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Becoming Alabama
Quarter by Quarter

The Civil Rights Movement
By Matthew L. Downs

Winter 1960
Spring 1960
Summer 1960
Fall 1960
Winter 1961
Spring 1961
Summer 1961
Fall 1961
Winter 1962

Winter 1960: The Sit-in Movement Spreads To Alabama
On Thursday, February 25, 1960, thirty-five African American men and women entered the Montgomery County Courthouse snack bar and asked to be served. White Alabamians had been waiting for such protest activities in the city’s public spaces. Several weeks earlier, on February 1, black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat at the segregated lunch counter of Woolworth’s in Greensboro and tried to order coffee. In the following weeks, the protest spread across North Carolina, neighboring Virginia, and by late February, into the heart of the Deep South. In Montgomery, the white snack bar owner acted quickly to halt the protest, closing the lunchroom, turning off lights, and asking the patrons of the all-white establishment to leave. When one observer asked the demonstrators if they could not eat at the college instead, a student replied, “Sure, but we think we’re American citizens and we like to shop around.”

The Montgomery sit-in was largely the work of students from Alabama State College (now University), an all-black, publicly funded school founded in 1867. Fearing that student leaders would organize the campus for widespread protest, Alabama governor John Patterson demanded that the state college’s president identify and expel any student involved, and he threatened to remove the school’s public funding. City leaders denounced the protest, blaming “outside forces” and promising to “preserve the time-honored traditions and customs of the South.” On Saturday violence spread to the streets. White men, carrying “small baseball bats concealed in paper sacks,” patrolled Dexter Avenue, ensuring that the city’s department stores and lunch counters remained segregated. One African American woman was assaulted after “bumping” a white pedestrian, and local authorities scrambled to restore order. Alabama State students assembled at First Baptist Church, the pulpit of Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a veteran of the bus boycott. Abernathy cautioned the students to avoid downtown Montgomery where “a real state of terror had developed.” They filed a petition with Governor Patterson, protesting the planned expulsion and warning that “we shall not yield our rights…without an extreme effort to retain them.”

By Sunday protests temporarily cooled. The Montgomery Advertiser warned citizens to avoid the acts of a “small, aggressive minority” and chastised the students for “idly and absurdly playing follow the leader.” However, the demonstrations occurring in Montgomery, in Nashville, in Chattanooga, and across the South presaged the coming storm. From Montgomery, sit-ins spread to other Alabama cities, particularly Birmingham, and remained an integral weapon in the fight for civil rights. Sit-ins gave politically minded students an opportunity to combat the South’s pervasive social inequality, yet as events in Montgomery soon proved, the protests also created a visible target for the growing resistance to civil rights activism.

By “sitting-in” at the Montgomery Courthouse, the students of Alabama State helped to usher in a new phase of the civil rights movement. African Americans across the South had long protested racial discrimination in public spaces, but until the 1950s, their actions were sporadic and disorganized. Beginning in 1955 those disparate acts of protest coalesced in Montgomery where the African American community, led by Martin Luther King Jr., boycotted the city’s public bus system. In 1956 the Supreme Court struck down the city’s segregation laws, and the boycott’s leaders formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to maintain the momentum won on the streets of Alabama’s capital. However, as King and the SCLC focused on raising money and garnering support, the movement lagged. Thus, when sit-ins rocked southern cities and towns in early 1960, the students re-energized the struggle for civil rights. Their determination encouraged activists young and old, black and white, to organize in order to claim equal rights for all Americans.

Spring 1960: A Student Movement For Change
In the spring of 1960, the momentum from the student sit-in at the Montgomery courthouse cafeteria propelled the leaders—young activists at Alabama State College—into the forefront of the state’s civil rights movement, even as the state government acted to punish the organizers. The Alabama State Board of Education expelled nine male students and placed twenty others on probation “pending good behavior.” The board acted at the behest of Alabama’s Gov. John Patterson, who warned, “If we ever bow to a mob, we are on the way out.” Patterson blamed the students for starting the sit-in at the courthouse cafeteria and a larger demonstration on the steps of the state capitol. The editorial staff of the Montgomery Advertiser concurred, “Let ’em go.”

