School Integration Now

In the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham had a well-earned reputation as America’s deadliest defender of segregation. Civil rights leaders Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference believed that breaking Birmingham’s racial barriers would help Blacks win equal rights across the country. In April 1963, the ACMHR and SCLC launched the Birmingham Campaign, called Project C for confrontation, and organized nonviolent sit-ins, boycotts, pickets, marches, and other mass demonstrations to pressure city leaders to integrate department stores, public facilities, and later Birmingham public schools, which remained segregated nine years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Desegregation of Birmingham public schools was one of several important goals of the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights Movement, and at the start of Project C, ACMHR and SCLC leaders presented Birmingham’s civic and political leaders with demands that included creating a biracial committee to set a timetable for desegregating public schools under Brown. Other demands included desegregating department store lunch counters, hiring Blacks for better-paying white-collar jobs in stores and city government, and reopening public parks that city officials had closed to prevent federally ordered integration.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States