This story is part of a series of articles, “Bending Toward Justice,” focusing on the 60th anniversary of events that took place in Birmingham during 1963 that changed the face of the city, and the world, in the ongoing struggle for equality and human rights. The series name is a reference to a quote by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The series will continue through 2023.
What began as a three-day retreat and planning session called by Martin Luther King Jr. in September 1962 helped lead the following year to dismantling segregation in Birmingham.
King gathered his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff and board members at their training center in Dorchester, near Savannah, Georgia. Along with Birmingham pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy (SCLC secretary) and Wyatt Tee Walker, they began initial discussions concerning what would happen in Birmingham in 1963.
Shuttlesworth was a key figure in organizing resistance to segregation and discrimination in Birmingham. He founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in 1956 to fill a hole left when the state of Alabama banned the NAACP for operating illegally as a “foreign corporation” and alleged connections to communist organizers.
Beginning that year, Shuttlesworth organized weekly “mass meetings” to coordinate direct protest actions against those who enacted and supported segregation in the city. The meetings at working-class churches often drew 300 to 400 people, and eventually thousands.
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth leading a mass meeting in 1956. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Al Samuel Stanton, Birmingham News.)
In 1962, these meetings led to the next phase of protest action – the citywide boycott of segregated merchants. The boycott was led by the Anti-Injustice Committee (AIC), whose membership was made up of local college students headed by Korean War veteran and Miles College student Frank Dukes. The AIC, with the support of Shuttlesworth, began the “Selective Buying Campaign” after negotiations between the merchant community, the AIC and Black business leaders failed.
Though contentious among the city’s Black upper and middle class, the boycott proved successful. As Birmingham historian and author Andrew M. Manis wrote, the boycott “proved to both white and Black leaders in Birmingham that economic pressure could be brought to bear on the racial status quo. Perhaps even more significant, it developed a cadre of previously uninvolved students who became potential activists for a major direct-action campaign the next year.”
The next stage
By 1962, King saw Birmingham as the next logical stage for massive direct action. He was aware of the racial conditions in Birmingham and that the city was widely known as the most thoroughly segregated in the United States.
Blacks in Birmingham experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There had been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation, among other issues.
King joined Shuttlesworth and other civil rights figures, who together conceived of a plan for 19 massive demonstrations. The organizers who met in Dorchester knew that only a well-organized protest campaign, based on repeated meetings, discussions and debates, would bring about Birmingham’s desegregation. Further, it was clear that the behind-closed-doors politicking of local officials and businesspeople for eventual desegregation was not going to deliver freedom with any speed or certainty.
They called the campaign “Project C,” with “the “C” standing for Birmingham’s “Confrontation with the fight for justice and morality in race relations.”
King later wrote that “because of the significance of the job to be done in Birmingham, we decided that the most thorough planning and prayerful preparation must go into the effort.”
The person in charge of the preparation was Walker, King’s chief of staff. As author Taylor Branch notes, “King presided over the business sessions at Dorchester, but the initial presentation belonged to Walker.” As chief architect of Project C, Walker developed a four-stage strategy for the campaign. First, they would launch small-scale sit-ins to draw attention to their desegregation platform, while building strength through nightly mass meetings. Second, they would organize a generalized boycott of the downtown business section and move to slightly larger demonstrations. Third, they would move up to mass marches to enforce the boycott and fill the jails. Finally, if necessary, they would call on outsiders to descend on Birmingham from across the country, as in the Freedom Rides, to cripple the city under the combined pressure of publicity, economic boycott and the burden of overflowing jails.
King wrote that Birmingham had been the country’s “chief symbol of racial intolerance,” and felt strongly that desegregation of the city would “set forces in motion to change the entire course of the drive for freedom and justice.”
A.G. Gaston Motel
Though the initial planning stages were in Dorchester, organizers needed a Birmingham location where they could coordinate the campaign. The A.G. Gaston Motel in downtown Birmingham was the logical choice for the climactic endgame. In Room 30, leaders held regular Project C strategy sessions. While there were other Black-only hotels and motels in the area, Gaston’s offered unrivaled accommodations.
Several of the civil rights leaders recalled how well-furnished and professional the motel was, and how it was in many ways equal to whites-only motels.
A promotional image of the A.G. Gaston Motel from the 1950s. The motel became the location for strategy meetings among civil rights leaders during the 1963 Birmingham campaign. (contributed)
King referred to Room 30 as “my room,” and it housed him and Abernathy. As a result of the daily news conferences announcing plans and successes that took place in the patio area, the motel became “as well known to America in 1963 as any other Birmingham landmark.”
For his part, businessman A.G. Gaston was involved with the civil rights movement, but his approach was far more conservative, mirroring that of Birmingham’s Black middle class and clergy.
For years, Gaston sought to elevate the financial and professional standing of Black people through education and employment. Immediately prior to King’s arrival in the city, Gaston was involved in negotiations with city officials and merchants concerning phased desegregation.
He viewed with distrust the impending protests in Birmingham, knowing it would give Eugene “Bull” Connor, the virulent pro-segregation commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, free rein to retaliate. Gaston let it be known he opposed such methods, and was unwilling to verbally support the SCLC due to its confrontational tactics.
