December 25: 

Bethel Baptist Church, pastored by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and headquarters of the ACMHR, is bombed.

1957

September 2: 

Klansmen castrate a black man in order to discourage efforts to desegregate Birmingham schools. (McWhorter)

SEPTember 9: 

Rev. Shuttlesworth is beaten in retaliation for having petitioned for his children to attend desegregated schools.

1957-1962

At least seventeen unsolved bombings of Negro churches and homes of civil rights leaders occur in Birmingham (Why We Can’t Wait 47). No wonder the community acquires the nickname “Bombingham.”

Reverend Shuttlesworth and others in the community continue to agitate for change. For example, a bus boycott modeled on the one in Montgomery is organized (and abandoned), and students are encouraged to participate in the 1960 sit ins. Bull Connor continues to resist.

1960

April:

The sit-in movement reaches Birmingham, encouraged by Shuttlesworth and resisted by Connor and the KKK. Shuttlesworth is briefly jailed.

On April 12, the New York Times carries a page-one withering critique of conditions in Birmingham, entitled “Fear and Hatred Cripple Birmingham.” It sparks outrage in the city and motivates a libel lawsuit.

SNCC is formed at a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, attended by Rev. Shuttlesworth and Rev. King (who is one of the speakers).

1961

May 14:

Klansmen, given tacit permission by Birmingham police and Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, severely beat Freedom Riders (notably, but not only, Charles Person and Jim Peck) in the Birmingham Trailways bus station. Six days later, other Freedom Riders, including John Lewis, are beaten in Montgomery. (The episode is covered extensively in the PBS American Experience documentary, Freedom Riders (2010), available via Youtube.)

For a sense of Birmingham in 1961, see Birmingham Speaks or Chapter 3 of Why We Can’t Wait.

November 7:

Segregationist Art Hines narrowly defeats moderate Tom King in the election for mayor. The white community in the city has become polarized: reformers vs. segregationists, business community vs. city hall.

November 12:

After city commissioners (including Bull Connor) vote to close city parks rather than desegregate them (effective January 1, 1962), moderates in the business community publish “Some Facts to Face” in the Birmingham News. The statement opposes resistance to desegregation.

1962

January:

Dynamite bombs severely damage three black Birmingham churches, one of them associated with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.

Reverend Shuttlesworth has filed a lawsuit to desegregate public parks, golf courses, the zoo, and public swimming pools; on January 15, a judge rules that those facilities must open to all citizens.

March 2:

Reverend Shuttlesworth is released after 36 days in jail–and accepts a new pastorate in Cincinnati. Meanwhile, Lucius Pitts, president of Miles College, takes on additional leadership in the black community: he initiates a boycott of white businesses downtown to achieve desegregation of drinking fountains, elevators, and lunch counters, and demands the hiring of black clerks.

May:

The SCLC turns its attention to a possible campaign in Birmingham that would align with Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

June 5:

Fred Shuttlesworth offers “A Call for Reason, Sanity, and Righteous Perseverance in a Critical Hour” as his message to the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

September:

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, having initiated the desegregation campaign in Birmingham, invites Martin Luther King to try to desegregate “Bombingham” as the SCLC meets in Birmingham. After a three-day retreat near Savannah, Georgia to consider the matter, King accepts the challenge.

From September 25-28, even as a crisis emerges at the nearby University of Mississippi, the SCLC holds its annual convention in Birmingham, including 300 delegates and Dr. King. (At the final session of the SCLC meeting, on September 28, King addresses the group from Hall Auditorium–where he is attacked physically by a young Nazi.)  To discourage demonstrations, city leaders temporarily desegregate downtown department stores. (The Whites Only signs reappear after the SCLCers leave town.)

November 6:

George Wallace is elected governor of Alabama, vowing to perpetuate segregation. But a new council-plus-mayor system is narrowly approved in Birmingham as a means of neutralizing Bull Connor’s segregationist control.

December 14:

Bethel Baptist Church, until recently Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s pastorate, is bombed.

1963

January 10:

At a meeting at the Dorchester Academy, in Midway, Georgia (near Savannah), SCLC leaders commit to a campaign to desegregate Birmingham.

January 14:

George Wallace is inaugurated as governor of Alabama, pledging “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

Concurrent with the inaugural observances is a National Conference on Religion and Race (January 14-17), chaired by Benjamin Mays, that brings together 647 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders. (Dr. King is one of the presenters.)

January 17:

Eleven Birmingham clergy publish a statement in the main Birmingham newspaper that implores the community to desegregate.

Early March:

The Birmingham Campaign is originally scheduled to begin, but is postponed until April 2 in order to let the local mayoral election play out. Wyatt Tee Walker and James Bevel tutor local citizens concerning nonviolent resistance.