The move marked a determined attempt by the state to curtail protests in Montgomery. Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan ordered more than four hundred law enforcement officers to break up a “prayer meeting” on the state capitol steps on March 6, though the “small army” spent an equal amount of time and energy restraining a crowd of thousands of white onlookers. Two days later Montgomery police arrested thirty-five students and a faculty member at Alabama State after an on-campus demonstration. Sullivan told reporters that if students continued with their protests and demonstrations, the jail could “accommodate them.” With each attempt at repression, Patterson and Sullivan found that the college students responded more vociferously in favor of social equality; as Charles L. Taylor of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute told a meeting of the Chicago NAACP: “This is something that cannot be stopped. . . .We may be arrested and even taken from jail and lynched, but other students will take our place.”

For the students at Alabama State, and other schools and in communities across the South, the sit-ins served as a call-to-arms. As segregationists moved to restore order, young activists translated the energy of the demonstrations into an organized movement for social change. This spirit was manifested in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), encouraged by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) activist Ella Baker. As her biographer noted, Baker hoped that a student organization might “create the space for [the sit-in leaders] to coalesce into a new, more militant, yet democratic, political force.” Baker met with hundreds of students who participated in the sit-ins spreading across the South, and the young leaders exchanged ideas and strategies and began planning for a coordinated confrontation with the forces of southern segregation.

Through the 1960s SNCC would play an integral role in organizing and sustaining civil rights activism, sometimes in cooperation with Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-funded and highly publicized SCLC, and sometimes in opposition to the group that many younger protestors saw as unwilling to work for real social and economic change. John Lewis, a native of Pike County, Alabama, became the chairman of SNCC in 1963. He remembered the tension that grew between the two groups: “We dug in early, did the groundwork, laid the foundation, then the SCLC came in again with their headline-grabbing, hit-and-run tactics, doing nothing to nurture leaders among the local community.” As more and more Americans chose to participate in the struggle for equal rights, SNCC came to symbolize the future of rights-based activism, mobilized by the energy and enthusiasm of young men and women like those Alabama State students arrested and expelled in Montgomery.

Summer 1960: African Independence, American Independence
In the summer of 1960, as the civil rights movement began to take on an added urgency in the wake of the sit-ins, events overseas placed the activities of young protestors into a global perspective. Black newspapers in Alabama followed events as, across the Atlantic, a number of African countries threw off colonial bonds and created independent governments. The Birmingham World published the comments of U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs Joseph C. Satterthwaite, who said that countries such as the Belgian Congo, Ghana, Mali, Somalia, and Nigeria “have one common denominator—opposition to colonialism; one common characteristic—political ferment; and one common goal—self-realization in their own, not in any other peoples’ image.”

African independence carried a particularly important message for the American civil rights struggle, and a number of organizations actively assisted the movement. The NAACP, for instance, used the opportunity of expanding self-determination on the continent to criticize the continued British presence in South Africa, particularly the “dangerous racist policies and ruthless violence” associated with the segregationist policies of apartheid. The organization also assisted representatives of the Belgian Congo and Somaliland as they traveled to New York City to appear before the United Nations.

The newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee saw parallels as well; as Pike County, Alabama native John Lewis remembered, “Sure we identified with the blacks in Africa, and we were thrilled by what was going on.… They were getting their freedom, and we still didn’t have ours in what we believed was a free country.” In his memoir, Walking with the Wind, Lewis recalled the importance of the African independence movements after a 1964 SNCC trip to the continent: “I felt a sense of communion, a sense of fellowship with the rising nations of Africa.” For the first time in his life, Lewis witnessed black pilots, black bank workers, and black police officers—“Black people in charge. Black people doing for themselves.” Here was the true importance of African independence for the American civil rights movement. As Lewis and others watched, Africans actively pursued both independence and equality, imbuing the actions of American students with purpose and community, as well as a “frame of reference that was both broadening and refreshing.” Yet perhaps the greatest expression of the impact of global independence movements on the American civil rights movement came in Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Writing in 1963, King admonished white moderates who failed to understand the motivations of their African American neighbors: “Consciously or unconsciously, [“the American Negro”] has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa … the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.”

African independence also had profound importance for America’s political leaders concerned about the loyalties of newly selfruling governments in the midst of the Cold War. In particular, Washington worried that continued racial discrimination and public protest and repression might be negatively received in Third World nations, causing them to reject American friendship and ally instead with the Soviet Union. The United States Information Agency, which presented U.S. foreign policy to the rest of the world, explained that, despite broadcasts of rioting and violence, the country was making “marked progress towards integration” and the unrest was the work of a “small minority” that in no way represented the American people. Officials hoped that as long as foreign observers understood that the country was still politically, economically, and morally sound, the United States’ international reputation would remain largely unscathed.

