Birmingham Quotes
stop the civil rights movement
He had written this text on a newspaper when he was jailed in Birmingham for violating a court order not to demonstrate. A common tactic of the Southern segregationists was to have local segregationist judges issue injunctions against civil rights demonstrations on the grounds that they would promote violence. These were generally unconstitutional, but King and others were jailed until the legal appeal could even be heard.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
In 2013, Congress awarded its highest honor to the 4 young Black girls who were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement by the KKK who set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church. She was sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the murdered girls, who herself was blinded in one eye and scarred badly in the bombing, refused the medal on behalf of her dead sister. She resented the fact that it had taken all these years for Congress to make this gesture and then would not do anything that might cost money such as monetary restitution. When the Muslim terrorists murdered people in the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks she and her husband observed, Congress swiftly arranged for restitution payments to go to the relatives of the murdered victims and to those wounded. However to her and many other people, when white terrorists murder black victims no monetary restitution many comes forth—only a medal. Although she cleaned houses for a living, she has had to pay medical costs out of her own pocket—she had no insurance then and could not get it until Obamacare as it was a “previous condition”. She has never even been reimbursed for those out of picked medical costs caused by white terrorists whose motives many racists still approve of.
There was violence but ironically in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, it was not the civil rights leaders who were murdered but 4 little girls.
