The 68-year-old Mr. Connor does not like newsmen—he has been burned so often in print—but he likes to talk, and an audience of five or six is irresistible—to the great distress of Mr. Boutwell and some of the “moderates.”
Today should be the day of resolution, but then nearly everyone thought that the day before would be, too.
The city is bracing itself. As Mr. Abernathy said: “This is the largest non-violent army in the civil rights struggle.” And according to Negro comedian Dick Gregory, who was bailed out of jail here yesterday, “the further you get away from that church, the less non-violent you get.”
Mr. Gregory accused police of brutality. “I was whipped by five policemen,” he told reporters. “They used billy clubs and hammers, and one guy had a sawed-off pool stick.” A policeman called the charges “a wild story.”
Asked about the food during his four days in jail, Mr. Gregory said at first it tasted like “garbage,” but added: “After that, it’s better than home cooking.…Mama couldn’t cook no better that third day, baby.”
The rest of the world was watching Birmingham closely. European and Asian newspapers regarded the racial unrest as front-page news. Many have used dramatic pictures of demonstrators being attacked by police dogs and knocked down with fire hoses.
“Public opinion throughout the world repudiates this wave of racial violence in Alabama, at which state officials and Federal authorities snap their fingers,” commented the Moscow newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya.
The Italian Communist party organ L’Unita said the clashes “indicate that a revolution is already under way.”
Financial support also was growing for the desegregation movement. The National Maritime Union said it had sent a check for $32,692 to Dr. King. The money was proceeds from a dinner the union held last October to honor its president, Joseph Curran.
The Women’s Strike for Peace organization sent $575 to Dr. King’s wife. The money was collected on a train carrying the women back to Philadelphia and New York from Washington, where they urged Congress to strengthen nuclear test ban negotiations.
In Toronto, members of a synagogue began a fund-raising drive and urged Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to express “concern and distress” about Birmingham when he meets with President Kennedy this week end.
May 13, 1963
How the Night Exploded into Terror
BIRMINGHAM.
It was a hot night and down in the Negro section of town, around the A. G. Gaston Motel, the beer joints and barbecue stands were doing a good, loud Saturday night business. In a three-block area more than 1,000 Negroes were milling about.
Over at Bessemer, 12 miles away, the Ku Klux Klan was having an outdoor rally in the flickering light of two flaming 25-foot crosses. On hand were 200 hooded men, including the imperial wizard himself and a couple grand dragons and about 900 Klan supporters in mufti. There were a lot of bugs in the air, too, knocking against the crosses and falling into open collars.
For a month, through all the Negro demonstrations here, little was heard from the tough white element in the Birmingham area—very likely, the toughest in the South. Everyone wondered why, and then, Saturday night, the explosion came, literally.
Earlier in the day, the Rev. Wyatt Walker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s executive secretary, asked the police to place a watch on the Gaston Motel because some white men had been observed “casing it.” At 7:30 p.m. a call came through the motel switchboard, warning that the motel would be bombed that night. It was a straight tip.
At 11:32 p.m. some night riders tossed two bombs from a car onto the front porch of the Rev. A. D. King’s home in the suburb of Ensley. The front half of the house was ripped apart, but no one was injured. Mr. King is Martin Luther King’s brother.
The night riders then sped four miles across town to the motel, headquarters for the Negro leaders, and threw another bomb. It blasted a four-foot hole through the brick wall of one of the bedroom units. Three Negro women were sent tumbling—including one about 80 years old—but they were not seriously injured.
That did it. The Negroes in the area, many of them just leaving the beer joints at midnight closing, went into a frenzy of brick-throwing, knifing, burning and rioting that took four hours to stop, and then just short of gunfire. It was the worst night of terror in the South since the battle of Ole Miss. More than 25 people were injured and property damage was estimated at many thousands of dollars.
