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BCRI History (continued)

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]

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[i] Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (The University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 96; [ii] New York Times, April 12, 1960, p. 1.