Civil rights activists used these political fears to stress the importance of their work. In a 1961 memo, Roy Wilkins and Arnold Aaronson of the NAACP cabled the White House: “Action on civil rights … cannot be postponed pending the accomplishment of other foreign and domestic goals but … must proceed simultaneously with them.” Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson all understood the powerful message that civil rights legislation would send to the nations of Africa, and much of the civil rights legislation of the late 1950s and early 1960s carried both domestic and foreign policy goals. As the continent began to emerge as newly independent, both civil rights activists and politicians understood that the countries’ leaders were watching the United States, just as some in the United States watched them.

Fall 1960: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Alabama Electorate
In the fall of 1960, national attention focused on the most contentious presidential election in recent memory as John F. Kennedy, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, challenged Richard M. Nixon, the Republican Vice President. Alabamians paid particular attention to the televised debates and public speeches that dominated airwaves and print media over the summer. Since 1872, Democrats dominated state politics, winning victories at the federal, state, and local level with little substantive competition from opposition parties. Yet in 1960, the election proved remarkably close, demonstrating the profound effect that race and civil rights had on the political orientation of the South.

Both candidates visited the region, hoping to ensure support in the weeks and months before November 8. In August, Nixon spoke in Birmingham, emphasizing his support for states’ rights, an implicit recognition of statewide opposition to federal support for desegregation. Afraid of Republican inroads into the region, Kennedy responded with a visit to Warm Springs, Georgia, in October. The senator praised Franklin Roosevelt, whose “Little White House” served as the backdrop for his speech, for “[raising] a Democratic banner that we can be proud to raise today—a banner that summoned all Americans in every section, in every walk of life, in every race and creed.” Roosevelt had helped to “open new doors for the Negro,” Kennedy reminded his audience, though he conspicuously failed to provide his own plans for action on civil rights.

Yet Kennedy’s praise revealed some consideration for the plight of southern blacks, a stance made clearer in late October after Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta after participating in a sit-in. Nixon publicly distanced himself from King, answering “no comment” to questions on the matter, but Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta, and pledged moral support for the jailed leader. Kennedy’s brother, Robert, went further, calling the Dekalb County, Georgia, judge, who then released King. In response, King reportedly responded that he had a “suitcase full of votes” and planned to “take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” Kennedy used the endorsement to his advantage, sending pamphlets proclaiming “’No Comment’ Nixon vs. a Candidate with a Heart – Senator Kennedy” to black churches and schools.

In a region in which every word and action of national leaders was parsed for an opinion on civil rights, Kennedy’s call rang loudly in the minds of southern whites. Alabama correspondent Rex Thomas noted that the call “prompted Republicans in the closing days of the campaign to talk more enthusiastically of their chances.” The Huntsville Times, though supportive of Kennedy, warned that his actions endangered the long relationship between his party and the region: “[We’d] like very much to vote Republican … to show the Democrats they can no longer take the South for granted, and to show the Republicans that there is value in courting the Southern vote.”

The Birmingham World, the state’s largest African American newspaper, displayed a similar sense of ambivalence. Despite Kennedy’s gesture, the editors chose experience over promises and the reality of the state’s conservative Democratic Party: “Senator Kennedy talks liberally and we have no evidence to doubt his sincerity, but knowing the attitude of half his party on Civil Rights, we do not believe he will be able to accomplish much in this field.” The Eisenhower administration’s work to “reduce the number of racial barriers,” while limited, seemed to suggest that a Republican president might prove more successful in addressing inequality.

Kennedy won Alabama on his way to a national victory, though the state returns hinted at an emerging shift in national political loyalties. Democrats only won 57 percent of the vote, and for the first time in the state’s history, the Republican Party won over two hundred thousand votes – nationally and locally, Kennedy’s victory was a “hairline choice.” The Huntsville Times was cautious in its congratulations: “Democrats and Republicans alike have written off the South far too long, and the election campaign just ended was not much different.” The Birmingham World, in conceding Nixon’s defeat, was perhaps more prescient: “[With] the Senator having run on a liberal Civil Rights platform it is natural that those who supported him shall expect some real results in the field.” Kennedy would prove hesitantly supportive of civil rights, but his willingness to enforce desegregation would help break the Democratic one-party rule over Alabama and the rest of the South.

