"Ill-timed" civil rights demonstrations

Shortly after, at ten-thirty, the President greeted the civil rights leaders. He was legitimately concerned that the March on Washington would give fence-sitters in Congress a "not at gunpoint" excuse to vote against his—their—civil rights bill. King agreed that the march might seem "ill-timed." But he had never engaged in a direct-action movement that did not seem ill-timed. "Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed," he said.

"Including the attorney general," the President said, and added, "I don't think you should be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, he has done more for civil rights than almot anybody else."

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), pp. 449-50.

Oppressors as witnesses for freedom

Though for now the mainstream—black as well as white—considered him crazy rather than prophetic, Shuttlesworth had understood early that the oppressors were essential "witnesses" for freedom, their wickedness often more eloquent than the victims' virtue. Now he would assume the lead in the greatest theater of the civil rights era, Shuttlesworth versus Bull Connor, who was sworn back in at city hall in November.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), pp. 110-11.

MLK as tourist in life

Martin Luther King sometimes seemed like a tourist in his own life, overwhelmed by the itinerary life had handed him.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p.102.

Life is short: work for freedom

[Jim] Bevel had been known to take his young trainees to a graveyard and say, "in forty years you are going to be here. Now, what are you going to do while you're alive?"

The schoolchildren went nuts. No one had ever talked to them like that, goading them to freedom rather than coaxing them into "gittin' an education."

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 343.

Steinbeck's poodle and civil rights

Charley doesn't have our problems. He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn't even know abut race, nor is he concerned with his sisters' marriage. It's quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America  (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 269 (orig. published 1962)

Protesting versus litigating

The desegregation of Montgomery's buses had not come about as a result of the heroic protest by the city's masses. It was the fruit of the NAACP's lawsuit stemming from Rosa Parks's arrest. "All that walking for nothing!" the NAACP's chief legal strategist, Thurgood Marshall, said disparagingly. He had missed the larger truth, however. The legal victory highlighted the flaws of the NAACP's strategy of patience since the decision affected only the buses of Montgomery; theoretically, every other community in the South would have to take to the courts for similar relief. The NAACP's legal triumphs would henceforth be a preamble to the civil rights movement—the book of an Old Testament prophet. The bus boycott had introduced a new gospel. The struggle had moved out of the hands of the talented tenth and into the streets.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 95.

(The case was Browder v. Gayle.)

Gotta have courage and hope

The Movement was going to have to give people courage and hope in order to give them nonviolence. That process would later get lost in the anecdotal lore of the Movement, the danger and the comedy of the showdowns. In fact, religion was what the activist Miles College professor Jonathan McPherson would call "the magnet that attracted people to the Movement and the cement that held it together.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p.308

Letting 'em sit down

"Boy," Folsom told Morgan, dispensing an important lesson about the white man's shame, "them goddamned Dixiecrats'll sleep with 'em at night and eat the breakfast they give 'em the next morning. But they'll never let 'em sit down to eat with 'em. That's the difference. Letting 'em sit down."

Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom (to lawyer Chuck Morgan), quoted in Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), pp. 169-70.

Sure, we'll uphold the Constitution

At the swearing-in ceremony in November, during the part where they vowed to uphold the United States Constitution, [Birmingham mayor Art] Hanes, forty-four years old, and [Birmingham public safety commissioner Bull] Connor, sixty-two, had put their left hands behind their backs and crossed their fingers, like fourth-graders neutralizing a fib.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 234.

Not exactly good versus evil

Now that the outcome is known, we tend to frame this era in terms of good versus evil. But the truth is scarier. Mostly this was a conflict of good against normal: Things that now seem surreal as well as shocking . . . were conventional in their time.

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 598.

Harding on Race—Birmingham, 1921

In October 1921, President Warren Harding had journeyed to Birmingham for the pageantry honoring the fiftieth birthday of what a booster called "the Magic City of the World, the marvel of the South, the miracle of the Continent, the dream of the Hemisphere, the vision of all Mankind." It was perhaps because Hugo Black had just won an acquittal for the Klan person who assassinated Father James Coyle that Harding was inspired to abandon his boilerplate congratulations and discourse instead on "the problem of democracy everywhere," race. "Whether you like it or not," Harding told the white members of his segregated audience, "unless our democracy is a lie, you must stand for that equality." 

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001, with 2012 Afterword), p. 455.

The full speech is more complicated. There are some amazingly great lines:

It is a matter of the keenest national concern that the South shall not be encouraged to make its colored population a vast reservoir of ignorance, to be drained away by the processes of migration into all other sections.

and

I would like to see an education that would fit every man not only to do his particular work as well as possible but to rise to a higher plane if he would deserve it. For that sort of education I have no fears, whether it be given to a black man or a white man. From that sort of education, I believe, black men, white men, the whole Nation, would draw immeasurable benefit. 

and his conclusion:

If we are just and honest in administering justice, if we are alive to perils and meet them in conscience and courage, the achievement of your first half century will be magnified tenfold in the second half, and the glory of your city and your country will be reflected in the happiness of a great people, greater than we dream, and grander for understanding and the courage to be right.

But there is a lot that is cringeworthy too:

Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. Indeed, it would be helpful to have that word "equality" eliminated from this consideration; to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, and inescapable difference. We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognize the difference

and

But there must be such education among the colored people as will enable them to develop their own leaders, capable of understanding and sympathizing with such a differentiation between the races as I have suggested$mdash;leaders who will inspire the race with proper ideals of race, pride, or national pride, of national pride, of an honorable destiny, an important participation in the universal effort for advancement of humanity as a whole. Racial amalgamation there can not be.

W.E.B. DuBois wrote an essay celebrating Harding's messages and showing the nonsense in the rest.