Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the C by Diane McWhorter

Author:Diane McWhorter
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Central, General, Americas (North, West Indies), South, History
ISBN: 9780743226486
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Moment of Truth

BY DAYLIGHT, the state troopers had reclaimed the picnic tables in Kelly Ingram Park and were drinking coffee and listening to the radio. A twenty-block area around the motel, strewn with broken plate glass and smashed squad cars, was sealed off and closed to white people, including the press. Blacks and reporters from the night before remained quarantined without food or water inside the motel, whose water main had been destroyed by the bomb.

Sunday, May 12, was Mother’s Day again in Birmingham. As he had two years before, Vincent Townsend editorialized on the News’s front page: “This is a sabbath of sorrow.” If the beating of the Freedom Riders in 1961 had proved how important white brutality was to the campaign for civil rights, this Mother’s Day introduced black violence as an ingredient of the struggle. It was the first race riot of the modern civil rights era. In Boston, a white clergyman said, “Birmingham removes our fear of the future, for the crisis is here and now. This is the moment of truth. We have presumed too long on the long, long patience of the dispossessed.” ACMHR vice president Abraham Woods had stood in the middle of the Saturday-night riot and realized that it wasn’t “going to be long till this thing is going to take a new turn.”3

For now, the country was not ready to accept the possibility of a black uprising. NBC’s Johnny Apple did not come back with any film of rioting Negroes to offset the previous week’s police dogs and fire hoses. The only widely circulated shot—of a fireman with blood streaming down his face—was once again the work of the AP’s Bill Hudson. But otherwise no published photographs of black violence—no cabdriver being bludgeoned, no police lieutenant being stabbed—undermined his photograph of Walter Gadsden and Leo.

Nor could an organization grounded in nonviolence afford to recognize the new turn things had taken: The Movement’s line on the riot—“freedom tensions,” Emory O. Jackson was calling it—came swift and unswerving. Wyatt Walker acted as if the question of whether the violent “riffraff” was part of the Movement was beneath consideration. “The Saturday night crowd wasn’t a member of nothing!” Ed Gardner insisted. “We don’t need to keep a drunk head to keep us going. We won’t be turned around.”

But how could they be so sure about the rioters? There had been 2,500 people on the streets. Many were the “basic churchpeople” who lived in the surrounding shotgun houses. Most of the voices captured on the Riverside Church radio tape did not sound drunk or irrational. The Miles College veteran Frank Dukes believed there was “no difference between the people who were demonstrating and going to jail and the people who were throwing rocks.” His former schoolmate Charles Davis agreed: “We kept ’em nonviolent while marching. But we knew in our hearts that they were violent. A lot of winos on Fourth Avenue marched.”

“And really, those were the people who put the Movement over,” Dukes said.

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