04/15/01
JEFF HANSEN and JOHN ARCHIBALD
News staff writers

James Armstrong still lives in the house where his dog was poisoned in 1963.

On the same street where toughs in the back of a pickup tossed a rock through the window of his Buick Riviera. In the same rooms where the phone rang after his sons enrolled as the first black children at Graymont Elementary and a voice asked: "How would you like to see all your kids lying in a casket?"

Four children in Birmingham did end up in caskets later that year. Not Armstrong's sons - instead, four girls who went to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday, Sept. 15, and became the victims of a bomb planted by Klansmen.

In 1963, when Blanton was 25, Birmingham was at war with itself. White politicians clung to power and the city's segregationist past as blacks demanded freedom in demonstrations, sit ins and marches. Police Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor, who was simultaneously fighting the city's elite to remain in power, used dogs and fire hoses to suppress demonstrators, many of them children. Gov. George C. Wallace, whose lieutenants mingled with Ku Klux Klansmen, railed against integration, even as moderate Birmingham leaders worked behind the scenes for integration of downtown businesses.

Until Sept. 15, 1963, Birmingham could be known as a city that hated, but not one that killed.

Racial violence had plagued the city for years, since blacks had begun to protest the laws - some of the most restrictive in the South - that kept them separate from whites.

The first test of Birmingham's segregation had come with housing. The city had laws that zoned residential areas by race. But a shortage of homes and U.S. Supreme Court decisions against housing discrimination allowed blacks into previously all-white areas.

Segregationists responded with dynamite. Night riders - who were familiar with explosives from work in the mines or farms - found they could blow up a house as easily as they could blow out a stump.

As many as 40 bombs had exploded in Birmingham since 1947. The city had earned its nickname: Bombingham. An area of present-day Smithfield, where several blasts occurred, became known as Dynamite Hill.

Two bombs were aimed at the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a rising civil rights leader. Shuttlesworth crawled from rubble of his house after a Christmas Day 1956 attack, unharmed and feeling anointed to lead the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. It was Shuttlesworth who persuaded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Birmingham in 1963 and make the city a test case for civil disobedience.

Bombs were unofficial intimidation.

The official version came from city government. Connor, a former baseball announcer groomed for power by the city's elite, strictly enforced segregation laws with harsh words, sometimes brutal actions and an armored car.

Police were slow to respond when Klansmen in 1961 beat freedom riders trying to integrate interstate buses at the downtown Trailways station. Riders on the bus were savagely beaten, at least one with a pipe.

A group of Birmingham business leaders, including Chamber of Commerce officials, had been in Tokyo during the Trailways attack for a Rotary Club gathering. Halfway around the world they saw the photo of the mayhem and knew something had to be done to try to salvage Birmingham's image. Bull Connor had to go.

They helped launch a campaign to change Birmingham's form of government from commission to a mayor-council system, a move that ultimately would sweep Connor from power and allow the fight over desegregation to dissipate. Connor lost a close mayoral election in April 1963 to the more progressive Albert Boutwell - though until May two governments operated in City Hall as Connor refused to leave office.

As white unity crumbled, Birmingham became the test case Shuttlesworth sought.

The city that spring was brimming with homegrown white segregationists and blacks eager to fight for their rights, and had attracted national civil rights activists and radical white supremacists.

In April, activists targeted Birmingham for civil disobedience - planning protests against segregated lunch counters and water fountains at downtown department stores, and against the refusal of businesses to hire blacks as clerks and salespeople.

They gathered at churches near downtown, Sixteenth Street prominent among them, and staged protest marches toward the center of the city. Children became the shock troops, and hundreds were arrested and taken to a compound at the State Fairgrounds. Among the marchers arrested between April 3 and May 9 were Armstrong, his wife and his daughter.

Armstrong said he was looking for freedom. He'd seen it in the Army in Europe in World War II, and he wanted it at home.

''There's an old saying that a black man wants his 40 acres and a mule," Armstrong said. ''I guess I wanted mine. I landed on Normandy beach and went all over Germany and France, but I came back here and caught more hell from George Wallace than I did from the Germans."

The persistence of people such as Armstrong, Shuttlesworth and King paid off. On May 10, downtown business and civil rights leaders agreed to end the marches in exchange for promises to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, fitting rooms and restrooms in downtown Birmingham. The businesses also agreed to hire blacks as clerks and salesmen. Businessmen wouldn't talk publicly about the deal; they thought it was too dangerous.

It seemed like a victory for blacks and progressives. To die hard Klansmen, it was an outrage. They reacted with dynamite.

The last fight

On May 11, the evening after the agreement was announced, one bomb hit at the home of the Rev. A.D. King, brother of Martin. Another hit the A.G. Gaston Motel, where civil rights leaders often stayed.

Those bombs hit too late to stop the deal. The segregationists were losing - airports, bus and train stations had already been integrated; the downtown department stores had given in; and in June, Wallace would make a defiant but empty stand in the schoolhouse door to try to block admission of a black student to the University of Alabama.

As summer came, Birmingham officials prepared to open schools and allow five black children to enroll with whites.