Winter 1961: Integration Draws Near
On Monday, January 9, 1961, news reports of integration troubles in Georgia captured the attention of anxious white Alabamians. They learned that Hamilton E. Holmes, a sophomore pre-medicine major at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and Charlayne Hunter, a freshman studying journalism at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, were prepared to register for classes at the University of Georgia (UGA). Hunter and Holmes first applied to UGA in the summer of 1959, but the students’ applications had been rejected. Atlanta’s Committee for Cooperative Action (ACCA), a community-based civil rights group, hired lawyers and successfully challenged the university. Under the support of a federal court ruling by Judge William Bootle, the African American students arrived in Athens and readied for class.

Delaying actions began immediately. Georgia state law required officials to revoke state funds for any university system that admitted black students, and Gov. Ernest Vandiver filed an appeal to stay integration. In an attempt to circumvent the federal ruling, Vandiver announced a constitutional amendment protecting children from attending integrated schools. He noted, “[We] must provide a new plate of armor, gird ourselves against the sweeping and insidious onslaught of forced integration in Georgia schools.” On campus, an estimated hundred students gathered in front of the journalism building while Hunter received her schedule of classes. College Dean William Tate escorted Hunter through taunts, disciplining a group of students who proved particularly vociferous. Near the college fraternity houses, a group of two hundred burned a cross.

Despite legal and physical threats, Hunter and Holmes found support from Atlanta’s and Athens’s civil rights organizations. The ACCA kept a nightly patrol of Hunter’s Atlanta home, and leaders escorted both students to and from campus. Rioting peaked on the night of January 11, following a narrow loss by the UGA basketball team to rival Georgia Tech. In what the Athens chief of police dismissed as “organized rowdyism led by strangers from out of the city,” more than a thousand rioters surrounded the girls’ dormitory where Hunter lived, throwing rocks at windows and yelling lewd taunts. Police responded to the rioters with tear gas and fire hoses, but the violence provided Vandiver and segregationist officials with an excuse. The university suspended Hunter and Holmes, citing the personal safety of the student population. In response, several hundred faculty members at UGA insisted that Hunter and Holmes be allowed to return to classes. Judge Bootle agreed, ordering the university to revoke the suspension and enjoining the state from cutting off funds to UGA. On January 14, amid police supervision and threats of dismissal for any student participating in a demonstration, Hunter and Holmes returned, leaving Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina as the only states with segregated state universities.

In Alabama, state officials panicked—the events in Athens recalled the attempted integration of the University of Alabama five years earlier. Autherine Lucy won admission to the university, but after riots broke out, officials suspended her, claiming that her presence on campus threatened the safety of all students. As the Birmingham News noted, Alabama’s governor John Patterson could be the next southern political leader to face the challenge of integration. On January 17, Patterson asked the Alabama state legislature to give him explicit authority to close any public school ordered to integrate. He told reporters, “[Before] I submit to integration I would be for closing schools,” and he commended fellow obstructionist governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Jimmie Davis of Louisiana. Patterson promised, “I’ll be right there with them.”

Despite Patterson’s warnings, at least some Alabamians considered school integration inevitable. The Birmingham News editorialized, “It long has been judicial history now, that when qualified Negroes apply for entry into Southern public universities, federal judges … ultimately will hand down only one ruling.” While the paper feared that similar decisions, if made in Alabama, might cause “more pain and hardship,” federal court orders made integration an “unavoidable” fact. As southern states attempted to stall, delay, and circumvent federal integration statutes, the pressure of the civil rights movement brought continued injustice to public attention.

Spring 1961: Southern Economic Growth and Racial Moderation
The hostility to the integration of the University of Georgia in January 1961 startled some southerners. Violence against civil rights activists was not a new phenomenon, but in Georgia's capital, Atlanta, city leaders claimed to reject a hard-line stance against integration in favor of racial moderation. The city's mayor, William Hartsfield, bragged that Atlanta was "the City too Busy to Hate," hoping that national and international businesses would look to the city to invest in the growing Sunbelt economy. In cities across the South, coalitions of business owners, professionals, and investors began to preach cautious acceptance of limited desegregation as a way to improve the South's reactionary reputation. As one local study warned, racial conflict "did not make good dollars and sense."