March 5:

The mayoral election in Birmingham pits Bull Connor against Albert Boutwell and his associate Tom King. No one gets 50% of the vote, so Boutwell and Connor will face one another in an April 2 runoff election. The SCLC again decides to delay activities until the election is decided, preferring to deal with Boutwell rather than Connor.

MArch 8:

Segregationists rally at Municipal Auditorium in support of Bull Connor.

April 2:

The less extreme Albert Boutwell, widely considered to be willing to consider changes to Birmingham’s segregation policies, narrowly defeats Eugene “Bull” Connor in a large-turnout run-off mayoral election, thanks in part to African-American voters. However, Connor and his supporters, instead of stepping down, decide to contest the election (contending, in part, that Connor’s elected terms as Commissioner only when his term was up in 1965) so that two functioning rival city governments operate simultaneously in Birmingham for months until the matter is adjudicated; meanwhile, Connor continues to control the local police. (For more on Bull Connor, see the Bull Connor Overview.)

April 3:

On what they dub “B Day,” the SCLC begins staging sit-ins and releases a “Birmingham Manifesto,” which is largely ignored. That day, the campaign is launched with a series of mass meetings and sit-ins at Birmingham lunch counters and bus stations, marches on City Hall, direct actions, and the beginnings of a boycott of all downtown merchants. Citizens are encouraged to avoid shopping at downtown stores during one of the busiest shopping periods, the Easter season, until reforms are instituted.

Dr. King speaks to black inhabitants of Birmingham about methods and philosophies of nonviolence, and actions expand over the next week to include sit-ins at the library, “kneel-ins” at churches, and a march on the county building to forcibly register voters. Hundreds are arrested during this week; many whites (and more than a few African Americans) wish that the “outside agitators” from Atlanta would leave town. but SCLC staff members James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash Bevel, Dorothy Cotton, Andrew Young, and Bernard Lee also provide workshops on nonviolence.

April 6:

Police arrest 45 protesters who are marching on City Hall. The next day, Palm Sunday, police dogs are set loose on a young protester. Meanwhile, daily demonstrations and the economic boycott continue.

April 7: 

On Palm Sunday, more people are arrested, and nineteen-year-old protester Leroy Allen is set upon by police dogs.

April 10:  

The city obtains an injunction against demonstrations from a friendly judge, so demonstrators are now subject to arrest. In response to the protests, Judge W.A. Jenkins, Jr. issues an order preventing Reverends King, Ralph Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, and other civil rights leaders from organizing demonstrations. Dr. King and Abernathy debate whether protesters should continue to submit to arrest; as money available for posting bail runs thin, leaders cannot guarantee that those arrested will be released. Dr. King’s services at a fundraiser to replenish funds are desperately needed, but he feels his credibility might be undermined if he refuses to submit to arrest so he decides to violate the injunction and accept arrest. Divisions are apparent in the African American community.

April 12:

On Good Friday, local clergy (eight of the eleven who wrote on January 17) compose a public letter, published in Birmingham newspapers  on April 13, condemning the protests and King’s role in them, and asking Dr. King to call off the demonstrations.

On the same symbolic day, Good Friday the 12th, Dr. King joins the demonstrations and is arrested along with Ralph Abernathy after violating the injunction against protesting, in accordance with the agenda of “Project C,” which had intended that King be arrested on that date all along. While in custody, he begins composing his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” which, among other subjects, justifies his ignoring the injunction.  Click here to read “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

April 12-20:  

As demonstrations continue, in jail Dr. King continues to pen his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It originally circulates only in mimeographed copies throughout Birmingham before becoming public on April 18 and being distributed more widely (but often in excerpts) later that year through pamphlets from the American Friends Service Committee and periodicals like Christian Century, New Republic, Christianity and Crisis, the New York Post, and Ebony magazine. Part of the letter is even introduced into testimony by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D-NY) and published in the Congressional Record, before King revises and prints it as a chapter of his 1964 memoir Why We Can’t Wait. (Consequently there are differences in the various versions of Dr. King’s famous Letter.)

Dr. King wishes to call his wife, Coretta Scott King, but his request is denied; Coretta King, who has given birth just a few days earlier, subsequently contacts the Kennedy administration, which intervenes to get Birmingham officials to let him call home. Bail money becomes available, and Dr. King is released from jail on April 20.

(To learn more about “Letter from Birmingham Jail” visit Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.)

April 13: 

The clergymen letter appears in the Birmingham News. 

April 20:

Dr. King is released on bond from jail, and solitary confinement, after interventions by the Kennedy administration. But in the coming days, it becomes increasingly difficult to convince adult citizens to be jailed for demonstrating.

May 2-5:

The Children’s Crusade: SCLC organizer James Bevel had proposed using young children in demonstrations, and he recruited youngsters during the last week of April. So on May 2, the Children’s Crusade begins. (The decision to use children in the demonstrations is debated at length; Dr. King finally agrees after expressing misgivings.) More than 1,000 African-American students march into downtown Birmingham, and hundreds of them are arrested. Many of the children arrested are freed on May 3, only to be sent out again to protest and be re-arrested.

