The New York Draft Riots of 1863: Shame of the Fighting Irish

From the Irish Times, "Shame of the fighting Irish: The New York riots against Lincoln’s draft in 1863 revealed a deep racism in Irish emigrants," by Keith Duggan, on 6 July 2013 -- Whenever Peter Quinn finds himself walking where Fifth Avenue intersects 43rd and 44th Streets, he thinks of the flames shooting through the windows of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Of all the atrocities carried out by the Irish crowds during the draft riots in 1863, the burning of the orphanage ought to have been an unspeakable low. Whether by some momentary restraint or pure luck, 233 terrified children were rescued.

There was one fatality, when a desk flung from an upper window struck a bystander on the street. That was at 4pm on July 13th, the beginning of five days of hallucinatory violence.

The cause of the fury was the first draft lottery, issued by Abraham Lincoln, calling for 300,000 men to help the Union war effort. An exemption cost $300 at a time when the average working wage was $1 per day.

Process of Drafting in the 6th District from the Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1863 (The Gilder Lehrman Collection, New York)

On July 11th, at Third Avenue and 46th Street, 1,236 names were drawn for the draft, most of whom belonged to the Irish working class. By dawn on July 13th, many thousands had gathered to protest at the system. Irish immigrants feared a Union victory would see a proliferation in black labour, and a blind hatred towards the black community led to a series of barbaric attacks.

They attacked the draft offices, the homes of the wealthy and the offices of the Herald Tribune and New York Times. One man was hanged, another beaten to death. A crippled black coachman was hanged from a lamppost, and the crowds shouted the name of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate South. A white prostitute was attacked because she had black customers.

“The Irish were seen as a problem from the moment they began arriving. You had one million people arriving here in the decade after 1845,” says Quinn, who has written fiction and non-fiction about what he terms as “the most violent episode in the history of New York until 9/11”.

“Many were living in really shocking conditions. The public institutions, the prisons and hospitals for the mentally ill, were full of Irish. They were considered violent and filthy by New York society.”

It was as if the Irish rioters had decided that if they were to be considered contemptible by the New York ruling class, they might as well behave as such. If there was logic in some of the targets – the newspapers because of their virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Irish attitudes, the rich because of the draft exemptions – the targeting of the Afro-American community was inexplicable.

Thousands, including women and children, gathered outside the orphanage to watch it burn.

It took the returning 65th and 7th cavalries, exhausted after the extremes of Gettysburg, to quieten the protesters with brutal efficiency.

One hundred and fifty years later, Gettysburg will this weekend be remembered and revered as a pivotal event in American history; not just a battle but the axis of its future. No plaque commemorates the victims of the New York draft riots. (source: The Irish Times)

New York Draft Riot Looting of the Colored Orphan Asylum

Looting of the Colored Orphan Asylum during the draft riots, on July 13-16, 1863 (source: The New York Illustrated News. August 1, 1863.)

Founded in 1859, the New York Illustrated News lasted only until 1864. But during that time it chronicled some of the most significant events of the era, from John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and subsequent trial to the draft riots. This engraving depicts a crowd of rioters carrying furniture and toys from the burning Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street during the afternoon of Monday, July 13, 1863. While portraying the rioters with harshly caricatured, animal-like features, the illustration also suggests that rioters looted items that were far beyond the meager means of poor New Yorkers. (source: http://www.vny.cuny.edu/Search/search_res_imagef843.html)

Mississippi's Medgar Evers

Medgar Wiley Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963)

From the History Channel, "7 Things You Should Know About Medgar Evers," by Barbara Maranzani, on 11 June 2013  --  Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, NAACP field secretary and civil rights leader Medgar Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home at the age of 37. His murder, which came just hours after President John F. Kennedy’s famed civil rights address, shocked a nation, and has inspired dozens of songs, poems, books and films in the 50 years since. As we honor his life and legacy, here are seven things you should know about Medgar Evers.

1. Evers was a World War II veteran who participated in the Normandy invasion.

Born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, Medgar Evers was the third of five children born to farmer and sawmill worker James Evers and his wife Jesse. Evers left high school at the age of 17 to enlist in the still-segregated U.S. Army, eventually rising to the rank of sergeant. In June 1944, Evers’ unit was part of the massive, post D-Day invasion of Europe, and he served in both France and Germany until his honorable discharge in 1946. Due to his wartime service, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors following his death in 1963.

