How a Pivotal 1963 Civil Rights Campaign Nearly Failed Before It Succeeded

We picture the Civil Rights Movement existing on a continuum of success. For nine long years, though, the movement knew nothing but failure, until, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. led his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the most racist, most segregated, most violent city in America — Birmingham, Alabama — where the goal wasn’t even success, it was suffering. Suffering, and likely dying at the hands of Bull Connor, a vile local leader who exemplified all that was awful about the South, and America. Bull and his brethren in the Klan and throughout the Birmingham Police Department raped Black women in patrol cars, dynamited local Black businesses, and castrated Black men as a caution against any civil rights protest.

That was Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Why would King and his protesters want to suffer or even die there? Because if King and his protesters did so while national media outlets filmed the violence, King would have what we see today as “viral videos” — footage that reached the highest echelons of American power, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where the Kennedy brothers governed the nation. If King’s viral videos of suffering and blood and even death reached the Kennedys, King might persuade the brothers to do something they had labeled impossible: sponsor a civil rights bill that would at last ban the traditions of Jim Crow Law from the South.

It was a huge gamble. King and the SCLC went into the Birmingham Campaign in the spring of 1963 with less than $500 to its name. Other civil rights leaders despised King, calling him a “phony” for his lack of success. The nation’s press, above and below the Mason–Dixon Line, sneered at him. Black Birmingham pastors openly rooted against him, seeing King as an “outsider” from Atlanta who had no clue how to rouse Black Birminghamians to his cause. The Kennedy brothers, meanwhile, had no interest in passing a civil rights bill. A bill like that didn’t poll well. By the time of the Birmingham campaign’s proposed start, Jack Kennedy had his reelection to consider.

Even King knew there was no rational argument to mount a civil rights campaign in Birmingham. He said his campaign there would either succeed or the SCLC would have to disband.

He played the long odds anyway. The excerpt you’re about to read is of King at his most vulnerable during the 10 weeks of the Birmingham Campaign, staring down a court order — an “injunction,” in the parlance of the Birmingham courts — that would bar his protesters from continuing out on the streets. If King abided by the injunction, the Birmingham Campaign would cease to exist. If he defied the injunction and took to the streets and protested anyway, he and his fellow protesters could be imprisoned for weeks if not months in Birmingham jail cells, bankrupting the SCLC and ending the campaign.

It was a no-win situation. That this injunction reached King on Good Friday was not lost on him. Weighing what to do was his moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, wishing anyone else would carry his burden.

Toward the chapter’s close, we see King reaching his decision.

I wrote You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live because the Birmingham Campaign is the dramatic peak of the Civil Rights Movement. What happened during those 10 weeks altered America for the rest of the 20^th century. We feel the impact of that campaign  even today. I’m a white man who married a Black woman, and Sonya and I and our three kids live on a quiet street where no one harasses us for who we are. I have the Birmingham Campaign to thank for that. I wrote the book for my kids and, frankly, for you, too. More people need to know in granular detail what actually happened in the spring of 1963. It shapes our lives to this very day.

Its actions then can give us hope in the here and now.

An Excerpt from You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live

Chapter 17 — The Good Friday Test

King emerged in the morning. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t made up his mind, either.

By Good Friday, not only the executive staff but also every member of the SCLC’s advisory committee had arrived in Birmingham. King wanted all twenty-four of them present for a meeting at 8:30 a.m. at the Gaston.

King looked terrible. His face bore the exhaustion of the sleepless night and the stress of the decision before him. Aides who saw him later said their leader was enduring the hardest test in his decade of activism. The hardest test in his life.

King asked the staff and advisory committee to come to room 30. They positioned themselves in the suite’s living room, twenty-five people standing and sitting and breathing in a room meant for perhaps eight. King took a seat at the living room table and dragged on a cigarette. He wanted to hear what everyone thought.

One by one they said they understood the impossible choice. Was there a way to find a less-terrible option? Could Harry Belafonte help again?

King said he’d reached Belafonte last night, asking about the possibility of an emergency fundraiser in New York at Harry’s apartment, to cover the now-exorbitant costs of bail. Harry had told Martin they could raise funds, but to be most effective, fundraisers needed Martin’s presence.

“This means you can’t go to jail,” someone said now. “We need money. We need a lot of money. We need it now.… If you go to jail we are lost. The battle of Birmingham is lost.”

The conversation turned to all the reasons King should cancel the day’s protests. Just that morning eight Alabama clergymen, Christian and Jewish, had written an op-ed in the Birmingham News calling King’s march “unwise and untimely.” Wasn’t at least one thing in that op-ed true? Couldn’t King benefit from more time now?

