Black Business Plans

Nearby Fourth Avenue North was the economic center of the Black retail district and the main cultural, social, and religious center of Black Birmingham. There, Black residents could live, work, and play among their own people with less fear of social or economic rejection. Black-owned offices, stores, and churches in and around Fourth Avenue became planning sites where leaders of the local Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the national SCLC developed strategy for Birmingham's spring 1963 demonstrations. At the Black-owned Lucky Star Employment Agency in May 1963, Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, executive director of the SCLC, and his staff explained to local activists the methods and objectives of the Selective Buying Campaign. Before Project C began, Walker and the local ACMHR staff walked through the main retail district to choose stores to target for marches, sit-ins, and pickets, counted lunch-counter chairs to estimate how many marchers police could arrest in a day, and calculated how many protesters would be needed to replace those arrested.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States