2. He was the NAACP’s first field secretary in the South.

Returning to Mississippi after the war, Evers attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) on the G.I. Bill, earning honors as one of the most successful students in the nation. After moving to nearby Mound Bayou, Evers worked as an insurance agent and began attending meetings of a local civil rights organization, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). In 1954, the same year the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools, Evers became one of the first blacks to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. When Evers’ application was denied on a technicality (the school claimed that he had failed to include the required letters of recommendations), Evers approached the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for help. NAACP Mississippi State Conference leader E.J. Stringer was so taken with Evers’ poise and determination that he instead offered him a position as the organization’s first field secretary in the state. Evers accepted, and by December 1954 he had opened an office in Jackson where within three years he had nearly doubled NAACP membership in Mississippi to more than 15,000.

3. One of Evers’ first assignments was investigating the murder of Emmett Till.

In August 1955, the Chicago-born Till (just 14 years old and visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi) was kidnapped by a group of white men after reportedly flirting with the wife of a local shopkeeper. Three days later, Till’s beaten and disfigured body was found in a nearby river; he had been shot in the head, and weighted down with a metal fan in an attempt to hide his body. In Chicago, Mamie Till Bradley’s insistence on a well-publicized, open-casket funeral for her son brought the plight of African Americans in the South to newspapers across the country. In Mississippi, the NAACP, fearful that the highly segregated sheriff’s office wouldn’t mount much of an effort to catch Till’s white murderers, launched their own investigation. Medgar Evers and two other field workers, Ruby Hurley and Amzie Moore, tracked down potential witnesses to the events leading up to and including Till’s abduction. They convinced several people to come forward, keeping them in protective custody when they testified at the 1955 trial of two men accused of killing Till, and then shepherding them out of town in secrecy when the all-white jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” after deliberating for just an hour.

4. Evers helped integrate Ole Miss.

Seven years after Medgar Evers own failed attempt at gaining admittance to the University of Mississippi, he was instrumental in finally desegregating the school through his work with James Meredith. Meredith, who like Evers had approached the NAACP for help after being denied admission, had taken his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 1962. That September, Meredith, accompanied by Evers, other NAACP members and a protective phalanx of U.S. marshals and federal troops, tried to register for classes, setting off a riot among the mob gathered to prevent him from matriculating. In response, President John F. Kennedy sent in more than 30,000 National Guardsmen, and two people were killed in the melee, but Meredith was successfully admitted and graduated the following year (having previously earned credits at another school). Evers’ involvement in the integration of Ole Miss gained nationwide attention, and garnered him the enmity of local white segregationists.

5. Evers was shot just hours after President Kennedy had delivered a landmark speech on civil rights.

By the summer of 1963, Evers had spent nearly nine years organizing voter registration drives and leading boycotts of segregated Mississippi businesses. His efforts had been met with more than hostility: Weeks before his death a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through a window in his home, and he’d been injured when a car tried to run him down outside his NAACP office. But Jackson, Mississippi, wasn’t the only American city caught up in the civil rights struggle. The violent response to protests in Birmingham, Alabama, which included the turning of fire hoses on thousands of schoolchildren, followed by the refusal of Alabama Governor George Wallace to admit African-American students to the University of Alabama, put increased pressure on President Kennedy to act. On June 11, Kennedy took to the airwaves, delivering an address from the Oval Office calling for Congressional action in the area of civil rights, defining the cause—for the first time—as a moral, and not purely legal, issue. Millions of Americans were glued to their sets, including Medgar Evers wife Myrlie and two of his three children. Evers was at an organizational meeting at a local church and returned home shortly after midnight, less than four hours after Kennedy’s address. As he walked to his door he was shot once in the back, dying less than an hour later. Kennedy himself would be killed just five months later, but the reforms he had laid out his speech that night would become the most sweeping social justice legislation in American history as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

6. It took 31 years to bring Evers’ assassin to justice.

Following Evers’ death, demonstration broke out in Jackson, followed by a larger riot during his funeral procession, when police violently clashed with a crowd of more than 5,000 mourners. Just two weeks after the assassination, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the local White Citizen’s Council, was arrested for Evers’ murder. The following year, all-white juries twice failed to convict De La Beckwith, stating they were deadlocked. De La Beckwith, who reportedly bragged about his role in the murder and even unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi, remained free until the 1990s when, based on new evidence gathered by Myrlie Evers-Williams and others, the case was reopened. In February 1994, De La Beckwith was finally convicted, this time by a racially mixed jury, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2001 at the age of 90. The decades-long effort to bring De La Beckwith to justice was dramatized in the 1996 film “Ghosts of Mississippi.”

