One of the most violent days of the civil rights movement took place in Tuscaloosa on Tuesday, June 9, 1964. Only a few people know the story. That day, upwards of seventy law enforcement officers, backed by hundreds of Klansmen and deputized white citizens, attacked more than 500 Black citizens gathered inside First African Baptist Church. For over three months, the Black citizens had defied police, local ordinances, and the Klan to protest discrimination. They picketed stores that refused to serve them, boycotted merchants that overcharged them, and paraded in front of a city hall that ignored their calls for equality. This was to be their largest demonstration yet, to march downtown to drink from white fountains and use restrooms reserved for whites in the new county courthouse. Yet as they prayed inside the church before the march, police smashed the stained-glass windows with water from a fire hose and filled the church with tear gas. When the protestors stumbled outside, police beat and arrested as many as they could. They donned gas masks and swept the inside of the church, routing out the elderly and the very young hiding in closets and back rooms. Nearly one hundred people went to jail, thirty-three were hospitalized, and many more received care at a local barbershop. Locals dubbed it “Bloody Tuesday.” The number injured and arrested would eclipse the violence experienced by marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965. It would become the largest assault and invasion of a Black church by law enforcement during the civil rights movement.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. anticipated the price of integrating Tuscaloosa would be high but never thought it would be so violent or widespread. On March 4, 1964, in Montgomery, he had assembled Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders from across the state. The meeting was closed to the press, but he gave a short speech afterwards addressing the citizens and government of Alabama:
To the state of Alabama and its people, you had better fasten your seatbelts. There will be no peace and tranquility until the Negro has had his conquest. Time has come for massive assault on segregation in Alabama. Alabama has fallen behind just about every other state in the union…. We will never stop until justice runs down like water.
Six months removed from delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech, King now prepared to end segregation once and for all in Alabama. He later identified Tuscaloosa as an early target in this new campaign. It was an easy choice. Breaking segregation there would carry enormous significance for the civil rights movement.
[ THE AFTERMATH ]
Tuscaloosa, the fourth largest city in the state, was the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan and home to its Imperial Wizard, Robert Shelton. There was no deadlier or more powerful white supremacist in the county. The city’s history of racial violence was as vicious as any in the state. King knew it well. He had declined an offer to preach at Hunter Chapel AMEZ in April 1956 and had yet to return because he feared for his safety in the aftermath of Autherine Lucy’s failed attempt to integrate the University of Alabama. Three days of riots had greeted her enrollment, ending only when she fled under the protection of armed Black guards. More recently, the University of Alabama had integrated in June 1963, becoming the last all-white southern university to do so. Pres. John F. Kennedy was forced to federalize the Alabama National Guard to ensure that Gov. George Wallace, one of the South’s fiercest defenders of segregation, would comply with a federal court order and admit two Black students to his alma mater. Afterwards, Kennedy announced his support for a new civil rights bill. Yet in spring 1964, only one Black student remained at the university, the bill was not yet law, and Tuscaloosa was as segregated as ever.
But King also realized that Tuscaloosa was an ideal location to launch a major civil rights offensive in 1964 because of the critical resources it offered. Nearly 18,000 Black citizens lived there and had built a dense network of churches, businesses, social clubs, and organizations. They had staged civil rights protests during the 1950s and early 1960s, though none produced lasting change. Locals had founded the Ministerial Alliance and the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC), an affiliate with the SCLC, which organized a short-lived bus boycott in 1962. Many attended or had graduated from Stillman College, one of the jewels of Black higher education in the state, which sat on one hundred acres in the western section of the city and historically had been a hotbed of political activism. Most importantly, Rev. T. Y. Rogers Jr. had moved to town in January 1964 and become pastor of First African Church, whose roots traced back to the Civil War era. The twenty-nine-year-old firebrand, who was born about an hour's drive southeast in Coatopa and was a disciple of King, arrived with the goal of desegregating the city.
Rogers relocated to Tuscaloosa from a church in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, because, as he told his mother, “he heard the cry of this people.” But he also came because King wanted him there. The two had met in Montgomery, while King was at the helm of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Rogers was a student at Alabama State University. King had hired Rogers as his assistant pastor at Dexter, ordained him, and steered him to attend King's alma mater, Crozer Theological Seminary. He also had strongly recommended him to the pulpit committee at First African Baptist and met with Rogers’s parents to quell their concerns over their son’s return to Alabama. They knew he would come back with the purpose of leading the fight against discrimination, and they feared what the Klan might do to a strong-minded, outspoken Black preacher.