Fred Shuttlesworth and Wyatt Walker argued he couldn’t. To delay the Good Friday march even for the campaign’s well-being was to capitulate. What Martin would gain in money over the weekend he would lose in reputation. Who would follow the leader who does not follow his own words?

If anything, “you should have gone to jail earlier,” Walker said.

Walker’s response showed a certain punchiness: King was not the only executive in the SCLC who had gone without sleep last night, worrying over the fate of the campaign.

Some members of the SCLC’s advisory committee spoke plainly. This body included A. G. Gaston and King Sr. himself. Almost as if they’d rehearsed their lines in advance, the advisory committee said:

You march and things might get out of hand, Martin. The violence against Black people. The possible retaliation from Black people. Better to uphold the sanctity of the Easter season.
Better to delay the march, Martin.

King inhaled on his cigarette and nodded. He tried to hide from the two dozen what his best friend saw immediately. Ralph Abernathy later wrote how the advisory committee’s recommendation “damage our morale.”

And yet capitulation seemed the prudent play here. No one else, not Shuttlesworth or Walker or Abernathy for that matter, volunteered to march alongside King. Perhaps that was due to their fear of a possible six-month jail sentence. Perhaps that was due to the understanding that only King could lead today’s march, if a march was going to happen.

The point was, nobody wanted King’s crown.

He rose.

“I was alone in that crowded room,” he later wrote.

He told the two dozen he needed to pray. He walked out of the suite’s cramped living room and into the adjoining, and empty, bedroom.

He closed the door behind him.

***

He had never wanted this. For years now he’d told his wife, Coretta, he’d wanted someone else to lead the marches or give the speeches. When the movement had begun in Montgomery in 1955, King wrote, “I neither started the protest nor suggested it.” He was pushed into leadership simply because he spoke well, he said. Once out front, he decided to apply the nonviolent resistance alluded to in the Gospels and practiced millennia later by Gandhi. He did not know what he was doing in Montgomery, but because no other protester did, either, he became the bus boycott’s leader.

Early in that Montgomery campaign, when almost all Black protesters chose to walk to work and withhold their fare from the city’s buses, Martin and Coretta began to get threatening phone calls at home. At first he thought nothing of them. “The work of a few hotheads,” he told himself and Coretta. They’ll stop phoning the house when they realize we aren’t going to fight back.

The calls increased. Specified the bodily harm to be done to Martin and his young family. One night after a long day of marches, Martin climbed into bed next to Coretta and the bedside phone rang.

Martin had learned to pick up, to leave Coretta out of it entirely. He put the receiver to his ear.

“Listen, nigger. We’ve taken all we want from you. Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.”
Martin hung up.

This one got to him. Maybe it was the anger in the man’s voice; maybe the forewarned date: before next week. Martin couldn’t sleep, and on that night it was worse than insomnia. “It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.”

He got out of bed. Paced. Went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. When it had brewed and he’d poured his cup, he’d reached a conclusion. “I was ready to give up.… I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.” He couldn’t figure how, though, so he took his problem of saving face to God. With his head in his hands and cup of coffee untouched before him, King prayed aloud: “I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

He’d come to the point where he couldn’t face it at all.

At that moment he experienced the rush of God’s presence “as I had never experienced Him before.” A voice called to him or, rather, issued from within him. “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth,” it said with quiet assurance. “God will be at your side forever.”

The fears dissipated. His self-confidence returned. He could endure this night. He could lead this movement.

“I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same but God had given me the inner calm to face it.”

The warning turned out to be far from idle—his home was bombed two days later—but how King continued to lead in Montgomery despite his fear was why he was still leading today, and often against his inclination.

What he sought in room 30 in Birmingham was that same inner calm. That assured voice that would tell him what to do in a situation even more threatening than the late-night phone calls in Montgomery.

The noise of his inner monologue this morning—If I proceed, the campaign will die; if I delay, the campaign will die as well—quieted as he relayed his struggle to God. “I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt,” King later wrote. A moment more and he found himself standing in the center of the room, eyes open. “I think I was standing also at the center of all that my life had brought me to be.” He thought of the two dozen next door, the 150 already in jail, the hundreds more who might join them today if the thousands of Blacks lining the streets were any indication. All of them waiting on this Good Friday to see what Martin Luther King Jr. would decide. His mind then leaped beyond Birmingham, and Alabama, to the twenty million Black people in America who yearned for the freedom Martin promised—if only he would lead them.

Suddenly, “There was no more room for doubt.”

He took off his suit jacket and dress shirt.