The schools became one of the last - and most visible -battlegrounds for segregationists. Two of their leaders were Edward Fields and J.B. Stoner, an Atlanta man later to be convicted of bombing Shuttlesworth's church in 1958. The two operated the neo-Nazi National States Rights Party from a building in Bessemer, handing out fliers, reprinting anti-Semitic diatribes in their newsletter, The Thunderbolt, and recruiting segregationist protesters.

Wallace had connections to them.

The governor's head of public safety, Col. Al Lingo, told Fields that if the NSRP campaigned against integration and held boisterous demonstrations, Wallace would have an excuse to shut down racially mixed schools, according a letter written by Fields to historian Dan Carter, author of the Wallace biography Politics of Rage.

Two of the children selected to integrate the schools were Armstrong's sons, 11-year-old Dwight and 9-year-old Floyd. During the weeks before the start of school, Armstrong sat on his porch with his grandfather's 30-30 Winchester rifle to protect his family.

As the start of school neared, a steady drumbeat of unrest began:

Tuesday. Aug. 20. The home of civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores was nearly destroyed by a blast that blew out windows and ripped a tree from the ground. Armstrong heard the explosion from his home.

• Monday, Sept. 2. At a Labor Day barbecue, Wallace trumpeted his defiance of integration to a crowd of 10,000 at Ensley Park. As he often did in the 1960s, he walked a fine line. He called for calm while sowing the seeds of unrest.

  "I will never knowingly let you down, but we do not want to have any violence," he told the crowd. "I will not give my plans ... here. But we have plans. We always have plans in Montgomery."

   

• Tuesday, Sept. 3. State troopers - uninvited and against the wishes of the City Council - headed to Birmingham at Wallace's order to block school integration.

  The Armstrong children, Dwight and Floyd, were turned away from Graymont Elementary that day.

   

• Wednesday, Sept. 4. The Armstrong brothers registered at Graymont. They got in and out of the school quietly but their father still can hear the white crowds chant: "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate." Others said far worse. A crowd of whites outside, led by members of the NSRP, tangled with Birmingham police officers.

  That night, the Shores home was bombed again with several sticks of dynamite, minutes before the lawyer was to stand guard on his porch with a shotgun. Shores had been in the living room, reading The Wall Street Journal, and his daughter was in the kitchen when the bomb went off. Shores' wife was knocked out of bed. The bombing brought neighbors from their homes, angry and frustrated.

  Across town, the city desk at The Birmingham News called reporter Donald Brown to work on the story. Brown walked up a dark street toward Shores' house, past angry crowds. Shots went off a block away, "short bursts of machine guns ... The blam of shotguns ... Single shots of carbines and pistols," he wrote in The News the next day.

   

• Thursday, Sept. 5. The Birmingham Board of Education closed the schools at Wallace's request. They would reopen Monday.

   

• Saturday, Sept. 7. Wallace spoke in Birmingham at an anti integration fund raiser at the Thomas Jefferson Hotel downtown. Fields had a center seat and Wallace repeatedly praised him for working to keep schools separated by color.

   

• Sunday, Sept. 8. Someone threw a firebomb into the home of A.G. Gaston, the city's leading black businessman.

   

• Monday, Sept. 9. State troopers led by Col. Lingo stopped James Armstrong as he led his sons toward Graymont School that Monday.

   

• Tuesday, Sept. 10. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard. Five days before the Sixteenth Street bombing, Dwight and Floyd finally started school with white classmates.

  The Armstrongs entered the school amid shouting and protests from several hundred white pickets. As the yelling dwindled, Fields of the NSRP called for the demonstrators to head to Ramsay High, where Richard A. Walker sought to enroll as that school's first black student.

  Police lined up against the demonstrators at Ramsay and bloodied several with their batons. Four demonstrators were arrested.

  Horace Blackstock, a senior at Ramsay High, left the school to protest Walker's enrollment.

  "I'm not going to school with a Negro," he told a reporter as he was escorted from the building. He left school playing Dixie on his trumpet.

  Throughout the week demonstrators continued to protest. Birmingham schools had officially integrated, but the anger remained and attendance was low.

   

• Sunday, Sept. 15. Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair headed to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in the morning for a special youth service.

  "I wanted to cry ... "

  The deaths of those girls shocked the world. Though it didn't stop the bombings in Birmingham, it brought new perspective to people like Blackstock, who had played minor roles in the battle against integration.

  "I saw black men crying over the death of those children," Blackstock, now 56, said in an interview last month. "I wanted to cry then but I didn't because I thought I was too much of a man.

  He now says his walking out of Ramsay High was a lark, that he just wanted to skip school. "I'm certainly sorry for the part I played."

  Armstrong is proud of the role he and his family played in the fight for civil rights. His children suffered at Graymont when bullies smashed their teeth against water fountains and refused to throw them the football at recess. By their last year at school, they began to make friends, he said.

  Armstrong still works at the same barbershop where he cut hair in 1963. "We've come a long way," he said. "My kids gave me courage. I always wanted them to be free."

  © The Birmingham News