7. Medgar Evers’ widow has carried on his legacy.

Myrlie Evers-Williams (she remarried after Medgar’s death) had worked alongside her husband at the NAACP and has continued her civil rights work to the present day. After two unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Congress, the California-based Evers-Williams was elected chairperson of the NACCP shortly after Byron De La Beckwith’s conviction, successfully overhauling the century old organization’s finances. Once named Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year, Evers-Williams is the founder of the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi, and in January 2013, nearly 50 years after her husband’s murder, she delivered the invocation at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.  (source: History Channel)

Black New York and the Draft Riots

From the New York Times Opinionator , "Black New York and the Draft Riots ," by Kevin McGruder, on 26 July 2013  --  Reflecting on New York City’s tumultuous summer of 1863, the Rev. Charles Bennett Ray, pastor of Bethesda Congregational Church on Sullivan Street in Manhattan, noted later that year:

But when we had concluded our work with the Relief Committee, our missionary work with these still suffering people was not done; with some of them it had just begun. Their claims for household goods were still unpaid, and they were destitute of everything needful for use and comfort. None know, excepting those who have witnessed it, the extent of the suffering among them.

The “suffering people” were African-Americans affected by the New York City Draft Riots, which occurred over four days in July of 1863 and dominated the lives of black New Yorkers during the rest of that summer. In the aftermath, Ray, the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and other black clergymen dispensed aid to those in need and collaborated with local newspapers to convey to white and black New Yorkers a desire to move forward living in an atmosphere of fairness.

A broad range of issues, some decades in the making, related to slavery, abolition, social class, politics, ethnicity, race, labor and capital inspired the riots that summer of 1863. As a city of commerce, many New York merchants had strong financial ties with the southern planter class against whom the Civil War, begun in 1861, was being waged. As a Northern bastion of the Democratic Party, many New York Democrats opposed the Civil War and sympathized with their fellow Democrats in the South. But New York was also a center of abolitionism, with the city’s presses producing thousands of antislavery tracts, and its churches and other meeting houses for decades served as gathering places for meetings denouncing slavery. By the 1860s New York had also become a base of the new antislavery Republican Party.

The spark for the New York City Draft Riots was the federal Conscription Act, the nation’s first draft, passed by Congress in March 1863. Two years into the Civil War, with desertions, tens of thousands of battlefield deaths and an equal number of deaths from disease, more troops were needed for the Union Army than were being supplied by volunteers. The conscription law targeted men between the ages of 20 and 35, and all unmarried white men up to the age of 45 for military service. The provision that enabled draftees to be released from service by paying $300 (a year’s wages for some) to a replacement ensured that the draft would target lower-income men. Many white working men in New York took this fact as proof of the rumors that, once they were drafted, their jobs would be taken by black men.

The draft selection began routinely on Saturday, July 11, and was scheduled to continue on Monday morning. But hundreds of white working men mobbed the draft office at Third Avenue and 47th Street and destroyed the office. Over the next four days, groups of men (and some women) moved about the city, looting stores and burning warehouses and the homes of African-Americans, white abolitionists and any businesses that were thought to be sympathetic to blacks. Any black person caught in the mob’s path was clubbed, stabbed, hanged or burned, and in some cases a combination of all four. Many of the male victims were sexually mutilated, and their toes or fingers cut off for trophies. New York’s recently elected Republican mayor, George Opdyke, issued a proclamation declaring New York City to be “in a state of insurrection.”

The police as well as militia units based in Manhattan scrambled to thwart rioters. By Thursday, the fourth day of the rioting, the first of several Union Army regiments arrived in New York from the South. By Saturday, 10 regiments were in the city, sent north under orders from the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Although the peak of the violence had passed, the city was still unsafe. A comprehensive survey of the damage began. Estimates of white and black people killed in the four days of rioting ranged from 74 to 1,200. Property valued at $5 million was destroyed, and it was estimated that 3,000 black residents (out of a black population of 12,000, and total city population of 800,000) had no place to live. For black New Yorkers, the riots shattered any sense of stability that they may have had.

New York’s white civic leaders moved quickly into action to organize relief efforts, under the auspices of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots. The Relief Committee hired a general agent, Vincent Colyer, and an office was opened on Fourth Street. Notices were placed in newspapers notifying victims of the process for obtaining assistance.

A panel of African-American ministers, including Ray and Garnet, pastor of the African-American congregation at Shiloh Presbyterian Church, located at Prince and Marion Streets, were appointed by the committee to make home visits to those seeking aid and to determine the truthfulness of their requests. They were good choices: a former editor of The Colored American newspaper, Ray had a reputation that extended beyond New York City, as did Garnet. His 1843 “Address to the Slaves,” a call to resistance which he made at the National Convention of Colored Men in Buffalo, brought him to the attention of leaders in the black community across the country.

