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Unit 3: Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail

hiring practices, to grant amnesty to the arrested demonstrators, and to create a bi-racial Notes
committee for the reconciliation of differences.
As had happened in Montgomery, violence followed the concessions. Whites bombed black
homes and churches, and blacks retaliated with mob violence. King’s activities in Birmingham,
therefore, included a final stage, during which he patrolled the city, speaking wherever people
had gathered; he implored African Americans to answer violence only with peace.

While changes in local policies constituted the Birmingham campaign’s immediate outcome,
the effort’s long-term effects were felt nation-wide. In the weeks that followed, tensions flared,
and protests commenced in scores of Southern cities. King’s fame as a civil rights leader was
redoubled. And on 11 June, President Kennedy voiced his commitment to federal civil rights
legislation. He had been holding off, preoccupied by the Cold War, but Birmingham had
pressed the issue. Kennedy’s commitment culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination. The act mandated
federally what had in Birmingham been won locally: a white commitment to desegregation
and equal employment opportunities. It also gave the federal government power to enforce
desegregation laws in schools by withholding funds from non-compliant districts.

3.1 Triumphs and Tragedies

On 28 August 1963 roughly 250,000 people, three quarters of them black, marched in Washington
D.C., from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to speeches
by America’s civil rights leaders, including King. Officially called the “March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom,” the event was a major success, as the preceding Birmingham campaign
had been, and, like that campaign, contributed to the atmosphere in which federal civil rights
legislation could pass.
The planning of the rally had been a group effort, involving A. Phillip Randolph, King, James
Farmer of CORE, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, John Lewis of SNCC, and Dorothy Height of
the National Council of Negro Women. Bayard Rustin became national coordinator. The plan
initially upset the Kennedy Administration, which feared riots would result, and thus endanger
the civil rights legislation that had recently come before Congress. Consequently, the Administration
became involved in the planning, editing the content of the SNCC speaker’s speech, inviting
white organizations to participate, and thereby successfully preventing the outbreak of violence.
This involvement led some militant blacks to consider the march an inauthentic event; Nation
of Islam spokesman Malcolm X dismissed it altogether.

Attendance of the march exceeded the expectations of its planners: they had counted on
100,000 and got a quarter of a million. At the rally, King was the last speaker to address the
marchers, and he delivered the most famous speech of his career. Impassioned, rhythmic, and
clear, King described his hopes for the future:

Did u know? Eugene “Bull” Conner was the Police Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama
in 1963 when protests led by Fred Shuttlesworth, King, and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference brought the city to a halt. Conner’s use of
fire-hoses and attack-dogs to suppress peaceful protestors was televised
nationally; his violence thus served, as King put it, “to subpoena the conscience
of the nation.”

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