A.G. Gaston, right, at the A.G. Gaston Motel. Gaston was wary, at first, of the 1963 campaign to dismantle racial segregation in the city. (City of Birmingham Archives)
The accommodationist position of Gaston and the majority of Birmingham’s upper classes was ill-received among civil rights leaders. His stance earned him an “Uncle Tom” label that stuck for years. Nevertheless, Gaston offered a modest lodging discount to the organizers and provided additional meeting space in his nearby office building.
In April 1963, Project C began by occupying lunch counters, resulting in a small number of arrests. The modest start was strategic as to slowly build the momentum of the movement. Soon more sit-ins took place, as did limited marches. Then, on Good Friday, King and Abernathy led 50 marchers in defiance of a court order barring demonstrations. They walked several blocks before police arrested the marchers and took them to the Birmingham Jail. Here, after a day in solitary confinement, King wrote his seminal “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
New tactic
After the Good Friday march, however, organizers realized that support for the campaign was waning and they had to develop an innovative approach.
The new tactic employed Birmingham’s Black children who, starting May 2, began a series of marches throughout the city. Marching from Kelly Ingram Park toward City Hall and the retail district, children were met with brutality by Connor and the Birmingham police force.
Connor unleashed police dogs and high-powered water hoses on the young demonstrators, trying to contain them in Kelly Ingram Park. Scores of children were arrested. News media documented the scene, and the “photographs and televised coverage of the brutal hosing of children sickened viewers and gained a new visibility for civil rights issues,” Branch wrote.
Eugene “Bull” Connor with police at Kelly Ingram Park on April 7, 1963, during civil rights demonstrations. His actions a few weeks later, during the children’s protests, would shock the nation. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Robert Adams or Jack Hopper or Lou Isaacson or Ed Jones or Tom Lankford, Birmingham News.)
The marches continued for six more days until, on May 8, a temporary moratorium was issued by the campaign to negotiate a solution. Throughout the protests, Gaston was frustrated. Desiring a more peaceful solution, Gaston wanted to hash out differences through meetings and negotiations. However, when he saw the children getting blasted with water and bitten by dogs, Gaston was incensed, “turning him from a reluctant participant in the rush toward desegregation into a powerful, visible broker of peace in his city.”
Gaston didn’t take part in the remaining marches but found other ways to help, including paying over $160,000 to bail out scores of jailed protesters. Further, Gaston was instrumental in pushing for the compromise that developed following the cessation of demonstrations.
Partial victory
On May 10, 1963, King, Abernathy and Shuttlesworth held a news conference in the courtyard of Gaston Motel, announcing that a truce was negotiated on the 7th. The truce produced a watered-down version of the original list of demands issued by the campaign a month earlier. The original list called for immediate desegregation of lunch counters, restrooms and other facilities. The compromise provided “no ‘immediate’ moves in any direction.”
Instead, a monthslong timetable replaced the stronger language. Shuttlesworth, who had been hospitalized after injuries sustained during the protests, was not a part of the final negotiations and was unhappy with the concessions, as the agreement contained no language requiring merchants to pressure the city government to support desegregation.
Birmingham Fire Department personnel blast young protesters with firehoses, 1963. The “Children’s Crusade” turned the tide in the civil rights campaign. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Robert Adams or Ed Jones, Birmingham News.)
While the main parties involved reluctantly accepted the truce, the National States’ Rights Party, along with Connor, did not agree with the deal. “The group picketed stores that desegregated lunch counters, and Connor had frequent meetings attacking those who showed any willingness to accept desegregation.”
The day after King announced the truce, terrorists attacked the A.G. Gaston Motel, detonating a bomb on the west side of the building. The bomb targeted Room 30 in an attempt to assassinate King and Abernathy. However, the leaders had just left for Atlanta, and the room was empty, though four people were injured.
After the bombing, a major uprising transpired in the city. Thousands of participants gathered in Kelly Ingram Park to protest the bombing and Blacks’ lack of freedom. Police descended on the protesters, severely beating many with clubs and corralling some in the motel parking lot. These demonstrations in Birmingham inspired hundreds of solidarity protests throughout the country over the next 10 weeks.
A building on fire, Sixth Avenue North and 15th Street, which was part of the violent reaction to the 1963 bombing of the A.G. Gaston Motel. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Norman Dean, Birmingham News.)
Over the summer of 1963, more bombings and attempted bombings took place throughout the city. In September, the Gaston residence was firebombed, terrifying his wife, Minnie, and nearly destroying their house. While the bombing of the motel and the Gaston residence, as well as other bombings the city had experienced were traumatic, they paled in comparison to the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in which four girls were killed and others injured. Afterward, King and Gaston were devastated but, again, approached the situation differently. King wanted federal troops and more demonstrations; Gaston wanted to hash things out internally, without “outsiders” like King involved. Without the support of the Black elite in the city, King backed off.
Change in Birmingham
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson became president. He continued Kennedy’s push for equal rights for Black citizens, which was driven by the Birmingham protests, and less than a year later Johnson was able to gain enough support for the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The law changed the face of America. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It outlawed racial segregation in schools, the workplace and all places that served the public, such as libraries, parks and swimming pools. It ended race-based and unequal requirements to block Blacks from registering to vote. The changes can be credited to events in Birmingham in spring 1963 that began with private meetings in Dorchester, Georgia, and culminated with meetings at A.G. Gaston Motel.
Barnett Wright is the editor of The Birmingham Times and author of “1963: How the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement Changed America and the World.”