The clergy reached out to the black community through home visits as well as newspaper announcements. In the July 21 edition of Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, Garnet offered a message of thanks under the heading “The Colored People of New York to Their Friends.” Indicating that the message was offered at the “request of many of the colored citizens of New York” to the “portion of the city press which counseled observance of the law,” to the police officers who provided protection, to the “ladies and gentlemen who sheltered our wives and little children,” and to ministers of every denomination, it noted that “we wish our persecutors no harm.”

This message seems to have been more than a simple note of gratitude. While its tone was consistent with the Christian ethos of forgiveness, Garnet’s reference to “the portion of the city press” that encouraged lawfulness alludes to the common belief, prominent at the time in the black community and elsewhere, that some elements of the press had incited the rioters. A critical purpose of the message could also have been to reassure white New Yorkers that black New Yorkers would not seek revenge leading to a cycle of violence.

Garnet’s same message appeared in the July 25 edition of the New York weekly The Anglo-African. The editor, Robert Hamilton, and his brother Thomas had established The Anglo-African in New York City in 1859 with the motto on its masthead announcing that “Man must be free, if not through the law, then above the law.” Since that paper’s readership was predominantly black, the purpose of reprinting the message of thanks to the white community in that paper could have been to inform the black community that there were white New Yorkers who had assisted some blacks in the midst of the riots, even if that had not been the personal experience of the readers, and to send the signal to black residents that seeking revenge would not benefit the black community.

The Merchant’s Committee ultimately raised over $40,000 from individuals and groups, including Sunday school classes and church congregations of all denominations within the city and from other parts of the country, and assisted over 12,000 people. The Committee formally completed its work with a meeting on Aug. 22, at which the black clergymen provided the committee with a proclamation of thanks for their assistance that included the following request:

If in your temporary labors of Christian philanthropy, you have been induced to look forward to our future destiny in this our native land, and to ask what is the best thing we can do for the colored people? This is our answer. Protect us in our endeavors to obtain an honest living. Suffer no one to hinder us in any department of well directed industry, give us a fair and open field and lets us work out our own destiny, and we ask no more.

Nevertheless, the black population of New York City declined dramatically after the draft riots. In the census of 1860, New York’s black population was 12,414; by 1865 it was estimated at 9,945. While other Northern cities, including Boston and Detroit, experienced racial violence sparked by the inception of the draft, no response was as virulent as New York City’s four days of rioting. The draft, suspended due to the riots, resumed on August 19, and with the military presence in the city continuing, it proceeded in an orderly fashion. But as suggested in Ray’s report to the American Missionary Association, the deep effects of the draft riots would require a much longer period to be overcome.  (source: The New York Times; Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company)

New York City Civil War Draft Riots of 1863

Draft wheel (ca. 1863) -- Civil War draft wheel; cylindrical drum with a rectangular, lockable hatch and an iron and wood handle, set on trestle frame with bracket feet and a turned stretcher; brass plaque on side; with 100+ cards with names of draft-eligible men. (source: New-York Historical Society)

From the  University of Chicago Press. "The New York City Draft Riots of 1863; An excerpt from

In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863," by Leslie M. Harris  -- In September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect January 1, 1863, and free slaves in those states or regions still in rebellion against the Union. If any southern state returned to the Union between September and January, whites in that state theoretically would not lose ownership of their slaves. Despite its limits, free blacks, slaves, and abolitionists across the country hailed it as one of the most important actions on behalf of freedom in the nation's history. The Emancipation Proclamation brought formal recognition that the war was being fought, at least in part, on behalf of black freedom and equality.

The enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 capped two years of increasing support for emancipation in New York City. Although Republicans attempted to keep abolitionists from taking a leading role in New York's antislavery politics during the early years of the war, by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York's white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern blacks would supposedly flee north. To these New Yorkers, the Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears. In March 1863, fuel was added to the fire in the form of a stricter federal draft law. All male citizens between twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five years of age were subject to military duty. The federal government entered all eligible men into a lottery. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Blacks, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft.

In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began.

The rioters' targets initially included only military and governmental buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. Mobs attacked only those individuals who interfered with their actions. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters had turned to attacks on black people, and on things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility. At 4 P.M. on July 13, "the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution." The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes.