King preached the installation sermon for Rogers at First African Baptist on March 8, 1964. The church overflowed with the faithful and the curious. Newspaper men sat in the front row, notebooks on their laps. Police circled the church, directing traffic and keeping a watchful eye on the crowd. “There are [those] who will tell you to put on the brakes,” King thundered from the pulpit. “Tell them you have had on the brakes. Now you want to get going down the highway of freedom and equality.” Their leader would be Rogers, he said, who embodied his personal ideal of minister as social critic and would lead them to the promised land of liberty. King ended on a prophetic note, as if he knew of the troubles to come: “Some of you may have to go to jail for standing up in the struggle, and some may lose jobs. Some may even face physical death to free your white brothers and their children from the death of the spirit.” Ultimately, King concluded: “Love is the only way to solve the problems in Tuscaloosa, the state, and the nation.”
But King also realized that Tuscaloosa was an ideal location to launch a major civil rights offensive in 1964 because of the critical resources it offered. Nearly 18,000 Black citizens lived there and had built a dense network of churches, businesses, social clubs, and organizations. They had staged civil rights protests during the 1950s and early 1960s, though none produced lasting change. Locals had founded the Ministerial Alliance and the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC), an affiliate with the SCLC, which organized a short-lived bus boycott in 1962. Many attended or had graduated from Stillman College, one of the jewels of Black higher education in the state, which sat on one hundred acres in the western section of the city and historically had been a hotbed of political activism. Most importantly, Rev. T. Y. Rogers Jr. had moved to town in January 1964 and become pastor of First African Church, whose roots traced back to the Civil War era. The twenty-nine-year-old firebrand, who was born about an hour's drive southeast in Coatopa and was a disciple of King, arrived with the goal of desegregating the city.
Rogers relocated to Tuscaloosa from a church in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, because, as he told his mother, “he heard the cry of this people.” But he also came because King wanted him there. The two had met in Montgomery, while King was at the helm of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Rogers was a student at Alabama State University. King had hired Rogers as his assistant pastor at Dexter, ordained him, and steered him to attend King's alma mater, Crozer Theological Seminary. He also had strongly recommended him to the pulpit committee at First African Baptist and met with Rogers’s parents to quell their concerns over their son’s return to Alabama. They knew he would come back with the purpose of leading the fight against discrimination, and they feared what the Klan might do to a strong-minded, outspoken Black preacher.
King preached the installation sermon for Rogers at First African Baptist on March 8, 1964. The church overflowed with the faithful and the curious. Newspaper men sat in the front row, notebooks on their laps. Police circled the church, directing traffic and keeping a watchful eye on the crowd. “There are [those] who will tell you to put on the brakes,” King thundered from the pulpit. “Tell them you have had on the brakes. Now you want to get going down the highway of freedom and equality.” Their leader would be Rogers, he said, who embodied his personal ideal of minister as social critic and would lead them to the promised land of liberty. King ended on a prophetic note, as if he knew of the troubles to come: “Some of you may have to go to jail for standing up in the struggle, and some may lose jobs. Some may even face physical death to free your white brothers and their children from the death of the spirit.” Ultimately, King concluded: “Love is the only way to solve the problems in Tuscaloosa, the state, and the nation.”
[ CHAOS ENSUES ]
As soon as King left Tuscaloosa, Rogers began to plot his attack on the color line. Working closely with TCAC officers—all of whom were men, and Black women from the community—he hosted mass meetings on Monday evenings at First African Baptist. Soon people were lining up hours before the meeting to get a seat. Police began to attend, too, eager to learn who was present and what Rogers’s plans were. TCAC’s first protest—a march to the courthouse to protest the segregated facilities—ended when police attacked Rogers and several others in front of the courthouse, hitting them with billy clubs and cattle prods. After pausing protests for a week, TCAC responded by boycotting and picketing segregated businesses and marching up and down Greensboro Avenue, which ran through the center of the city’s commercial district. As the protests and demonstrators grew in number, King sent SCLC leaders to provide counsel, like Rev. C.T. Vivian, James Bevel, Rev. Andrew Young, and Dick Gregory. Klansmen and white citizens took notice, too, and threatened and beat protestors, shot them with pellet guns, and doused them with acid. Police did little to stop the violence and sometimes joined in. Still, the protests continued. By early June, the city was a tinderbox. The march on the courthouse on June 9 would become the setting for the explosion of white resistance.