A few of us at the Tutwiler Hotel, four blocks away from the Negro motel, heard the mid night explosion—a dull whoomp—and got there a few minutes later. Only about 35 city policemen were on the scene, and they were standing in a small perimeter, arms over their heads, under a barrage of rocks and bottles from a mob of cursing and shouting Negroes closing in on them.
Mr. Walker—a Negro—was catching it from them, too, as he moved about with a bull horn pleading for calm.
“Please, please. Move back, move back. Throwing rocks won’t help,” he said. “This is no good. Please go home. It does no good to lose your heads.”
“Tell it to Bull Connor,” they shouted back to him. “This is what non-violence gets you.”
Some of the rioters were attacking the police cars, smashing the windows with chunks of cinder blocks and cutting the tires with knives. One group kicked over a motorcycle and set it afire. Some others got around a paddy wagon and tried to upset it, but it was too heavy, so they battered the windows in.
Patrolman J. N. Spivey, alone and encircled in the mob, was stabbed in the shoulder and back. Capt. Glenn Evans and a deputy sheriff were kicked and punched pulling him free.
Help arrived soon in the form of a Negro civil defense unit with helmets and billy clubs, and more white police. These emergency Negro officers took just as much abuse and pummelling as the whites.
The city’s armored car arrived shortly before 1 a.m. and its appearance provoked the mob anew.
“Let’s get the tank,” they yelled. “Bull, you — —, come on out of there.” Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor was not in the “tank” though this idea persisted throughout the night. (No one seemed to know where he was.)
The little white riot vehicle roared back and forth under a hail of rocks to scatter the crowd, and it mounted the sidewalk once and made a headlong pass down it, sending about 50 of us spectators diving for the dirt.
Some of the newsmen were hit with rocks and beer cans, but most of them quickly learned to stay away from such targets as the armored car and any large group of police.
Two blocks away, in a quiet zone, a gang of white boys were gathered on a corner throwing rocks and smashing the windows of Negro ambulances on their way to the motel. Police re moved boys from the scene early, though, and no other whites appeared in the melee.
There came a frightening development at 1:10 a.m. That was when Col. Al Lingo, director of the Alabama Highway Patrol, arrived, itching for action. He and a lieutenant sprang from their car with 12-gauge pump shotguns at the ready, and moved toward the crowd.
“I’ll stop those — —,” he said.
“Wait, wait a minute now,” said Birmingham Police Chief Jamie Moore, intercepting him. “You’re just going to get somebody killed with those guns.”
“I damn sure will if I have to,” said Col. Lingo.
“I wish you’d get back in the car. I’d appreciate it.”
“I’m not about to leave. Gov. Wallace sent me here.”
In the end, he did go back to the car, jabbing a couple of Negroes with his gun on the way. But Col. Lingo would be heard from again before the night was over.
Chief Moore and his chief inspector, William J. Haley, used little rough stuff in trying to disperse the mob. The dogs and fire trucks were on hand but were never used.
Inspector Haley, his head protected only by a soft hat, moved fearlessly from one hot spot to another, taking punches and kicks and rocks, yet never losing his head.
The action took place on all four sides of the city
block, bounded by 15th and 16th Sts., and Fifth and Sixth Aves. The motel is on Fifth Ave., between the two streets. It is a neighborhood of small grocery stores, taverns, frame shanties and churches.
The 16th St. Baptist Church, the starting point of all the recent demonstrations, is a block diagonally away from the motel at the corner of Sixth Ave. and 16th St. For a while it was thought the church was burning, but it turned out to be a taxicab that had been turned over and set afire in front of the church.
The Rev. A. D. King arrived at 1:45 a.m. and joined Mr. Walker and a number of other Negro leaders in trying to quell the riot with bull-horn pleas. Around 2 o’clock he climbed atop a parked car in the motel court-yard and gathered an audience of about 300 Negroes.
“We have been taught by our religion that we do not have to return evil for evil,” he told them. “I must appeal to you to refuse any acts of retaliation for any acts of violence…We’re not mad with a soul…my wife and five children are all right. Thank God we’re all well and safe.”
