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(history continued....)
Birmingham was described by social workers of the era as the city hardest hit by the Great Depression, which dealt its heaviest blow to the Black population. The social disorder of the 1930's resulted in increased unionization, and with the shift to wartime production the city began its bounce back as civic leaders diversified the economic base. Yet, despite the returning prosperity, Blacks who then stood at forty percent of the total population, received unequal opportunity, and substandard municipal services. Having fought for freedom abroad, returning Black veterans grew incensed at the dismal living standards in the Black community.
The owners and managers of Birmingham's businesses showed indifference to entreaties from the Black community, while elected officials responded with hostility and repression to Black demands for municipal services. The civic and economic elite tended to reside outside Birmingham's city limit. Postwar prosperity allowed some workers to move to newly developed suburbs.
After the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many white families with school aged children left the city. Racial hostility and discrimination in Birmingham accelerated following the Brown decision. The local governing City Commission and its head of public safety, T. Eugene "Bull" Connor, an unrelenting racist fomented more violence than he contained. During his reign Birmingham earned the designation "Bombingham," which referred to the scores of unsolved bombings of houses in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Despite the determined and harsh defense of white supremacy by city officials and white vigilantism, new leadership emerged in the Black community. In 1956 when the state of Alabama forbade the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to operate in Alabama, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). The new organization pledged to "press forward for freedom and Democracy and the removal from our society of any forms of Second Class Citizenship."[i]
On April 12, 1960, Harrison Salisbury wrote about Birmingham in the New York Times observing that, "Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police, and many branches of the state's apparatus.[ii]
In 1962 Rev. Shuttlesworth invited Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to join forces with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in their challenge to the city's segregation ordinances. The citizen's revolt, highlighted by the 1963 children's marches, subsequently struck the final blow to de jure racial segregation in Alabama, and prompted the federal government to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination. Historian John Hope Franklin described the resulting 1964 Civil Rights Act as "the most far reaching and comprehensive law in support of racial equality ever enacted by Congress." [iii]
Click here to continue.>> ALABAMA P 96. < p. 1999), Alabama Press, of University The Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: Fred Reverend Birmingham?s Life Rights Civil – Out Put Can?t You Fire A Manis, M. Andrew in Principles,? ?Declaration Rights, Human For Movement Christian>[ii] New York Times, April 12, 1960, p. 1. [iii] John Hope Franklin, From Slavery To Freedom – A History of African Americans, 3rd Edition (New York: Alfred Knopf), p. 635.
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