Word: birminghams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Woolworth demonstrations protested the refusal of four department stores in Birmingham, Ala., to desegregate their lunch counter facilities. The picketers claimed that owners of Woolworth's, Newberry's, H.L. Green, and had reneged on a year-old promise desegregate...
...most Birmingham Negroes, just beating the city's tough police commissioner, Theophilus Eugene ("Bull") Connor, in his bid for mayor seemed a major triumph. It was the Negro vote that gave former Lieutenant Governor Albert Boutwell a narrow margin of victory in the April 2 election. Connor had become such a symbol of the nightstick solution to race problems that local Negroes felt certain that they could deal more successfully with Boutwell, even though he is a segregationist...
...after the election, into Birmingham came the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., hero of the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery. Without consulting most of the Birmingham Negro leaders, King announced that "Birmingham is the most thoroughly segregated big city in the U.S. today," said that he would lead demonstrations there until "Pharaoh lets God's people go." Specifically, he demanded creation of a biracial commission, fair hiring practices, amnesty for previously arrested demonstrators, an end to lunch-counter and other segregation...
Missing the Chance. To many Birmingham Negroes, King's drive inflamed tensions at a time when the city seemed to be making some progress, however small, in race relations. Complained a Birmingham Negro attorney: "The new administration should have been given a chance to confer with the various groups interested in change." A. G. Gaston, a Negro businessman, added: "I regret the absence of continued communication between white and Negro leadership in our city." Said the Rev. Albert S. Foley, a white Jesuit priest who is chairman of Alabama's Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission...
...Birmingham live 180,000 Negroes and 260,000 whites. Unless the Federal government can directly ease the city's integration pains, the violence on Palm Sunday will have been only a beginning...