FIRE HOSES AND POLICE DOGS

For Birmingham, Alabama, the early months of 1963 were a time of turmoil. Its 350,000-strong population was two-thirds white and a third black and it had earned itself a reputation as one of the United States’ most racially segregated cities. Indeed, this segregation affected, as a legal requirement, all public and commercial facilities, covering every aspect of everyday life and was rigidly policed. Barely ten per cent of the city’s blacks were registered to vote and their average income was less than half that of the whites. No black police officers, firefighters, bus drivers or shop assistants could be found anywhere in the city and manual labour in steel mills or work in black neighbourhoods were among the few available options. Racial violence was rife: since 1945, some 50 bombings had earned Birmingham the nickname ‘Bombingham’, one area even being dubbed ‘Dynamite Hill’.

Efforts to implement change, spearheaded by Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King, initially focused on challenging the city’s segregationist policies through partially-successful legal action and protests. These began with a selective buying campaign to impose pressure on business leaders to open retail jobs to blacks and end segregated facilities in stores; when this failed, King and his followers instituted sit-ins at libraries and white churches and marches to provoke arrest, even irresponsibly recruiting children to their campaign at one stage. The demonstrations were denounced by white religious leaders, who argued that their case should be pressed in the courts and not on the streets, and the infamous public safety commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor obtained an injunction to bar future protests. The injunction was ignored as a denial of constitutional rights but on Good Friday, 12 April 1963, King was among 50 Birmingham residents, aged between 15 and 81, who were arrested. King’s four-day incarceration in ‘Birmingham Jail’ inevitably focused the eyes of the nation on the city. The Children’s Crusade, although it attracted criticism from Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy, served to maintain this focus.

By the first week of May, Birmingham’s jails were overflowing and Connor’s efforts to keep protestors out of the downtown business area had degenerated into

using high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs. Witnessing the traumatic events was photographer Charles Moore, then working for Life magazine, who was hit by a brick meant for the police and one of whose “era-defining” images showed three teenagers being hit by a water jet powerful enough to rip bark off a tree. When published, it was labelled ‘They Fight A Fire That Won’t Go Out’. Television cameras broadcast harrowing pictures of unprotected protestors being attacked by police dogs. A photograph of student Walter Gadsden being charged by one of the dogs ended up on the front page of the New York Times, which President Kennedy called ‘‘sick’’ and the scenes in Birmingham ‘‘shameful’’. Moore would later reflect that the events of those violent days were ‘‘likely to obliterate in the national psyche any notion of a ‘good Southerner’’’.

The tactics employed by King in Birmingham certainly focused the entire nation on the troubles. New York Senator Jacob Javits declared that America would refuse to tolerate such scenes, pressing Congress to pass a civil rights bill, while Oregon Senator Wayne Morse compared the situation to South Africa’s loathsome apartheid regime. President Kennedy sent Assistant Attorney-General Burke Marshall to Birmingham to negotiate a truce. As the crisis deepened and the city’s infrastructure virtually collapsed, it aroused international debate and condemnation. The Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its news broadcasts to the demonstrations, accusing Kennedy’s administration of neglect and “inactivity”.

By 8 May, white business leaders had agreed to most of the protesters’ demands and two days later Shuttlesworth and King told journalists that they had received an agreement from the City of Birmingham to desegregate lunch counters, restrooms, drinking fountains and fitting rooms within three months and to hire black workers as salesmen and clerks. President Kennedy urged a number of workers’ unions to raise bail money to free the demonstrators from the city’s jail – a move condemned by Connor and Birmingham’s outgoing mayor, Art Hanes – and 3,000 federal troops were deployed to restore order. A new mayor, Albert Boutwell, took office and Bull Connor ended his time as Commissioner.

Desegregation took longer to achieve. Indeed, at around the same time, bombs destroyed the hotel where King had stayed and damaged the house of his brother, Reverend A. D. King. Many observers felt that the protestors had settled for ‘‘a lot less than even moderate demands’’; it was feared that the three-month desegregation agreement meant, in effect, that a single black clerk hired by mid-August would suffice. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1963, some lunch counters in department stores had complied with the new rules, while parks and golf courses opened to blacks and whites and Mayor Boutwell established a committee to discuss additional changes. At the same time, however, no black policemen, firefighters or clerks were hired and no black lawyers were admitted to the city’s bar.

The reputation of King, though, had soared. Later that year, he would deliver his famous ‘‘I have a dream’’ speech in Washington, DC, and receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Longer-term consequences of the ‘Birmingham Campaign’ and other protests included the drawing up a Civil Rights bill by President Kennedy to prohibit racial discrimination in employment and access to public places, eventually passed into law and signed by his successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy’s civil rights drive extended, indirectly, to the space programme, too. By mid-1963, NASA had two groups of astronauts in training – a new nine-man team having been picked under Deke Slayton’s auspices the previous September – and a third was expected before the year’s end. Bobby Kennedy, in particular, felt that a black pilot should be a member of Group Three. Unfortunately, wrote Slayton, “the Navy didn’t have anyone remotely qualified, but in the Air Force there was a black bomber pilot, Captain Edward Dwight’’. With a multi-engine flying background, no engineering degree and no test piloting credentials, Dwight was underqualified, but, in what Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) commandant Chuck Yeager felt was a case of ‘reverse racism’, the Attorney-General pressurised Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to accept the black pilot.

A deal was struck, whereby Dwight was admitted to ARPS, on condition that better-qualified white pilots ahead of him were also accepted. In a laughable chain of events, which even obliged Yeager to appoint a tutor for the pilot, Dwight graduated from ARPS ‘‘and did okay’’, Slayton wrote, ‘‘but okay wasn’t really enough: had he been white, he wouldn’t even have been a serious candidate’’. NASA was not simply looking for test pilots, but for Navy, Marine and other Air Force fliers, together with civilians and research scientists, many of whom had far better qualifications than Dwight. Some of those candidates – including the Air Force’s Mike Collins and the Navy’s Dick Gordon – were actually among the best pilots in their respective services and had been passed over in the September 1962 astronaut intake to gain additional experience before being picked the following year.

‘‘As I heard it,’’ wrote Slayton, ‘‘Dwight himself wasn’t particularly driven to become an astronaut: he wanted to move up in the Air Force.’’ Dwight himself, it seemed, was being used as little more than a pawn in the Kennedys’ civil rights crusade; a crusade which would win them both enemies and admirers in the coming years.