Selective Buying Campaign

After white businessmen failed to integrate their stores and remove "Colored" signs from water fountains and dressing rooms as promised in 1962, Miles College students led by Frank Dukes organized a boycott against the stores. They recruited students from other colleges, including whites from Birmingham-Southern College, to join them. Because a 1921 Alabama law made boycotts against businesses illegal, the students called their effort the Selective Buying Campaign. They sent out flyers urging Birmingham blacks to wear overalls to church on Easter Sunday rather than buy new clothes for the holiday. The campaign caused a dramatic drop in sales at white-owned stores downtown. Selective buying became one of the key non-violent strategies used in the 1963 Birmingham Movement, as blacks refused to buy clothes from white-owned retail stores during the busy Easter shopping season and put economic pressure on stores that treated them unfairly. On May 6, 1963, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led marchers behind a woman carrying a sign demanding that downtown Birmingham lunch counters be open to all, including blacks, but police stopped them before they reached the retail district.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States