Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1960s was what it had always been, a city that kept blacks and whites apart with separate water fountains, hotels, schools, hospitals, etc., for each race.

Digital History notes that, “Calling Birmingham ‘the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,’ the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced in early 1963 that he would lead demonstrations in the city until demands for fair hiring practices and desegregation were met.”

The Birth of Project “C”
CBS News correspondent Dan Rather covered the civil rights movement in the U.S. south in 1962 and ’63. In his 2012 book, “Rather Outspoken,” he writes that the campaign had become stalled in 1963: “they could march and chant and sing until hell froze over, but it wouldn’t make a dent unless they elicited an extreme response from the segregationists and the press was there to witness it, report it and show it on the air.”

So Project “C” for Confrontation was launched. It was a plan to provoke authorities into doing something so outrageous that it would stir Americans out of their complacency about equal rights for black people.

The activists needed someone, in the words of Mr. Rather, so filled with racial hatred and so dumb “that he didn’t care what the pictures looked like.”

They found such a man in Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor. He was the Commissioner of Public Safety in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. He made no secret of his racist beliefs and had close ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

When the first Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham in 1961 to try to desegregate the bus system, Connor knew how to deal with them. A PBS biography of him notes that he told local Klansmen to meet the activists and “He would see to it that 15 or 20 minutes would elapse before the police arrived.” The Freedom Riders were handed a vicious beating.

Civil Rights Crackdown Goes Global
The PBS documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize, America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954 – 1985,” describes how “activists begin recruiting children to march.”

Bull Connor, who oversaw the operations of the city’s police and fire departments, decided the marchers needed a harsh lesson about who was in charge and what their “proper place” was; 700 marchers were arrested on the first day of protests.

“On May 3rd (1963), 1,000 more children show up to peacefully protest, and Connor turns high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on them, creating some of the most indelibly violent images to date.”

Dan Rather writes that, “Up close, the jets of water would be forceful enough to flay flesh from bone; even at a somewhat greater distance, the water ripped clothing and sent children rolling down the street.”

In his 1991 biography of Bull Connor, William A. Nunnelly writes of the shock when the world saw film of “the confrontation between grim-faced, helmeted policemen and their dogs, and black children chanting freedom songs and hymns.”

After five days of peaceful protests Birmingham’s jail were overflowing; 2,500 people had been arrested, 2,000 of them children. The scenes of violence horrified mainstream Americans and gave a very black eye to the U.S. internationally.

Birmingham the Turning Point in Civil Rights Movement
Dan Rather says the extremism of Bull Connor and his police and firefighters was the “tipping point” in the civil rights movement.

The Alabama Department of Archives and History comments that, “The events in Birmingham helped mobilize the administration of President John Kennedy to begin efforts leading to the most far-reaching civil rights legislation in history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As President Kennedy said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
In February 1973, Bull Connor died. The documentary “Segregation at All Costs: Bull Connor and the Civil Rights Movement” notes that by the time of his death “Connor had lost almost all his political power and remains in the minds of Americans as a racist leader in the south.”

Civil Rights in the South Today
But, that’s all in the past and everybody gets along just fine today. No they don’t. Just ask Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson. The African-American couple wanted to get married in the church they attended in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. But, some of the white congregants objected to the July 2012 wedding taking place in their First Baptist Church.

Charles Wilson told CNN: “Because of the fact that we were black, some of the members of the congregation had got upset and decided that no black couple would ever be married at that church.”

They were married in a nearby church that does not have a problem with the colour of their skin. The Civil Rights Act may have passed but it’s not possible to legislate racism and bigotry out of existence.

Sources
• “America in Ferment: The Tumultuous 1960s.” Digital History, undated.
• “Rather Outspoken.” Dan Rather with Digby Diehl, Grand Central Publishing, May 2012.
• “Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor.” PBS American Experience, undated.
• “Eyes on the Prize, America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954 – 1985.” PBS American Experience, undated.
• “T. Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor.” Alabama Department of Archives and History, undated.
• “Bull Connor.” William A. Nunnelly. The University of Alabama Press, 1991.
• “Segregation at All Costs: Bull Connor and the Civil Rights Movement.” Eamon Ronan, undated.
• “Charles, Te’Andrea Wilson: First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs Mississippi Refused to Marry Them.” CNN Wire Staff, July 30, 2012.