When hundreds more gather on May 3 and jails are becoming filled to capacity, Bull Connor directs local officials to use force to halt their demonstrations, causing images of children being blasted by fire hoses and attacked by police officers and dogs to appear on television and in newspapers around the world. Those tactics continue on May 4 and on May 5 (“Miracle Sunday”). The images, published in newspapers and magazines and carried on television, swing public opinion within Birmingham and across the nation.

That evening, Dr. King encourages the parents of these child protesters: “Don’t worry about your children, they’re going to be alright. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job for not only themselves, but for all of America and for all mankind.”

May 6:  

Attorney General Robert Kennedy has sent Burke Marshall, his chief civil rights assistant, to Birmingham to facilitate negotiations between the Senior Citizens Council (SCC, the city’s business leadership) and the black leaders. Fred Shuttlesworth is hospitalized after sustaining injuries from being hit with the full force of a fire hose: demonstrations nd marches are continuing. Civil rights activist Dick Gregory, having come in from Chicago to help, is among those jailed. Joan Baez has also arrived in order to encourage demonstrators, along with Guy Carawan; she offers a concert at Miles College on May 5.

May 8:

Dr. King tells the negotiators that he would accept an interim compromise that would grant some of the black leaders’ demands while halting the demonstrations and negotiating for other demands afterward. Shuttlesworth, not present at the negotiations, is furious at the perceived betrayal, feeling that King should not speak for the black population of Birmingham on his own. King announces the proposed compromise to the city anyway, though he indicates that demonstrations could potentially be resumed if the negotiations do not pan out well.

On the same day, President Kennedy uses a press conference to speak about developments in Birmingham.

May 10:  

Reverends Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and King join together to read the prepared statement outlining the settlement. Its details include removing “Whites Only” and “Negroes Only” signs in certain venues, a plan to desegregate lunch counters and all downtown stores, the release of jailed protestors, an ongoing program to upgrade Negro employment, and the formation of a biracial committee to monitor the implementation of the agreement. Protests are suspended and it feels like Victory. That night segregationists react violently: the Klan plans retaliatory strikes.

May 11:

The home of King’s brother, A. D. King, is bombed, and another bomb damages the Gaston Motel, a headquarters for the SCLC leadership. So President Kennedy orders 3,000 federal troops into position and prepares to nationalize the Alabama National Guard. KKK Imperial Wizard Robert “Bobby” Shelton addresses a Klan rally to resist integration.

May 20:

The Birmingham Board of Education announces plans to suspend or expel all students who took place in the recent protests and demonstrations. Meanwhile, Dick Gregory delivers a speech at St. John’s Baptist Church. Medgar Evers offers a televised address on civil rights in Jackson, Mississippi.

May 22:

The SCLC and NAACP take the Board of Education’s decision to the local federal district court. The judge initially upholds the Board of Education’s decision, only to have the decision reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that same day.

May 23:

The Alabama Supreme Court rules that Albert Boutwell’s election as mayor of Birmingham should stand, ousting Bull Connor. A few days later, Dr. King attends a celebratory rally in Los Angeles: his speech concludes with a recitation from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”–“Mine eyes have seen the glory!” (McWhorter 452)

May 28:

Wyatt Tee Walker offers “Reflections on Birmingham” in a presentation broadcast on KPFA in Los Angeles.

July:

Duke Ellington begins to perform his “King Fit the Battle of Alabam,” immortalizing the events of Birmingham between Connor and King.

August 5:

Johnny Mathis, James Baldwin, Ray Charles, and Nina Simone are among those who entertain at a free, peaceful, and integrated concert at Miles College in Birmingham.

September:

Negotiations in May and June desegregated most Birmingham institutions, but resistance continued. A Labor Day rally of Klansmen attracts George Wallace and Bull Connor as speakers; and several bombings are pulled off by Klansmen, especially because schools are opening around Labor Day under a judge’s desegregation order.

September 15:

Four children are killed when a bomb is set off in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. For an in-depth look at the bombing, see McWhorter’s Carry Me Home and Spike Lee’s documentary, “Four Little Girls.”

Bombings in Birmingham continued in the days after the one at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, as Klan resistance continued. Only years later would anyone be convicted of the murder of the children.

September 16:

At a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Men’s Business Club, Charles “Chuck” Morgan excoriates the white community for its complicity in the segregation policies that resulted in the deaths of the four little girls. “We did it” is his lament. He later publishes A Time to Speak about the incident and spends his career furthering social justice.

September 18: 

King delivers the eulogy at the joint funeral of three of the girls

October 14: 

King returns to Birmingham to demand that the city hire black police officers, and at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church he encourages citizens to demand change, no matter the cost (Garrow 302).