In Alabama, perhaps no community was more concerned about economic security than Huntsville, where federal investment at Redstone Arsenal and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center sparked unprecedented prosperity. Reliant on government support, city leaders had to avoid negative publicity. In 1959, when the NAACP led a costly legal battle to integrate Huntsville's schools, the Huntsville Times voiced the concerns of the city's business leadership who preached moderation—calling for "sound reasoning [of] leaders of both races" and instructing locals to avoid "excitement or rash action."

Moderates had definite cause to worry. In late 1958, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson warned local leaders that the United States might curtail military spending in the South because of its "race problems." Officials at the arsenal and space center found recruitment increasingly difficult, as highly educated students from northern and western universities hesitated to move to the volatile South. Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun begged city and state leaders to work to improve their state's race relations. In a June 1965 speech to the Alabama Chamber of Commerce, he cited a letter published in the Congressional Record, in which three University of Rochester (New York) students stated that they would refuse to take a job in Alabama "due to the unfavorable posture of this state in racial matters." As von Braun added, a number of his recruiters had received similar "testimonials-in-reverse." He asked the assembled businessmen and businesswomen to take a "positive and constructive" approach to solving the state's problems, and counseled state leaders to "work hard to shed the labels of obstructionism and defiance that have been applied to us." Alabama needed to take proactive steps to repair its reputation if its businesses, public and private, were to recruit top-level researchers and technicians.

Von Braun praised the state's business community, whose members had formed groups such as Birmingham's Committee of One Hundred to call for communication and cooperation between white political leaders and civil rights activists. Moderates would play an important role in the coming civil rights struggles of the mid-1960s. Granted, many moderates cautioned against acquiescence with the demands of African Americans for full equality, and in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, moderates were a distinct minority within the larger white community. However, by fighting to create a favorable climate for business across the South, economic leaders provided an important voice of moderation as the black freedom struggle staged a frontal assault on the segregationist foundation of southern society.

Summer 1961: The Freedom Rides
In Alabama, the summer of 1961 was dominated by discussion of the "Freedom Rides" and the growing national outcry over the mistreatment of civil rights activists who came south to protest continued segregation. Throughout the summer, over three hundred activists boarded buses and tested integration at terminals across the South, eventually convincing Attorney General Robert Kennedy to step up enforcement of the desegregation of interstate bus terminals across the region. As protests rippled through the Deep South, segregationists and supporters of civil rights recalled the events of late May, when the attention of the world had focused on Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides to test a December 1960 court ruling that called for the desegregation of interstate bus terminals across the South. The group drew on the lessons learned in the sit-ins: violence against civil rights activists brought negative attention, resulting in federal intervention to force desegregation. Beginning in Washington, D.C., the group experienced resistance as it made its way through the Carolinas and Georgia.

On Mothers' Day, May 14, 1961, at the Anniston depot, an unknown assailant slashed the front tires of the Riders' bus, and a group of white reactionaries in forty cars followed the Greyhound as it limped out of town. When the bus pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, the mob tossed a firebomb into the bus through a shattered window. Black smoke billowed as the passengers—twelve men and women, white and black—poured out onto the side of the highway. As the Greyhound burned, a second group of Riders arrived in Birmingham to a crowd of angry whites at the Trailways bus station. Thirty men broke from the crowd, beating the riders and several bystanders, including members of the press from the Birmingham Post-Herald, the Birmingham News, and CBS television. The Birmingham News immediately placed blame for the violence on the police, led by Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, for failing to respond quickly to the rioting, as well as the activists, who tried "to create racial trouble to make headlines."In fact, Connor and Governor John Patterson had been informed of the Freedom Riders' planned arrival and deliberately kept police from the station.

In the wake of the events in Birmingham and Anniston, veteran activist John Lewis and an interracial group of students from Nashville traveled to Alabama to continue the Freedom Rides; as one student explained, "The impression would have been that whenever a movement starts, all [you have to do] is attack with massive violence and the blacks [will] stop." Lewis's group was accompanied by John Siegenthaler, a personal representative of Robert Kennedy sent to ensure the students' safety. Governor Patterson promised to "fill the jails" with anyone "[trying] to stir up trouble," but on Friday, May 19, Patterson agreed to meet with Siegenthaler, telling him that the state would protect the riders. Armed with a promise of safety, twenty Freedom Riders left Birmingham for Montgomery. State patrolmen in cars and planes escorted the bus down Highway 31, skirting a rudimentary roadblock at Clanton, but as the bus approached Montgomery, the officers disappeared.