Rogers was the first person arrested on June 9. Police sat him, along with two other protesters, in a cruiser positioned near the front of the church. They wanted him to watch what was to come next. As the violence unfolded in front of him, Rogers stared in disbelief. “How could this happen in Tuscaloosa? How could it happen in America?”, he later asked. As thin streams of white gas curled through the broken windows and some of his friends lay bleeding on the pavement in front of First African Baptist, he prayed that his wife, LePelzia, who was hiding inside, was safe. He wondered if he had preached the right message earlier in the week; “We first told them, ‘If we are arrested, if we are beaten, if we are disabled, move over us and get to town.’” Now, he only cared that no one was killed. He would learn later that LePelzia was indeed unharmed, but she would never forget the sight of police in gas masks removing her from the church’s office.
As the tear gas canisters exploded inside First African Baptist, people panicked. “All bedlam broke loose,” LePelzia said. Irene Issac, sixteen years old, was nursing her side where a policeman had cattle-prodded her when the barrage began. “It was like hell—the bang, the smoke, the screaming,” she remembered. Deborah Bush tried to run but could not. “Just the fumes and the gas just burned our eyes, the coughing going on,” she said. Relief from the fumes was hard to find. Twelve-year-old Alfred Jones struggled to follow directions being shouted at him by other protestors. “But when the tear gas came, everybody immediately said, ‘Well, go down to the bathroom,’” he remembered. “And tear gas rises, so they are telling us, ‘If you get tear-gassed, put your head in a garbage can or something.’ So we were puttin’ our faces in the toilets, you know. Put our faces down in there so that tear gas couldn't —because, man, if you’ve never been tear-gassed, it’s bad. And they were using the good stuff then.”
Maxie Thomas, another protestor arrested, almost died in his cell. Police had struck him above his left eye with a billy club, and no one could stop his head from bleeding. Jailers ignored his calls for help. His cellmates grew angry. “And the guys in the jail, they just started tearing it up. So, the jailor came up, and they insisted that they take me somewhere to get medical care.” The jailor, perhaps fearful that Thomas might bleed to death, arranged for him to be transported in the back of a sheriff’s department’s car to meet a physician in the alley behind his office. “And we went in the back door, and this doctor was up in front, and he was using some real colorful language,” Thomas remembered. Thomas was shoved into a small room and ordered to wait for the doctor: “Couple seconds later, he kicked the door in, he looked at me, and he said… ‘Even if you were Martin Luther King, I would sew your whole blankety-blank eye up.’ And he just grabbed it, no anesthetic, no nothing, just sewed it all up.” The suturing halted the bleeding, but it was touch-and-go for Thomas for the rest of the day. “I had lost a lot of blood,” he remembered. Sheriff’s deputies brought him back to the jail, took a picture of him to prove his injuries were tended to, and placed him in his cell.
Rogers was the first person arrested on June 9. Police sat him, along with two other protesters, in a cruiser positioned near the front of the church. They wanted him to watch what was to come next. As the violence unfolded in front of him, Rogers stared in disbelief. “How could this happen in Tuscaloosa? How could it happen in America?”, he later asked. As thin streams of white gas curled through the broken windows and some of his friends lay bleeding on the pavement in front of First African Baptist, he prayed that his wife, LePelzia, who was hiding inside, was safe. He wondered if he had preached the right message earlier in the week; “We first told them, ‘If we are arrested, if we are beaten, if we are disabled, move over us and get to town.’” Now, he only cared that no one was killed. He would learn later that LePelzia was indeed unharmed, but she would never forget the sight of police in gas masks removing her from the church’s office.
As the tear gas canisters exploded inside First African Baptist, people panicked. “All bedlam broke loose,” LePelzia said. Irene Issac, sixteen years old, was nursing her side where a policeman had cattle-prodded her when the barrage began. “It was like hell—the bang, the smoke, the screaming,” she remembered. Deborah Bush tried to run but could not. “Just the fumes and the gas just burned our eyes, the coughing going on,” she said. Relief from the fumes was hard to find. Twelve-year-old Alfred Jones struggled to follow directions being shouted at him by other protestors. “But when the tear gas came, everybody immediately said, ‘Well, go down to the bathroom,’” he remembered. “And tear gas rises, so they are telling us, ‘If you get tear-gassed, put your head in a garbage can or something.’ So we were puttin’ our faces in the toilets, you know. Put our faces down in there so that tear gas couldn't —because, man, if you’ve never been tear-gassed, it’s bad. And they were using the good stuff then.”
