Promises to Keep by Donald G. Nieman

Author:Donald G. Nieman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.3. Walter B. Gadsden, a Birmingham, Alabama, high school student, attacked by a police dog, May 3, 1963, during demonstrations against segregation. Alabama Media Group Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

King’s strategy worked. As pictures of police brutality appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on TV screens across the nation, civil rights again took center stage, and northern support for national action mounted. The president sent Justice Department mediators to Birmingham to arrange a settlement and pressured the city’s business elite to compromise. Negotiations began promptly and were successfully concluded on May 10, when King announced that whites had agreed to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, rest rooms, and department store fitting rooms and had pledged to implement a nondiscriminatory hiring program in the city’s industries. The victory over Bull Connor emboldened African Americans across the South, touching off more than eight hundred boycotts and demonstrations in two hundred southern towns and cities during the summer of 1963. Birmingham kindled a new assertiveness among blacks, leading them to reject tokenism and to demand fundamental and immediate change.

Birmingham also forced John Kennedy to make civil rights a top priority—something that no president since Ulysses Grant had done. He realized that blacks were no longer willing to wait patiently and feared that unless sweeping changes were initiated, racial confrontation would tear the nation apart. Indeed, while King continued to espouse nonviolence, many African Americans had grown tired of turning the other cheek. On May 11, in response to a wave of racist bombings orchestrated by the Klan and local police, Birmingham blacks took to the streets, pelting police with rocks and bottles and burning several white-owned businesses located in the ghetto. Elsewhere, black writer James Baldwin wrote of The Fire Next Time, and Malcom X, the militant black nationalist who appeared on television more than any other African American leader in 1963, insisted that “the day of nonviolent resistance is over.”22 Faced with a growing racial crisis and sensing greater support for action, Kennedy appeared on national television on June 11 to announce that he was sending sweeping civil rights legislation to Congress. He appealed to principle, arguing that the nation confronted a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.” But he also warned that the issue could no longer be avoided. “The events in Birmingham and elsewhere,” he suggested, meant that legislation was essential “if we are to move this problem from the streets to the courts.”23

The president moved quickly. He submitted legislation strengthening voting rights laws, authorizing the attorney general to file school desegregation suits, empowering the president to end federal financial assistance to discriminatory state and local programs, and banning discrimination in employment and places of public accommodation such as motels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and gas stations. Kennedy could count on the votes of northern Democrats and support from many labor leaders, the major national Jewish organizations, and liberal groups such as Americans for Democratic Action.

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