From Montgomery until today he realized he had prayed to God for leadership but then faltered in his own execution. Why had he been an observer during the Freedom Rides in 1961? Why had the organizers in SNCC called him “De Lawd” last year? Why had James Bevel abandoned just last week the Birmingham protests that he was meant to organize?

King took off his dress slacks and put on a pair of blue jeans and a green denim shirt.

Bevel had left, and SNCC had sneered at King, and the Freedom Riders had dismissed his speeches because Martin’s actions as a leader had never risen to the the level of his rhetoric.

He stared in the mirror, in these “work clothes,” as he called them, which were suddenly as rich in symbolism as Good Friday itself.

He opened the door to the other room. Martin looked at the two dozen.

“I have decided to go to jail.”

The room gasped. The firmness of King’s voice, even what he wore: Many of those assembled had never seen Martin in anything but a suit and tie. To dress like the working-class Blacks who would inevitably want to march behind him showed the conviction King held regarding his own martyrdom.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he said. “I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

Some in the room smiled. Many of them were horrified. The most horrified was Martin’s own father, King Sr.

“Son,” he said, “I think at this time my advice would be to you to not violate the injunction.”

The words unspooled a gnarled history. King Sr. had always been over-bearing: forcing his way into Morehouse despite failing its entrance tests; proclaiming he would marry Alberta Williams before he met her. But because King Sr. had willed his way through life (Morehouse grad, husband to Alberta), he also thought he could will into existence the life he wanted for his older son.

In 1934, after a visit to Germany and the birthplace of Protestant-ism, King Sr.—born Michael King—changed his name to Martin Luther King. And changed his five-year-old son’s to Martin Luther King Jr.

As soon as he was old enough to understand its significance, Martin Jr. shrank from his name. He wondered if he could ever “earn” it, he said. He lacked his father’s self-confidence. He was too aware of mankind’s limitations. Maybe King Sr. was right that Martin read too much. Martin found strength in books that he could not find in himself.

Through the years other coping mechanisms emerged. Martin often dressed in a suit and tie because his dandyism pleased his father. Martin relinquished his dream in college to become a professor because King Sr. told him he should pastor his own congregation. Martin learned to tell himself the same thing. Ultimately that congregation became King Sr.’s own at Ebenezer Baptist, with Martin a co-pastor and in line to inherit the family business, but even now in 1963, and despite Martin’s worldwide recognition, Martin did not usurp his father. Martin’s name still appeared below King Sr.’s in each Sunday’s bulletin. That was how King Sr. advised the secretary to draw it up. Martin didn’t question it.

To compound the problem of expectations, Martin did not share King Sr.’s beliefs. King Sr. lived life as if it were a daily practice of manifest destiny. To the extent that he discussed civil rights—and he almost never did—King Sr. knew that “he was right, segregation was wrong, and the hatefulness of white people was a mystery best left to God,” as one observer of both men put it. But Martin, perhaps because he’d read too many books by Marx or Gandhi or Plato, wanted to push more people than himself across the line of freedom.

So what King Sr. said to Martin in room 30—“My advice would be to you to not violate the injunction”—really meant: Listen to me again, son.

Martin looked his dad in the eye. His whole life had been an act of loving God and loving his father, the two sometimes hard to extricate from each other and even harder to defy.

But he did not agree with King Sr. “If we obey it,” Martin said of the injunction, “then we are out of business.”

His father stepped back, as much baffled as amazed by the insubor-dination.

Martin didn’t try to placate him, not today.

At last King Sr. said, “You didn’t get this nonviolence from me.” He would turn his humiliation into a joke if he had to. “You must have got it from your mama.”

But this was no day for jokes. “I have to go,” Martin said softly, but looking his father in the eye, meeting that gaze, expanding beyond the parameters of King Sr.’s expectations because Junior was setting his own. “I am going to march if I have to march by myself,” he told his father.

In the end he did not march alone. Martin asked Ralph Abernathy to join him.

Abernathy had planned to lead the Easter services at his own church in Atlanta, but said to those in room 30 now, “Let me see if I can get in touch with my deacons, because I’m going to see if I can spend Easter Sunday in the Birmingham jail.”

Fred Shuttlesworth said he would march, too. This was his city, his people. He had asked King to come to Birmingham, and by God, to return the favor Fred would walk beside Martin, whatever the costs, start-ing with Fred’s own pastoral responsibilities on Easter Sunday.

An hour earlier no one had wanted to walk beside King. Now, as if to unify the decision, King asked the two dozen in the room to join hands. Martin led them all, even his father, in their anthem, “We Shall Over-come.” Some sang with tears in their eyes.

This moment in room 30, one aide later said, was the emergence of King’s “true leadership.”