Maxie Thomas, another protestor arrested, almost died in his cell. Police had struck him above his left eye with a billy club, and no one could stop his head from bleeding. Jailers ignored his calls for help. His cellmates grew angry. “And the guys in the jail, they just started tearing it up. So, the jailor came up, and they insisted that they take me somewhere to get medical care.” The jailor, perhaps fearful that Thomas might bleed to death, arranged for him to be transported in the back of a sheriff’s department’s car to meet a physician in the alley behind his office. “And we went in the back door, and this doctor was up in front, and he was using some real colorful language,” Thomas remembered. Thomas was shoved into a small room and ordered to wait for the doctor: “Couple seconds later, he kicked the door in, he looked at me, and he said… ‘Even if you were Martin Luther King, I would sew your whole blankety-blank eye up.’ And he just grabbed it, no anesthetic, no nothing, just sewed it all up.” The suturing halted the bleeding, but it was touch-and-go for Thomas for the rest of the day. “I had lost a lot of blood,” he remembered. Sheriff’s deputies brought him back to the jail, took a picture of him to prove his injuries were tended to, and placed him in his cell.
[ IN HINDSIGHT ]
Today, the story of Bloody Tuesday remains largely unknown outside of the small circle of survivors. The main reason is that King decided not to come to Tuscaloosa after being informed of the violence. At home in Atlanta when he took the call from Rev. T. W. Linton, a close friend of Rogers’s, he opted to keep his original travel plans and board a plane bound for St. Augustine, where he would rejoin a desegregation effort that he had been leading throughout the spring. Instead, he sent to Tuscaloosa one of his closest aides, James Bevel, who had been one of the masterminds of the Birmingham campaign, and two younger SCLC workers, Richard Boone and Harold Middlebrook. Bevel was an effective organizer, but he was no magnet for the media.
White newspapers certainly carried the story of the sacking of First African Church, but only for a day or two. Most parroted what was being reported by the Tuscaloosa News, which lauded law enforcement for subduing a “riot.” It disregarded claims of excessive police force voiced by Black protestors or described them as unfortunate but necessary acts to save the city. Several Black newspapers ran stories about it but were short on details. They only published one story each about the violence. Other events soon grabbed the nation’s attention. A few days after Bloody Tuesday, three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney—went missing in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson sent the FBI and National Guard to aid in the search. Freedom Summer began, bringing thousands of white activists from the North to Mississippi to register Blacks to vote. Governor Wallace barnstormed across the Midwest in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. The US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Reynolds v. Sims on June 15, ordering Alabama to reapportion its legislature. The Civil Rights Act, despite being stalled in the Senate, appeared likely to pass very soon. The University of Alabama, which the national press closely monitored in the aftermath of its integration, made no public statement about Bloody Tuesday. The university’s silence made national coverage of the violence less likely.
There is, however, much to be learned by remembering Bloody Tuesday. We often tell the story of the civil rights movement by featuring King as recorded by newspapers, radio, and television. We are drawn to heavily documented events, often ones featuring extreme violence, and hope they are exceptions. What we lose in this narrative is the reality that the movement was a series of small orchestrated and interconnected battles in towns and cities like Tuscaloosa, and acts of police violence and white resistance were, sadly, all too common.
The planned march and protest in Tuscaloosa was part of King’s larger vision for desegregating the state and nation. It emboldened Black protestors and unnerved white politicians, leading the latter to sanction extreme measures like the attack by State Troopers on marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The story of Bloody Tuesday reminds us that TV cameras and reporters did not capture the struggles for justice beyond King’s reach nor did they accurately communicate the widespread and violent nature of white resistance to racial change.
Most importantly, the story of Bloody Tuesday centers on the courage of everyday Black citizens to resist and persevere despite the overwhelming power of police and white citizens intent on stopping them. Within weeks of Bloody Tuesday, TCAC resumed protests. Many were again jailed and assaulted.
Aided by the passage of the Civil Rights Bill on July 2, a series of anti-segregation federal court orders, and the Klan’s declining power in Tuscaloosa, TCAC integrated the county courthouse and some local businesses in mid-July. Still, whites resisted. More than 1,000 whites tried unsuccessfully to block the integration of the Druid City Theater, and the Black movie-goers were forced to call the Defenders, a local Black armed self-defense group, to rescue them. In August, TCAC launched a boycott of Druid City Transit over its refusal to hire Black drivers and protect Black passengers from threats by white riders. Despite pressure from city officials to end the boycott, TCAC kept it in place for three months, eventually bankrupting the company, and established integrated travel as the local norm in the city. Integrating public schools and the city commission took until the 1970s, occurring after a federal court order, new legal battles, and protests.
