Profiles in Character #7: Martin Luther King, Jr. Faces Failure in Birmingham

Surrounded by twenty-four men in Room 30 of the Gaston Motel, the only place for blacks to stay in the steel city, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a decision to make: should he lead a march that would result in his arrest?  The effort to desegregate Birmingham in 1963 that began methodically ten days before was in trouble.  The economic boycott of downtown merchants designed to hurt Easter season sales and thus put pressure on political leaders had not worked.  After ten days, only three hundred people had been locked up for sit-ins and marches, yet filling the jails was essential to get the national media to cover the protests in what King considered the most segregated city in America.

There was also no money left to bail people out, a problem magnified by the city’s calculated notice that only cash would now be accepted for bonds.  “Martin,” someone said, “this means you can’t go to jail.  We need money.  We need a lot of money.  We need it now.  You are the only one who has the contacts to get it.”  His decision was also complicated because marching would defy a court injunction, served two days before, aimed at stopping Project C (for “Confrontation”) in its tracks.

Going to jail could jump start Project C.  King had already been in jail many times, and he had picked this symbolic day, April 12th, Good Friday, to go to jail again.  He had announced it at a mass meeting and had fasted as usual.  But now he was wavering.  “Our most dedicated and devoted leaders were overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness,” King recalled, and he could understand why.  “I want to meditate about this decision,” he said, and went alone to an adjoining room.

King was just 34.  His background and instincts urged caution.  As his wife Coretta would say, “Martin never abruptly forced an issue.”  He had been reluctant to lead the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, did not launch the sit-in movement in 1960 nor start the Freedom Rides in 1961.  Nevertheless, he had been vilified, physically attacked, and seen others get beaten, go to jail, and die on his behalf.  The burden he faced seemed overwhelming. 

If he obeyed the injunction and cancelled the march, Project C would collapse.  If he allowed the march, he would violate the law.  If others marched without him, he could not bail them out and would be seen as a coward. “What would be the verdict of the country about a man who had encouraged hundreds of people to make a stunning sacrifice and then excused himself,” he later observed.  Confronting a decision, he recalled, “I think I was standing also in the center of all that my life had brought me to be.”

“I must go,” King finally said to himself.  In the end, he trusted in the morality of his choice and the belief that creating tension by marching was the only chance for success, even if he could not control what the tension produced.  He changed into blue jeans, a work shirt and draped a coat over his arm (jail would be cold).  He rejoined his advisers, telling them: “I don’t know what will happen.  I don’t know where the money will come from.  But I have to make a faith act.  If we obey this injunction we are out of business.  I have to go.” “That, I think,” civil rights leader and King confidant Andrew Young later recalled, “was the beginning of his true leadership.”

King and his key aides emerged in the soft, 73-degree spring air, and went one block to Zion Hill Baptist Church where King told the audience that only the “redemptive influence of suffering” could transform Birmingham.  Singing “We Shall Overcome,” King and Ralph Abernathy, walking side by side, led 50 marchers onto the street.  Three blocks later, facing Police Commissioner Bull Connor and more than 80 officers, they fell to their knees to pray and were promptly arrested.

King would spend the next eight days in solitary confinement in a 9 by 6 foot cell.  While there, he would soon learn that singer Harry Belafonte had contributed $50,000 to the bail fund and that President Kennedy had expressed concern about his treatment, both critical signs of outside support.  He would also write, at first on toilet tissue and smuggled in newspapers, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, which would become the Declaration of Independence of black Americans. 

When he accepted being bailed out on April 20th, there was still no clear outcome. That would not come until Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on child marchers in early May, giving the nation vivid proof of the contradiction between American values and segregation.

King had put his freedom and his life in the service of his moral values and thus encouraged thousands more over the next few months and years to make the same sacrifice.  He is perhaps better known for his “I have a Dream” speech in August that year, but if not for his moral courage in Birmingham, that speech might never have been made.

Photo Credit: npr.org