Birmingham Foot Soldiers: Voices from the Civil Rights Movement

By Nick Patterson

Personal recollections from everyday people who marched against segregation and injustice in Alabama, risking arrest or worse, in the early 1960s.

Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Fred Shuttlesworth: These are iconic names associated with the Birmingham campaign of the civil rights movement. But there were thousands of others who played crucial roles too, and this volume gives voice to many local residents who also risked their lives for the cause.

Myrna Carter Jackson feels no shame about the police record she garnered while demonstrating against the harsh treatment of African Americans in the city. Carolyn Walker Williams, who knew the injustice black people faced in East Birmingham even as a child, was arrested at a protest for the first time while still in school. Gerald Wren grew up in the Smithfield neighborhood, part of which was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” as a result of the bombings of African Americans’ houses, churches, and schools. Journalist Nick Patterson interviews these and other Birmingham foot soldiers—and recounts the struggle and adversity overcome.

Includes photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625846969

Book preview

INTRODUCTION/CONTEXT

Students of civil rights history already know much about Birmingham and the role of its foot soldiers in the struggle against segregation and official public racism. As I write these words, the city is in the middle of a week dedicated to commemorating the events of 1963, fifty years past.

And yet, there is ample evidence that there are still many who live in this town, perhaps blocks away from where history was made—or maybe even closer—who still are unaware of exactly what took place. There are students who have never been, for instance, to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the most prominent structure in the community dedicated to teaching the lessons of civil and human rights. Indeed, the BCRI, whose assistance was invaluable in producing this book (and other articles and stories written by me and many others), succeeds in educating thousands of visitors to Birmingham each year and multiples of that this year, when the entire city’s tourism engine is tuned to civil rights. And yet, for one reason or another, many people who live in Birmingham remain less than fully aware of the city’s important historical significance.

Just days before commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the September 15, 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham mayor William Bell told me in an interview that new generations don’t fully understand the impact of what was happening then. They don’t have an appreciation for signs over a water fountain that says, ‘Colored,’ or ‘White only.’ They can’t have an appreciation of riding public transportation but being required to sit in a certain location, the idea that you’re restricted in your travel, that you can’t ride a Greyhound bus with other races. Well, he said, that’s gone. But it’s gone because of the sacrifices that were made. It’s gone because people said, ‘We can’t live like that.’

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is an educational organization dedicated to human rights in Birmingham and around the world.

Just as many are less familiar than they could be with the era of civil rights, many are unaware that they are walking past foot soldiers in Birmingham every day. The civil rights movement was, after all, a struggle waged not by militarily trained infantry armed with guns, grenades and bayonets, but by an army of foot soldiers trained by ministers to be nonviolent in the face of provocation, armed with steely determination, their faith and their outrage over injustice. Today, many who were foot soldiers in an extraordinary time have returned to very ordinary lives, having jobs, raising families, living and dying as regular folks and certainly not as local celebrities. Unless they have a reason to talk about what they went through in the 1960s or earlier, they might not do so.

So, before beginning to tell the stories that individual foot soldiers have to tell, let’s start with why they have stories at all, why they felt compelled to do what they did. If you already know the context of the civil rights era—with which I will deal in very brief, elementary detail—feel free to skip ahead. The remainder of this chapter is for those less familiar.

It is no secret that American history contains more than a little oppression or that much of that oppression derives from notions of white supremacy, which some believed was a divine right. Slavery of Africans was present from the founding of the nation, and even after it ended legally, there was a white power structure that resisted by force, by law and by every means possible the idea that black people could ever become equal citizens of the United