When Lewis's bus reached the terminal, it was again met with violence. Lewis recalled "shouting and screaming, men swinging fists and weapons, women swinging heavy purses, little children clawing with their fingernails at the faces of anyone they could reach." Lewis was knocked unconscious, and John Siegenthaler, arriving late to the scene, was hit in the head with a pipe. By the time state troopers managed to disperse the mob, news reporters had begun to send images of the violence around the world.

Furious at Patterson's duplicity, the Kennedys sent federal marshals to Montgomery to keep the peace. Lewis and his fellow Freedom Riders continued to Mississippi, yet the state of Alabama remained as recalcitrant as ever. On May 24 the Alabama state legislature adopted an amendment praising Patterson's actions during the crisis and blasting the Freedom Riders and federal troops for creating "conditions of unrest, violence and hatred." The protests convinced state leaders of the need for greater vigilance against the actions of such "outside agitators," even as civil rights activists were encouraged by the bravery of the Freedom Riders. The mood was best captured by Martin Luther King Jr. who arrived in Montgomery on Sunday, May 21, to address the wounded activists: "Alabama will have to face the fact that we are determined to be free … we've come too far to turn back."

With those words, the eyes of the nation turned on Alabama, launching a summer of festering debates over the limits of rights and rabblerousing.

Fall 1961: Massive Resistance
The Freedom Rides challenged the Kennedy administration to confront the continued existence of segregation in the Deep South. African American protests provoked southern whites to act violently towards activists; the resulting publicity kept the struggle for civil rights in a national spotlight. The reaction to the civil rights movement in the South, usually termed "Massive Resistance," encompassed a number of groups, each with different motivations and methods. As the federal government considered legislation to enforce equality, and as civil rights activists planned protests, southern resistance helped shape the civil rights movement.

Perhaps the most notorious group in Massive Resistance was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In fact, the Mother's Day violence against the Freedom Riders was encouraged by members of the Klan seeking to disrupt the integration of public spaces. Two days after the attack on the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus terminal, police arrested a young Klansman who admitted that the KKK had called him days before the riot, instructing him to be at the station when the Riders arrived. Less organized than other anti–civil rights groups, the Klan nevertheless attracted members throughout the state and gained a reputation for vigilante violence. One of the more vocal Klansmen in Alabama was Asa Earl "Ace" Carter, who led a faction of the Klan called the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy and directed an assault on Nat "King" Cole while the singer visited Birmingham in 1956. KKK activity increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s as members targeted local and national civil rights leaders, bombing homes and attacking protesters in hopes that physical violence would frighten national leaders and prevent real change from occurring.

The KKK was undoubtedly the most visible representation of Massive Resistance, but another group proved more powerful in its ability to recruit and pressure local and state leaders. In July 1954 in Indianola, Mississippi, white leaders formed the first Citizens' Council, and in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision, similar groups spread throughout the South. In Alabama the first Citizens' Council appeared in Selma, where members began a campaign to use political and economic power in the city to limit jobs, revoke credit, and deny mortgages to black residents openly critical of segregation. By 1956 Alabama's Citizens' Councils boasted a membership of eighty thousand. The organizations rejected the bombings and beatings that were the province of more radical reactionaries, instead focusing on political and economic opposition that targeted those African Americans who challenged white supremacy. The Councils were helped by well-placed members. As Alabama historian Wayne Flynt has noted, the group's leaders were Black Belt politicians, businessmen, and professionals, most notably Montgomery's Judge Walter B. Jones, whose writings became "a forum for segregationist ideology."

With over sixty chapters in Alabama alone, the Citizens' Councils proved very effective at inspiring fear with their message. In a 1956 speech to the Central Park Citizens' Council in Birmingham, Bull Connor told attendees, "If you don't register and vote [the NAACP is] going to outvote you." A strong white majority at the polls would "beat the NAACP so fast it won't be funny." Dallas County State Senator Walter C. Givhan told a Council meeting that the NAACP hoped "to open the bedroom door of our white women to the Negro." But even as the Citizens' Councils adopted much of the rhetoric of white supremacy, the groups' leaders rejected outright terror and physical violence. The statewide Council renounced Asa "Ace" Carter and his followers as "demagogic rabble rousers" and "prisoners of hate." The Councils claimed to be the "responsible" alternative to the KKK and welcomed only "respectable" members.

