success if they worked for civil rights in that city.

Operation C (for confrontation) in Birmingham had 3 goals:

  1. Desegregate lunch counters, fitting rooms and drinking fountains within 90 days.

  2. The hiring of black citizens as clerks and salespersons along with proper training and future development starting within 60 days.

  3. Formation of a committee that would work to dismantle all segregation in the city.

The city leaders were utterly against granting these requests, represented famously by a powerful politician named Bull Conner. You can watch videos of people peacefully protesting downtown, only to be hauled off in paddy wagons. This is not the Montgomery boycott where the majority of black residents take part. The number of protestors are initially small enough so that they can be “handled” by the police department, but large enough that the SCLC runs out of bail money to get protesters out of jail. 

And this is when the movement faces a critical moment. It looks like this can be another failure: A bit of noise with no results. Dr. King knows that if he goes to join the protest, he’ll be imprisoned with no guarantee they can bail him out. As the leaders are discussing whether to push ahead or pull back, Dr. King goes into another room and shuts the door. He comes out having changed from his suit into jeans in preparation for going to jail and says “I don’t know what will happen; I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

He joins the protest and is thrown in jail. For 24 hours he is in solitary confinement, not even allowed to speak to his lawyer. King wondered whether all was lost. 

King often spoke publicly about the non-violent protest movement at this time, trying to help people understand its nature. Some (such as Malcolm X at the time) criticized it for being passive. King was adamant that violence would be a failure. If Black Americans took up arms, he said that the government would obliterate them. Nonviolence, he defended, requires great courage. Others (such as the 8 white clergymen described below) advocate waiting. King was just as adamant that non-action would be cowardice, and protest against injustice was a moral imperative.

The SCLC made anyone who wanted to protest with them sign an agreement and undergo training in nonviolent protest methods. Among others, prospective protestors had to agree to:

  • Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.

  • Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.

  • Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.

  • Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.

When King was in jail, the newspaper printed an op-ed piece from 8 white clergymen criticizing King for being an outside agitator and for lacking an appropriate timing. 

King’s response is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in American History. He is forced to write in the sides and margins of the paper and other scraps of paper. His lawyers get it to his secretaries who are able to read his writing and put together the response in an open letter. His letter is an explanation which respectfully offers a powerful and philosophically/ theologically rich response. 

To summarize his points very briefly (I’d highly recommend reading the whole letter), King says that nobody is going to give Black Americans the rights they are entitled to, but rather they must demand those rights. King also responds that he is not an outside agitator, because he was invited to come to Birmingham, and that his conscience demands he speak up for justice wherever injustice is found.

When King is able to speak with his allies after his time in solitary confinement, he finds that the singer Harry Belafonte has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars to support the cause. Rather than snuffing out the movement, the arrest of King had brought some new life. King wrote that in the experience, he learned “I had never been truly in solitary confinement; God’s companionship does not stop at the door of a jail cell.”

The movement, however, was still on a knife’s edge. Another failure like Albany would perhaps cause such a loss of confidence in the black community and a resolve in those seeking to oppress the black citizenry as to make any progress impossible for the foreseeable future.

What happens next changes everything.

In early May, civil rights leaders start to visit college and high schools to invite students to join the protests of Birmingham. These young men and women responded. Some would criticize the movement for allowing kids to be put in danger of violence. King asks why these critics were not incensed about the way these kids were treated everyday under segregation, only attempting to “defend” them when it suited their own purposes and preferences.

On May 2nd and 3rd, 1963, a thousand students marched on downtown Birmingham. They were peaceful, but insisting on equal rights. The leadership of Birmingham, in complete disarray, responded in almost unbelievable fashion. Police officers used clubs on the children. When the children would not relent, police dogs were brought in. Kids facing these fangs carried no weapons, and had caused no damage to any property.

When this tactic failed, the Bull Conner brought in the firemen and ordered them to blast protesters with powerful jets of water. Men, women, boys and girls were blasted off their feet or against walls with tools designed to protect.

In the midst of this, the students were also being arrested. Not having enough vehicles to transport the students to jail, school busses were brought in to do the job. Again, materials purchased by the government designed to uplift students were used to jail them as they asked to be treated with basic equality. The students, it is reported, went to jail joyfully — believing in the cause for which they sacrificed. They managed to fill the jails in Birmingham. King reports that up to 2500 people went to jail from the demonstrations, with a large portion being young people.

Following the footsteps of Jesus, they confronted great injustice with great sacrifice.

When city leadership saw the resolve being exemplified by these young people, an agreement was struck to fulfill the three requests of the protestors from the start, plus the added stipulation that all protestors be released immediately.

When word got out of the agreement, segregationists were furious. Following a KKK meeting outside of town, a bomb exploded at the Gaston Motel, near Kings room. But they were unaware that King was in Atlanta that night. The black community was angry and threatened to riot — not everyone was part of the nonviolent movement.

But the federal government and judiciary became involved and provided the stability needed for the agreement to take hold.

When the students walked out to protest, they assembled at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In September of that year, the church was bombed on a Sunday morning, using 16 sticks of dynamite. 4 girls aged 11-14 were killed. While substantial evidence existed, no one was prosecuted at the time. The head of the FBI, Hoover, who believed King to be a Communist, refused to provide needed assistance in the process.

In Montgomery, there were bouts of violence, but it was largely a peaceful process. In Birmingham, blood would be shed in an effort to gain equal rights. In seeing the images of people attacked by dogs and blasted with hoses, one must understand that living under Jim Crow segregation was so dehumanizing and demeaning that citizens were willing to face injury and even death rather than continue under the status quo. 

Again we find the church and pastors at the center of the efforts, preaching hope that God will grant justice to the oppressed as they offered their bodies as sacrifices.

Selma will follow this experience in Birmingham and lead to powerful legislation supporting civil rights. It’s real progress. King seemed to feel that if the South, where Jim Crow was entrenched, could be transformed, the dominos of equality would begin to fall everywhere. 

He used the law to promote the opportunity for black people to have a voice in the halls of political power. He genuinely believed in the power and nobility of democracy — that when everyone had an equal voice, humanity could make progress. Changing the law, King would often argue was only part of the process. He said that while the law could not make you love another person, it could make you stop lynching them.

In addition to using the law, King preached about the need for unity through allowing God to transform hearts. King said that we must reach the point where we are willing to submit to “enforceable obligations” to our fellow humans. That to go beyond “not lynching” and to arrive at “love and care” would take a work of God.

I believe that as King saw walls begin to tumble and progress being made in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and other places in the South through peaceful protest; he felt optimism. It was at great cost, but progress long delayed was finally being realized. The fight God had led him to seemed achievable.

But then he turned his eyes to the North. King went to Chicago to learn of the challenges in the North. King had gone to college in Boston, but having spent most of his life in the South, he likely felt the North would celebrate freedom for black citizens in the South and make progress as well.

In fact, what he saw in Chicago changed his writings from hopeful optimism to prophetic warnings of what was to come unless we changed course.