Posted on 05/07/2013 5:51:26 AM PDT by Nextrush
When non-violent protestors faced the dogs and water cannon of Bull Connor in Birmingham, spectators by the hundreds were angered.
They shouted at the police and firefighters to be sure, but then some of them picked up rocks and other objects and began to hurl them.
As the media spread the images of the violence around the country sympathy and outrage spread.
People were moved to give money to the protest movement, others wanted to come down and get arrested like the children who first walked into the paddy wagons did.
And yet others were just angered towards police and whites vowing in their hearts that things would not be the same in the future. They would fight back if they saw "police brutality"
President John Kennedy worked to get local black and white leaders in Birmingham talking through intermediary Burke Marshall.
The local white business leaders were talking by Monday May 6th but they could promise little, saying they would not integrate department store bathrooms or other facilities as long as Bull Connor and the commission form of government existed. The newly elected Mayor Albert Boutwell was awaiting a court ruling in his favor.
Saturday May 4th witnessed more street protests with small groups of two and three working their way to protest at City Hall where they were arrested. Enraged bystanders again rained rocks on police.
On Sunday May 5th protestors spilled out of a church headed for City Hall. The police and firemen with Bull Connor in front stopped them and allowed them to hold a prayer service in a segregated park.
Monday May 6th saw parents and children alike march into the paddy wagons with spectators again becoming enraged throwing bottles and rocks at the authorities.
800 people had marched to jail that day and another 200 showed up by surprise in the downtown business district to picket and be arrested.
Some five to ten thousand people packed four churches for mass meetings Monday night.
On Tuesday May 7th surpise tactics involving small groups with picket signs stored in car trunks led to picket lines involving six hundred people in downtown Birmingham.
As police thinned their lines at the usual front line (Sixteenth Street Baptist Church) hundreds more demonstrators swarmed past the police to move towards the downtown area.
Thousands marched, sang, sat on the sidewalks. Police were simply overhwelmed by the numbers unable to make any arrests because the jails were full from the thousands already arrested.
Meanwhile, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church the hoses went into action attacking protesting children and the rock throwers alike as protest organizer Wyatt Walker tried to get a second wave of protestors off.
Kennedy aide Burke Marshall was relaying the names of key business leaders in Birmingham back to the White House so that cabinet members and the President himself could lobby them in search of a solution to the demands of the protestors.
At a meeting this night 50 years ago Dr. Martin Luther King said: "We are not going to stop this movement until we have moved segregation from this city." At the same time Governor George Wallace ordered state troopers into Birmingham to reinforce the local police and sheriff's deputies.
Notice a President Of The United States trying to find a peaceful negotiated solution and not trying to throw fuel on the fire.
Suck on that Democrats. Your boy Connor is in the dustbin of history.
When non-violent protestors faced the dogs and water cannon of Bull Connor (D-Birmingham), spectators by the hundreds were angered.
I just heard Dear Leader Ubama say this weekend that people have nothing to fear from their government and that any suggestion to the contrary is foolishness.
Names from the article:
Bull Connor - Democrat
Burke Marshall - Democrat
John Kennedy - Democrat
Albert Boutwell - Democrat
George Wallace - Democrat (at the time)
Dr. Martin Luther King - Republican
Wyatt Tee Walker - unknown affiliation at the time, but highly critical of federal judges who were appointed by Democratic administrations as “the chief stumbling blocks to the enforcement of constitutional law”
Now every month is Black History month.
We are smothered with it.
The nation’s spirit and vigor are being suffocated by it.
Nothing in America’s history matters anymore unless it has something to do with race, skin color, slavery, white racism, Affirmative Action, reparations.
The next step is the realization that these “protests” like Ghandi’s in India were the opening shots by the Third World against Western dominance. The outcome of the war with Japan convinced Ghandi that his people could never win by direct armed confrontation against the West. So accurately reading the crushed state of the Western psyche and the resulting sick nature of its populace he developed “Nonviolence” as a technique of conquest. He and his follower King knew the West no longer had the strength to resist. Today they are 1/2 way to total conquest and are in the process of consolidating their ongoing victory. They have even enlisted the aid of some Westerners in the war.
I grew up near Birmingham.
It would be an instructive exercise to compare Birmingham 1963 to present day Birmingham.
The county (Jefferson) is now bankrupt, for starters. And, like many other urban areas, Birmingham is now surrounded by newer, nicer cities - the population having shifted to the outskirts. What remains in the actual city limits of Birmingham is not so nice.
Lots of forces caused this...but it can’t be ignored that ‘white flight’ was one of them. In other words, most with the means to leave did just that...Birmingham is now less than one quarter white by population.
In many ways, the civil rights movement has failed...as soon as the southern democrats realized they couldn’t stop the movement, they co-opted it, and morphed it with Johnson’s socialist agenda, as well as a style of woman’s liberation movement that viewed men as problematic. The result: Birmingham, Detroit, etc, etc.
George Wallace was a life long democrat who ran for president 4 times, he did become an independent for a short time for his 1968 presidential run facing Nixon and Humphrey.
In his last Governor campaign (1982) democrat George Wallace received over 90% of the black vote.
Governor Wallace was one of the assassination figures of the era of JFK and Martin Luther King. In an assassination attempt during his 1972 campaign, Wallace was shot 5 times.
Its been argued that non-violent civil disobedience leads to violent civil disobedience. The historical record of 1963 indicates that.
There are potential consequences to such protests if people defending their freedom choose that route today.
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