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Is this the flaw? Or its feature?
I’m at the point in the book I’m writing on the Birmingham Campaign where everything goes to shit. The Civil Rights leaders had planned, endlessly, for how to stage protests in Birmingham in 1963. One of King’s deputies, Wyatt Walker, knew how man stools, tables and chairs were in every department store where they might stage sit-ins. Walker had even timed, and to the second, how long it took an old man to walk from a Black church to Birmingham’s downtown, and how long it took a child to walk the same distance.
None of that mattered. Once King and the rest got to Birmingham? The Black churches abandoned them, as did the city’s Black leaders and the hundreds of people who had promised and sometimes signed their names to documents pledging they would march. No march, no sit-in worked. The press ridiculed King. So did other Civil Rights groups. So did members of King’s own organization, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “We allowed our problems to dictate our decisions,” Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend, said about the early days of the Birmingham Campaign. “We saw difficulties and complications everywhere and as the work of the Devil.”
It seemed there was no way to succeed, and if they failed in Birmingham nothing less than civl rights itself…