Preserving the history of Bloody Tuesday and its place in the civil rights movement has been the enduring mission of its survivors and their families. They have kept the memory of it alive by sharing stories, collecting newspaper articles and photographs, and recording oral histories. For them, there is no more important story of the civil rights movement. It embodies the ability of local citizens to organize and defeat legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and it testifies, for new generations, how communities can marshal the power to right historic wrongs. Since 2014, many have gathered to commemorate the day at a community-wide service at First African Baptist.
As the sixtieth anniversary of Bloody Tuesday approaches, they are again organizing to record and share their history. They hope that more of us will listen this time.
White newspapers certainly carried the story of the sacking of First African Church, but only for a day or two. Most parroted what was being reported by the Tuscaloosa News, which lauded law enforcement for subduing a “riot.” It disregarded claims of excessive police force voiced by Black protestors or described them as unfortunate but necessary acts to save the city. Several Black newspapers ran stories about it but were short on details. They only published one story each about the violence. Other events soon grabbed the nation’s attention. A few days after Bloody Tuesday, three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney—went missing in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson sent the FBI and National Guard to aid in the search. Freedom Summer began, bringing thousands of white activists from the North to Mississippi to register Blacks to vote. Governor Wallace barnstormed across the Midwest in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. The US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Reynolds v. Sims on June 15, ordering Alabama to reapportion its legislature. The Civil Rights Act, despite being stalled in the Senate, appeared likely to pass very soon. The University of Alabama, which the national press closely monitored in the aftermath of its integration, made no public statement about Bloody Tuesday. The university’s silence made national coverage of the violence less likely.
There is, however, much to be learned by remembering Bloody Tuesday. We often tell the story of the civil rights movement by featuring King as recorded by newspapers, radio, and television. We are drawn to heavily documented events, often ones featuring extreme violence, and hope they are exceptions. What we lose in this narrative is the reality that the movement was a series of small orchestrated and interconnected battles in towns and cities like Tuscaloosa, and acts of police violence and white resistance were, sadly, all too common.
The planned march and protest in Tuscaloosa was part of King’s larger vision for desegregating the state and nation. It emboldened Black protestors and unnerved white politicians, leading the latter to sanction extreme measures like the attack by State Troopers on marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The story of Bloody Tuesday reminds us that TV cameras and reporters did not capture the struggles for justice beyond King’s reach nor did they accurately communicate the widespread and violent nature of white resistance to racial change.
Most importantly, the story of Bloody Tuesday centers on the courage of everyday Black citizens to resist and persevere despite the overwhelming power of police and white citizens intent on stopping them. Within weeks of Bloody Tuesday, TCAC resumed protests. Many were again jailed and assaulted.
Aided by the passage of the Civil Rights Bill on July 2, a series of anti-segregation federal court orders, and the Klan’s declining power in Tuscaloosa, TCAC integrated the county courthouse and some local businesses in mid-July. Still, whites resisted. More than 1,000 whites tried unsuccessfully to block the integration of the Druid City Theater, and the Black movie-goers were forced to call the Defenders, a local Black armed self-defense group, to rescue them. In August, TCAC launched a boycott of Druid City Transit over its refusal to hire Black drivers and protect Black passengers from threats by white riders. Despite pressure from city officials to end the boycott, TCAC kept it in place for three months, eventually bankrupting the company, and established integrated travel as the local norm in the city. Integrating public schools and the city commission took until the 1970s, occurring after a federal court order, new legal battles, and protests.
Preserving the history of Bloody Tuesday and its place in the civil rights movement has been the enduring mission of its survivors and their families. They have kept the memory of it alive by sharing stories, collecting newspaper articles and photographs, and recording oral histories. For them, there is no more important story of the civil rights movement. It embodies the ability of local citizens to organize and defeat legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and it testifies, for new generations, how communities can marshal the power to right historic wrongs. Since 2014, many have gathered to commemorate the day at a community-wide service at First African Baptist.
As the sixtieth anniversary of Bloody Tuesday approaches, they are again organizing to record and share their history. They hope that more of us will listen this time.
About the author
John Giggie is an associate professor of history and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is also the author of Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Battle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa (Oxford UP, 2024).