The Councils and the Klan adopted different approaches to the civil rights movement, yet both played an important part in white reaction to integration. Massive Resistance placed real pressure on white moderates, forced to find a middle ground between African American activists demanding political, economic, and social equality, and the white opposition, rejecting any hint of desegregation. As state and national leaders searched for compromise, the movement continued to evolve, coming to rely on visible, sometimes violent, resistance to bring national and international attention to the plight of blacks in the segregated South.

Winter 1962: Albany and the Movement Divided
From its inception, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, decided to focus its efforts on African American communities across the South, encouraging education and political participation as a way to create a local leadership that could continue the fight for equality. While the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) participated in marches and gave public speeches, SNCC sent representatives and volunteers to rural communities in order to, in the words of Alabama’s John Lewis, “[bring] America’s invisible black vote out of the darkness of fear and repression.” In the fall of 1961, Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon, both young SNCC leaders, arrived in Terrell County, Georgia, (nicknamed “Terrible Terrell” for its reputation of racial oppression), to begin a voter education project. Their work soon centered on the city of Albany, and during the winter of 1962, their campaign to empower local black leaders brought to light the growing split between the SNCC and SCLC, a division that demonstrated the complicated nature of the fight for civil rights.

Direct action was not unknown in southwestern Georgia. Albany was the location of Albany State College, an all-black school whose students faced routine harassment from the city’s white population. In early 1961, a student leader named Bernice Johnson organized a rally to protest the college’s apparent unwillingness to protect the student body from overt prejudice. When Sherrod and Reagon arrived in the city, they came to rely on local activists like Johnson as intermediaries between SNCC and the larger black community. In November, SNCC, the local branch of the NAACP, and four other black organizations formed the “Albany Movement” and agreed to focus on a broad plan for change that included fair employment, an end to police brutality, and public desegregation. On November 22, Albany police arrested five SNCC activists attempting to integrate the Trailways bus terminal. Five days later, as the young people stood trial, the Albany Movement, including Sherrod, Reagon, and Johnson, led a six-hundred-person march to city hall. Over 450 were arrested.

In Montgomery and Birmingham, the Freedom Riders used arrest and police negligence to call attention to the plight of southern blacks—the images of the beaten Riders demonstrated the violence that kept segregation in place. Yet in Albany, activists found local leaders prepared for their arrival. The city’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had read Martin Luther King’s treatise on nonviolence, Stride Toward Freedom, and determined to fight nonviolence with nonviolence. When confronted with public protest, Pritchett quickly sent participants to jail before attracting negative attention. One SNCC member complained, “We ran out of people before he ran out of jails.”

The situation grew even more complicated on December 15 when Martin Luther King arrived in the city with fellow SCLC leader, Alabama’s Ralph Abernathy. Some in the Albany Movement hoped that King’s presence would put additional pressure on the city and Pritchett to accede to activists’ demands. Instead, Pritchett arrested King and Abernathy while they led a protest march. The men were released on bond only after agreeing to a month-long cessation of demonstrations and the creation of an interracial committee to address race relations in Albany. In return, city leaders promised to conform to federal integration of interstate bus terminals.

King’s presence in Albany angered many in SNCC. While he sat in jail, younger leaders in the Albany Movement warned incoming SCLC members, “We welcome any help from outside, but as of now we need no help.” When King was released, he alienated SNCC activists by excluding them from public press conferences. SNCC’s John Lewis remembered Cordell Reagon’s complaint: “I don’t think that anybody appreciates going to jail…and then you don’t even get to speak on it.” King’s actions in Albany validated the worst fears of SNCC’s young volunteers. After weeks of preparation and the threat of constant persecution at the hands of segregationist officials, SNCC’s activists were overshadowed by the popularity of SCLC. King’s planned protest and arrest did nothing to address the needs of local blacks, and his failure to outfox Pritchett threatened to undermine the entire Albany Movement. As Lewis recalled, “Unlike the members of the old-guard civil rights organizations, especially the SCLC, who…did not step down and suffer the kinds of indignities and injustices that the local people were suffering on a daily basis, we did go out and live and suffer with the everyday people.”

After the Albany stalemate, SCLC and SNCC struggled to share the spotlight, and came to embody different aspects of the fight for equality. SCLC, headed by King, used its ever-present national publicity to call attention to the most overt aspects of southern segregation. SNCC focused its attention on rural Alabama and Mississippi, where activists empowered local communities to make lasting social, political, and economic change.

Matthew L. Downs (PhD, Alabama) is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His dissertation focused on the federal government's role in the economic development of the Tennessee Valley.

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