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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, May 22, 1963
The Meaning of Birmingham
"Those Alabama Stories Are Sickening. Why Can't They Be Like Us And Find Some Nice Refined Way To Keep The Negroes Out?"
By Fred Zimmerman
America today is undergoing a major social upheaval. It is probably as major as any upheaval could be in our fairly stable society.
And surely the events of the last few weeks will come to represent a significant turning point in the Negro's increasingly militant campaign to secure equal rights. For as the story of Birmingham emerges from the bits and pieces reported daily in the newspapers, it becomes evident that something new and overpowering is happening to this country's race relations.
Historians will be able to fix the beginnings of the revolution accurately enough at 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional.
Equally apparent is the fact that civil rights—100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation is the biggest domestic issue of the decade.
THE MAIN questions now are questions of time: How soon will white racists completely lose their control over the Negro, and will it be soon enough to prevent the dire consequences of a widespread movement of Negroes into the camp of the black supremacists?
Birmingham demonstrates that the traditionally docile Southern Negro is disappearing. In his place is a new, militant Negro, thousands of whom were running through the streets of Birmingham this month, openly defying their white masters.
And now the revolt spreads rapidly across the Deep South, like a brush fire hopelessly out of control. Birmingham could fill its jails with the insurgents, but the prisoners knew they were winning anyway.
The first proof that the power structure was shifting in Birmingham was the willingness of local businessmen to sit at a bargaining table with Negro leaders. Further, the eventual truce was simply a list of concessions to Negro demands; about all that the whites won was a promise that the Negroes would stop demonstrating.
THE EVENTS of Birmingham are significant for several reasons:
- Negroes have realized that mass defiance is not only possible but also effective in winning major gains. They see that they have little to lose and everything to win in using such tactics.
- Southern whites now understand that Negroes have a tremendous amount of potential power, and that in using this power there is virtually no limit to the demands Negroes can make. Jailing a handful of Negroes is a simple matter; but to subdue and jail nearly three thousand in one city means something else entirely.
- The large-scale entrance of Southern businessmen into the picture inevitably will help shift the balance of power away from Southern racists.
- The wind has gone out of the segregationists' old argument that Southern Negroes are content with their lot and that there would be no problem if it were not for "outside agitators." The pictures on the front pages of the nation's newspapers this month have shown no white "agitators," but only Negroes—thousands of obviously discontented Negroes, fighting in their own behalf against fire hoses and police dogs for what they are convinced belongs to them.
They well know — even if the city's mayor does not — that Birmingham suddenly is having major economic problems. A measure of this is the city's troubles in attracting new industry, as reflected in capital spending statistics.
OF MAJOR importance is the role assumed by the businessmen who negotiated with Negro leaders. To the city's lame duck mayor, Art Hanes, the white negotiators were simply "a group of fuzzy-minded liberals, pinkos, and Reds."
Finally, what happened in Birmingham has set off an explosion of new civil rights moves that is spreading across the country, both North and South. (In a long news story describing the nation-wide aftermath, the Wall Street Journal last week spoke of the "spirit of Birmingham.")
But the businessmen who sat down to reach a settlement with the Negroes are far from being Communists. They can more accurately be described as normal, profit-seeking capitalists.
In 1960, businessmen invested $51.8 million on new plants and expansion. In 1960 — the year white mobs beat freedom riders in Birmingham — such investment fell to $23.5 million. Last year it dropped to $11.4 million.
In the four weeks ending May
4, department store sales fell 10 per cent from totals a year earlier, as a result of Negro boycots and violence in the downtown area.
FIGURES SUCH as these and not moral or political attitudes explain why the Southern businessman has entered the racial picture on the side of moderation. Though he is not openly pushing the Negro's cause, he is taking what amounts to an unusually strong position, considering the tenseness of the situation and the risk he runs of alienating many of his white customers.
In addition to Birmingham's bi-racial committee, similar efforts of business groups are reported in Raleigh, N.C., Jacksonville, Fla., New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Baton Rouge, La., and Montgomery, Ala.
Now, though Birmingham is relatively calm, the reports of new civil rights activity across the nation are coming so rapidly that it is impossible to form a coherent picture of all that is happening.
(As I began writing, for example, a newscast was reporting that 600 Negroes had been arrested for demonstrating somewhere in North Carolina. A broadcast two hours later had the figure at 1,000.)
- In Englewood, N.J., 30 Negro children are holding an extended sit-in in classrooms at a school that won't register them.
- OTHER EXAMPLES of the new trend:
- In Los Angeles last week 2,000 Negroes and whites marched on city hall to make various integration demands.
- In Philadelphia, Negroes are flooding the Bell Telephone
Company of Pennsylvania with applications for jobs. Unless some Negroes are hired, the NAACP threatens hundreds of simultaneous phone calls to information operators in some distant city, payment of phone bills in pennies, and the cancellation of extension phones in Negro homes.
- In Cleveland, a Negro group began last week to picket a big Cadillac agency as part of a 60-day boycott of General Motors products. The campaign is a protest against hiring practices which the Negroes consider discriminatory.
- Discriminatory housing is being fought in various ways in a number of cities, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
- In Cambridge, Md., last week Negroes staged a series of marches to protest segregated lunch rooms, bowling alleys, and theaters.
"We've got a stack of membership applications six inches high, and we haven't been out recruiting. Birmingham has done the recruiting for us."
It is obvious that as each day passes the Negro gains momentum in his attack on racial barriers throughout the country. The campaign may slow temporarily, but if it does it will begin again with renewed speed.
AND THE nation-wide wave of militant action shows no sign of abating. A leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality savs:
Of major importance will be the ability of white persons to make continual adjustments to a social situation that refuses to remain static any longer.
BIRMINGHAM'S POLICE
commissioner, Bull Connor, probably does not realize it, but the struggle has already passed him by. He can call out the dogs and the fire hoses again, but the Negroes will keep coming—and it will take more than dogs and fire hoses to stop them.
He can take another thousand Negroes to jail, but more will be waiting when he returns — and there is not enough room in all the jails in the South to hold the number of Negroes who have decided that now is the time to get what belongs to them.
The Bull Connors are rapidly losing their power. They are no longer relevant. Also ceasing to be an influence are those white "moderates" who talk of gradually "giving" the Negroes their rights. Negroes are no longer waiting for gifts.
THE PROBLEM is what lies ahead for a whole race that is suddenly on the move. There is the threat the Negroes will be driven into such organizations as the Black Muslims, a Negro group dedicated to violence in establishing a virtual dictatorship of Negroes in the South.
Each new wave of violence on the streets of Southern cities makes these black supremacists look less like a harmless fringe group. And they are certain to gain increasing influence as the intransigence of whites continues.
Americans must realize that the poles of the conflict are shifting. The NAACP and the Rev. Martin Luther King soon may represent moderation to the Negroes. And in that light, these words of Dr. King have a chilling sound:
"There go my people. I am their leader. I must catch them."
Worth Repeating
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.-Walter Lippmann
Daily Transan
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Fred Zimmerman ... Managing Editor
Ben Marshall, Bill Sheldon, Mike Miller,
Art Miller, Margaret Cathcart ... Assistant Managing Editors
Scott Payne ... City Editor
Trudy Meserve and Jackie Stern ... Co-Society Editors
Steve Clark ... Sports Editor
Murrel Bland ... Photograph Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Dennis Branstiter ... Editorial Editor
Terry Murphy ... Assistant Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Jack Cannon, Business Manager; Jim Stevens, Assist. Business Mgr;
Mike Carson, Advertising Mgr; Joanne Zabornik, Circulation Mgr;
Brooks Harrison, Classified Mgr; Bob Brooks, National Adv. Mgr;
Charles Hayward, Promotion Mgr; Bill Finley, Merchandising Mgr.