As he spoke and prayed, and as the gathering sang, “We Shall Overcome,” a white grocery store was burning on the corner of 15th St. and Sixth Ave. Firemen trying to put it out were stoned by the mob. After a few minutes they retreated and the fire burned unchecked. The firemen pulled out so fast that they left a hose in the street, and it lay there burning in the no-man’s land.
At 2:30, another grocery store directly across the street blazed up. Two frame houses on either side of the store caught fire, then a third, a two-story house. The rocks kept the firemen out, and it appeared the whole block would go.
“Let the whole — city burn, I don’t give a God damn,” said one of the rioters. “This’ll show those white — —s.”
“We have just spoken with the President’s press secretary, Andrew Hatcher, and he asked you to re turn to your homes,” announced one of the Negro leaders. “Please go to your homes. This is no answer.”
At 3:05, with a police guard of about 75 men, the firemen returned to the blazing houses with two trucks and went to work again. The rocks and bricks were still flying, but a skirmish line of Negro leaders kept the rioters out of throwing range of the fire fighters.
In this scrap, Inspector Haley caught a brick on the forehead. With blood running down his face into his eyes, he stayed on the skirmish line calling, “Get back…get back, you must get back.” He became so weak he had to be carried away.
An infuriated city policeman started toward the Negroes with a shotgun. When Mr. King tried to stop him, he knocked the minister out of the way with his gun. But a police lieutenant grabbed the angry patrol-man and ordered him back. A few minutes later another policeman advanced on the mob and sighted his pistol across his left arm. Again the lieutenant stepped in and stopped him.
Soon there was left only a small pocket of rioters, young men in their teens and twenties, confined to 15th St. between Sixth and Seventh Aves. This group set fire to yet another grocery store at 15th St. and Seventh Ave. The blaze was nipped by Negro Civil Defense men.
It was pretty much all over at 3:40, when the state troopers began clubbing Negroes sitting on their porches. They had been sitting there watching all along, taking no part in the fight.
“Get in the house, God damn it, get, get,” shouted the troopers, punching and pounding them with their nightsticks. And so the battle ended with the state policemen, who had played only a very minor role in the actual quelling of the riot, rapping old Negro men in rocking chairs.
Col. Lingo and his men had been chafing all week at the moderation and restraint of Chief Moore and his city police. “Moore is a Boy Scout,” said Col. Lingo.
When daylight began to break at 4 o’clock, there were no Negroes in sight. The only sound to be heard was the screaming of sirens as more and more state troopers poured into the city, with their shotguns at ready and carbines with bayonets fixed.
The police, about 1,000 of them, cordoned off the troubled area around the motel from 14th to 17th Sts. and from First to Eighth Aves., allowing no one to leave or enter the area.
Shortly before 6 a.m. a state police sound vehicle cruised about downtown warning individual Negroes to “get off the God damn streets, get.”
But someone put a stop to that, evidently because it was Sunday and Mother’s Day.
After that the city was deathly silent, and no one was to be seen on the streets for several hours—until church time. It was a sparkling morning, and around the post office the air was fragrant with the scent of magnolia blossoms.
May 13, 1963
Klan Rally—Just Talk
BIRMINGHAM.
A Ku Klux Klan meeting, for all its cross-burning and hooded panoply, is a much duller affair than one might expect. The masked Klan rally in Bessemer Saturday night—just before the bombings in Birmingham—limped along for three hours of nothing but Kennedy jokes and invocations of Divine guidance.
It’s hardly worth driving 12 miles and risking a clout on the head to hear President Kennedy and his brothers slandered, when you can get that on any street corner in Birmingham.
The rally was held in a well-kept little roadside park, a gift to the City of Bessemer from the Loyal Order of Moose. Moose Park, they call it. Two huge crosses were burned, one with an effigy of Martin Luther King on it. The crosses were some 25 feet high and about the heft of telephone poles.
