Integration Begins: Desegregating Graymont School

As Birmingham's civil rights leaders pushed to desegregate city schools, radical opponents in Birmingham pushed back, sometimes violently, with responses that included telephone death threats to parents who dared send their children to all-White schools and the August and September 1963 bombings of the home of Arthur Shores, a prominent Birmingham civil rights attorney who had filed scores of lawsuits to end segregation in city schools and other public facilities. Despite rising anti-integration mob violence, the families of five Black children moved ahead with their effort to integrate three Birmingham Public Schools. On September 11, 1963, James Armstrong, who had waited several years for the chance to open the doors to a better education for his sons Floyd and Dwight and other Black children, walked toward Graymont Elementary with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, foot soldiers, and national reporters, backed by a federal court order against the Alabama state troopers who had blocked them days earlier. In response, Gov. George Wallace sent in the Alabama National Guard, but President John F. Kennedy federalized the Guard, which then had to protect the Armstrongs and the other Black students who integrated three Birmingham public schools that day.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States