Word: birmingham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...understood, for instance, the importance of symbolism in fighting discrimination. In 1938, while attending the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Ala., she refused to abide by a segregation ordinance that required her to sit in the white section of the auditorium, apart from her black friends. The following year, she publicly resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution after it barred the black singer Marian Anderson from its auditorium...
...course, but a Southern version writ small and mean: a war by Jim Crow segregationists defending their "way of life" against those they saw as insurgents and traitors. The major battles have long since become part of the national consciousness--Martin Luther King Jr. writing from the Birmingham jail, Freedom Riders enduring hatred at every stop, Bull Connor hosing down children like animals. But last week America learned much more about a furtive, blood-spattered unit in that struggle: a sort of Mississippi KGB known euphemistically as the Sovereignty Commission...
...reminder of Vulcan's city set King to talking quietly of the events of 1963. "In 1963," he said, "there arose a great Negro disappointment and disillusionment and discontent. It was the year of Birmingham, when the civil rights issue was impressed on the nation in a way that nothing else before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the Negro's fight for equality. Never before had there been such a coalition of conscience on this issue...
Bull Connor thought he knew a thing or two about power. In May 1963 the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., was ready to use water cannons and attack dogs on a group of civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The protesters responded in a way Connor found hard to fathom--they knelt in the street and prayed. "Let them turn their water on," said one. "Let them use their dogs. We are not leaving. Forgive them." Connor gave the order to mow down the marchers, and television beamed the scene to a horrified world...
...blacks of Birmingham raised the fundamental question of the 1960s: Who has authority, and why? Six months later, the question was posed again in Dallas, when the squeeze of a trigger snuffed out the life of the world's most powerful man--the ultimate attack on authority. Kennedy's assassination began a nightmarish string that ended with the 1968 slayings of King and Robert Kennedy. Great leaders were called, great leaders were murdered, and great cities burned, baby, burned. And through it all, Vietnam was blazing too, an unwinnable, unfathomable, undeclared war that claimed 57,605 American lives in exchange...