There were 200 hooded and gowned men on hand and about 1,000 spectators in street dress. Entire families came, some with tow-headed kids that couldn’t have been much more than 4 years old.
About 25 of the gowned Klansmen were in fancy red regalia—they were the dragons and kleagles. The other wore white. Their outfits are in three pieces—blouse, gown and pointed hood.
Some wore badly tailored cotton sheeting, but others had costumes of well-cut shiny nylon. Only a few concealed their faces. Most of them had their face flaps tied back.
“Klansmanship…Kennedy…niggers…Jews…the white man…Our Heavenly Father,” these were the recurring words in all the speeches. One or two spoke vaguely of bloodshed to come, but only in the sense of some unscheduled Armageddon.
A few references were made to the Birmingham situation. All were advised to cancel their charge plates and stop shopping at downtown stores there.
“We know who the men are who are selling out our country,” said one dragon. “The K.B.I. (Klan Bureau of Investigation) has learned their names.”
The imperial wizard of the Klan, Robert M. Shelton, presided and introduced the speakers as they appeared, one by one, on big flat truck trailer bed. [Mr. Shelton is a thin, intense man of about 40. An old friend of former Gov. John Patterson, he is a tire dealer from Tuscaloosa.]
Honored guests were the grand dragons of Georgia and Mississippi. [One of the favorite speakers was a man in red who warned of sickle-cell anemia, “a deadly organism lurking in all nigger blood.”
“If so much as one drop of nigger blood gets in your baby’s cereal,” he said, “the baby will surely die in one year.” He did not explain how he thought a negro would come to bleed in anyone’s cereal.]
By 10:30 p.m. one of the crosses had collapsed and the other was just smoldering. Everyone drifted away and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.
[Parts of the story enclosed in brackets appeared in a version distributed by the Herald Tribune News Service.—Ed.]
June 12, 1963
A Long Day of Defiance
TUSCALOOSA, Ala.
Down a path lined by steel-helmeted troopers and cleared by soldiers in battle dress, James A. Hood and Vivian Juanita Malone went to college yesterday.
They are both 20, they are both Negroes. They were both, for a day, in the center of the national stage as the President of the U. S. issued first a proclamation to “cease and desist” and then an order Federalizing the National Guard to stop the Governor of Alabama from keeping them out.
Together, t
hey represent integration for an all-white state school system that has resisted integration longer than any other state in the union.
But as they walked into the red-brick registration building on the university campus, Gov. George C. Wallace—who backed down under the threat of a force greater than any he could muster—breathed defiance and told the world:
“We are winning this fight because we are awakening the people of the nation to the trend toward military dictatorship.”
And then he quickly added, “We must have no violence today or any day.”
That was the pattern of the hot, airless day: like a strange ballet, the forces on each side slowly took up their positions and slowly changed as strategy called forth counter-strategy. Seemingly, the only non-determined item was the fact that Miss Malone came to the campus yesterday morning in a black dress and yesterday afternoon went in to pay her $175 summer-term fee wearing a bright pink dress.
In a suddenly called national television and radio address last night, President Kennedy praised the students of the university—conspicuous by their silence, their restraint—and pointed out the lessons for every state made clear by posing the moral issue in Alabama as to “whether all Americans are going to be treated equally.”
It was an epilogue to a moral drama.
The final act was set in motion at 1:34 p. m. when President Kennedy signed the executive order that brought the 15,000 troops and 2,000 air personnel of the Alabama National Guard under Federal jurisdiction.
The last time Alabama’s crack 31st Infantry Division had been called up to national duty was in 1961—when Berlin was the crisis that called forth the headlines.
The President’s order was transmitted immediately to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and down the chain of command it went until Brig. Gen. Henry Graham, assistant commander of the 31st, marched to the doorway where Gov. Wallace stood—just as he had pledged in his last campaign—in the final effort to keep the Negro students out.
Dressed in fatigues, a Rebel flag patch on his shoulder, four tough special guardsmen flanking him, Gen. Graham said: