By Steve Bergsman
In the course of working with Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer Beverly Lee of the Shirelles — the girl group that sang "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," "Soldier Boy" and many other hits — on her memoirs, she told me of a now-forgotten Birmingham, Alabama, event that took place in the turbulent year of 1963. That year began with the Birmingham Campaign, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to integrate the highly segregated city. News clips of police attacking children with dogs and water hoses played around the world and brought the National Guard to town. That didn't end the strife, however. In September of that year, Birmingham's 16th Street Church was bombed by white supremacists, killing four young girls.
The event Lee recalled was the Freedom Concert in the summer of 1963, when African-American and white performers flew down from New York to hold the first integrated concert in Birmingham. Along with the Shirelles were Ray Charles, Johnny Mathis, Clyde McPhatter, Nina Simone and the writer James Baldwin, among many others.
"Together Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy personally greeted everyone coming down the stairs to the tarmac," she recalled. "Dr. King smiled at me. His hand was steady. For a moment, I forgot my fears. It was an exciting moment, and it was a moment of uncertainty. We were full of mixed emotions."
Lee vividly recalled the troupers, both black and white, staying at city's A.G. Gaston Motel, along with King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. Indeed, King, Abernathy and Birmingham's Rev. L. Shuttlesworth used the black-owned Gaston Motel as their headquarters while planning the Birmingham Campaign. The motel, fenced and abandoned, is now part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.
The other key parts of the national monument near the Gaston are the 16th Street Baptist Church; Kelly Ingram Park, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor directed the white police against the black protestors with mass arrests, water cannons and German shepherds; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
A part of the monument elsewhere in Birmingham is the Bethel Baptist Church, where the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement began in 1950s under the leadership of Shuttlesworth. This is where I began my tour of Birmingham's civil rights history. The church was built in 1926, and in the 1950s, with Shuttlesworth deep into the civil rights movement, it was bombed three times. The first time was on Christmas night in 1956, when white supremacists dynamited the minister's home next to the church, leveling it. When Shuttlesworth was pulled out of the rubble, he exclaimed, "You go back and tell your Klan brethren if God could keep me through this then I'm here for the duration."
At the church, I met Martha Bouyer, who explained the history of the Birmingham movement and said King called Birmingham the most segregated city in America.
"In the 1950s and early 1960s, the issue was segregation on buses, but here in Birmingham it was all things," she said.
Indeed, Birmingham racial laws were so intense and complicated that the code made no sense at all. For example, racial segregation Code 597 stated: It shall be unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, baseball, softball, football, basketball or similar games."
In 1960, more than 40 percent of the Birmingham population was African-American, but these people could only live in 10 percent of the city. As Bouyer pointed out, it was the daily humiliations that wore down the African-American populace and eventually caused them to fight back.
The best place to understand all this and learn about Birmingham's role in the civil rights movement is at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum that recalls the long journey to equality. The walk through the institute closely follows the chronology of segregation in Birmingham and eventually desegregation. Some of the most amazing artifacts include the actual jail cell bars of King's incarceration in Birmingham, where he wrote the famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Barry McNealy, the education programs consultant at the institute, told me that every time he walks by the jail exhibit and sees the bars he feels inclined to make contact - it's like touching history.
The institute also showcases an authentic Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, which offer a different kind of remembrance.
Kelly Ingram Park is now a quiet landscaped little bit of Eden in the busy city. Statues and walkways commemorate all of those events from 60 years ago, when the park was a war zone between the forces of segregation and those of integration and civil rights. There is one oddity — a small European horse chestnut tree that was planted in honor of Dutch diarist Anne Frank. It's a reminder that Adolf Hitler modeled his Nazi discrimination laws on the Jim Crow laws of the American South.
WHEN YOU GO
For more information: www.birminghamal.org
Steve Bergsman is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
In 1963, four young girls were killed in a white-supremacist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Photo courtesy of Steve Bergsman.
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