Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham Campaign

922 Words4 Pages
In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) descended upon the city of Birmingham, Alabama in hopes of achieving integration that African Americans of the city desperately sought out. While the “Birmingham Campaign” or “Project C” as it is sometimes called, is mostly associated with being organized by Dr. King and his associates of SCLC, there were other people that contributed a great deal to the success that the Birmingham Campaign was. The campaign’s success was in large part due to its tactical use of an economic boycott, strategic planning and the use of school age children to protest. Birmingham for a long time had been a city encased by fear. Negros living in the city,…show more content…
And SCLC there were other key players in Birmingham that attributed to the fight for integration. One of these people was Fred Shuttlesworth. Shuttlesworth was a black Baptist pastor who founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Right (ACMHR) after Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1956. Not only was Shuttlesworth founder of ACMHR but he was also one of the clergy that were first on board with Dr. King when he established SCLC. Shuttlesworth felt it was his assigned duty from God to desegregate Birmingham and he set out to do so at all costs and would not allow the bombs that Birmingham were famous for to derail him. In Birmingham from the years 1957 to 1962 Shuttlesworth tried to desegregate schools, get a black police officer appointed to the police force, and boycott the buses. Although his attempts were not fruitful, they lay the some of the groundwork for what would become known as the Birmingham…show more content…
King and SCLC recuperated and began to plan their course of action for Birmingham in September 1962. A boycott of the downtown stores by the students of Miles College had already began and SCLC wanted to build on the momentum of the boycott. The white merchants, whose businesses were suffering due to the boycott, did not want SCLC to come into town and start protesting. They had already established amongst themselves that the best way to combat Connor’s racism was to replace their current local government, that gave Connor too much power, with a more moderate mayor and administration. The threat of a protest would cause their plans to be derailed and could potentially be dangerous. The council of white merchants asked that the demonstrations be cancelled but Shuttlesworth refused to do so without a commitment to desegregating the water fountains and public facilities of five downtown stores. To Shuttlesworth this was a victory so he asked Dr. King to call off the protests; which Dr. King obliged. The desegregation of the downtown stores’ public facilities did not last long, which made Shuttlesworth and King decide to reschedule the protests at a time that would damage the downtown stores financially and serve as a punishment for reneging on the previous agreement with
Open Document