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Elective English–II

Notes giving them economic bite. He postponed his plans, however, to prevent them from affecting
the local mayoral election, in which Bull Conner was a candidate.
The campaign began on 3 April with lunch-counter sit-ins. On 6 April, protestors marched on
City Hall, and forty-two people were arrested. Demonstrations occurred each day thereafter.
While the jails filled with peaceful blacks, King negotiated with white businessmen, whose
stores were losing business due to the protests. Although some of these businessmen were
willing to consider desegregating their facilities and hiring African Americans, City officials
held fast to segregationist policies. On 10 April, these officials obtained an injunction prohibiting
the demonstrations. Unlike the injunction in Albany, Georgia, however, this one came from a
state court, not a federal one. King felt comfortable violating such an injunction, on the grounds
of adhering to the federal laws with which it was at odds.
Getting the other leaders of the campaign to violate the injunction, however, took some convincing
by King, especially as many of the clergy felt bound to be in the pulpit–and not in jail–on the
following Sunday, which was Easter. But King succeeded in persuading them to his cause, and
personally led a march on Good Friday, 12 April. All protestors were quickly arrested. Birmingham
police separated King and Abernathy, placing each in solitary confinement, and denying each
man his rightful phone-calls to the outside world.
Disturbed by the unprecedented silence from her husband, Coretta Scott King called the White
House. Her call was returned by Robert Kennedy and then by the President himself. The
Kennedy Administration sent FBI agents to Birmingham, and King promptly received more
hospitable treatment. Moreover, this intervention by Kennedy gave the movement greater
momentum.

King spent eight days in his cell. During that time he composed his “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail.” The letter was ostensibly conceived in response to a letter that had recently run in a local
newspaper, which had claimed that the protests were “unwise and untimely”; however, King
also quite deliberately wrote his letter for a national audience. The letter reveals King’s strength
as a rhetorician and his breadth of learning. It alludes to numerous secular thinkers, as well
as to the Bible. It is passionate and controlled, and was subsequently appropriated by many
writing textbooks as a model of persuasive writing. At the time, it gave a singular, eloquent
voice to a massive, jumbled movement.
Once King was released from jail, the protests assumed a larger scale and a more confrontational
character. At the suggestion of SCLC member Jim Bevel, the organizers began to recruit younger
protestors. They visited high schools, to train youth in non-violent tactics. The method was
dangerous—kids could get hurt—but also potentially very symbolically powerful: children
were the beneficiaries of the movement; they represented the movement’s hope for the future.
On 2 May King addressed a young crowd at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Afterward
they marched downtown, singing “We Shall Overcome,” and nearly a thousand youths were
arrested. The next day, more young people had arrived to replenish the ranks, and another
march occurred. By this point, the situation had become overwhelming for Bull Conner, whose
jails were full. On 3 May he had his forces blast the young protestors with fire-hoses, and
released attack dogs against them. It was these acts of violence–broadcast on national television–
that pricked the national conscience, and marked a turning point not only in Birmingham but
also in the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. Telegrams flooded the White House conveying
outrage, and it became clear that the Kennedy Administration would have to confront civil
rights issues more directly.
In a day or two the protests had become so massive and volatile that the City was willing to
negotiate. It listened to the demands of the SCLC, and set a schedule for the desegregation of
lunch counters and other facilities. It also promised to confront the issue of inequality in

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