The New Strategy

By the end of April 1963, national media and local Whites were losing interest in Project C, and fewer Blacks were volunteering to be arrested at downtown stores and lunch counters. Reverend James Bevel, a field secretary with the SCLC, responded by turning to schoolchildren, whom Whites could not intimidate in the same ways they used against Black adults, such as firing them from jobs, threatening their homes with foreclosure, or applying other economic pressures. On April 29, Bevel's SCLC team spread hundreds of flyers through Black high schools urging children to leave school and rally at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Despite Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.'s initial reluctance, Bevel and his team held workshops for the young recruits, teaching them the purpose and principles of nonviolent protest, and Birmingham's Black children soon became the newest, youngest, and most effective foot soldiers in the battle for freedom.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States