In the meantime, the superintendent and matron of the asylum assembled the children and led them out toForty-Fourth Street. Miraculously, the mob refrained from assaulting the children. But when an Irish observer of the scene called out, "If there is a man among you, with a heart within him come and help these poor children," the mob "laid hold of him, and appeared ready to tear him to pieces." The children made their way to the Thirty-Fifth Street Police Station, where they remained for three days and nights before moving to the almshouse on Blackwell's Island—ironically, the very place from which the orphanage's founders had hoped to keep black children when they built the asylum almost thirty years earlier.

The Irish man who castigated the mob for not helping the black children was not the only white person punished by rioters for seeming overly sympathetic to blacks. Throughout the week of riots, mobs harassed and sometimes killed blacks and their supporters and destroyed their property. Rioters burned the home of Abby Hopper Gibbons, prison reformer and daughter of abolitionist Isaac Hopper. They also attacked white "amalgamationists," such as Ann Derrickson and Ann Martin, two women who were married to black men; and Mary Burke, a white prostitute who catered to black men. Near the docks, tensions that had been brewing since the mid-1850s between white longshoremen and black workers boiled over. As recently as March of 1863, white employers had hired blacks as longshoremen, with whom Irish men refused to work. An Irish mob then attacked two hundred blacks who were working on the docks, while other rioters went into the streets in search of "all the negro porters, cartmen and laborers . . . they could find." They were routed by the police. But in July 1863, white longshoremen took advantage of the chaos of the Draft Riots to attempt to remove all evidence of a black and interracial social life from area near the docks. White dockworkers attacked and destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses, and tenements that catered to blacks; mobs stripped the clothing off the white owners of these businesses.

Black men and black women were attacked, but the rioters singled out the men for special violence. On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men's bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams—jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones—while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging "vengeance on every nigger in New York." A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin's body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.

With these actions white workers enacted their desires to eradicate the working-class black male presence from the city. The Longshoreman's Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that "the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry." But "other parts of industry," such as cartmen and hack drivers, not to mention skilled artisans, also sought to exclude black workers. The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove blacks not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and leisure spaces. The rioters' actions also indicate the degree to which the sensational journalists and reformers of the 1840s and 1850s had achieved their goals of convincing whites, and particularly the Irish, that interracial socializing and marriage were evil and degrading practices. The riots unequivocally divided white workers from blacks. The act of rioting may itself have released guilt and shame over former interracial pleasures. Finally, and most simply, white workers asserted their superiority over blacks through the riots. The Civil War and the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln to power indicated to New York's largely Democratic white workers a reversal of power in the nation; black labor competition indicated a reversal of fortunes in New York City itself. White workers sought to remedy their upside-down world through mob violence.

Ironically, the most well known center of black and interracial social life, the Five Points, was relatively quiet during the riots. Mobs neither attacked the brothels there nor killed black people within its borders. There were also instances of interracial cooperation. When a mob threatened black drugstore owner Philip White in his store at the corner of Gold and Frankfurt Street, his Irish neighbors drove the mob away, for he had often extended them credit. And when rioters invaded Hart's Alley and became trapped at its dead end, the black and white residents of the alley together leaned out of their windows and poured hot starch on them, driving them from the neighborhood. But such incidents were few compared to the widespread hatred of blacks expressed during and after the riots.

In all, rioters lynched eleven black men over the five days of mayhem. The riots forced hundreds of blacks out of the city. As Iver Bernstein states, "For months after the riots the public life of the city became a more noticeably white domain." During the riots, landlords drove blacks from their residences, fearing the destruction of their property. After the riots, when the Colored Orphan Asylum attempted to rebuild on the site of its old building, neighboring property owners asked them to leave. The orphanage relocated to 51st Street for four years before moving into a new residence at 143rd Street between Amsterdam and Broadway, in the midst of what would become New York's predominantly black neighborhood in the twentieth century, Harlem. But in 1867, the area was barely settled and far removed from the center of New York City. Black families also fled the city altogether. Albro Lyons, keeper of the Colored Sailors' Home, was able to protect the boardinghouse on the first day of the riots, but soon fled to the neighborhood police station to seek an escort from the city for his wife and family. An officer accompanied the Lyons family to the Sailors' Home, where they gathered up what belongings they could carry before boarding the Roosevelt Street ferry, which took them to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. "From the moment they put foot on the boat, that was the last time they ever resided in New York City, leaving it forever." Other blacks fled to New Jersey and beyond. By 1865, the black population had plummeted to just under ten thousand, its lowest since 1820.

Those blacks who remained in the city found a somewhat chastened elite eager to help New York's black residents recover in the aftermath of the riots. The seven-month-old Union League Club (which had as one of its main tenets black uplift) and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People spearheaded relief efforts to blacks, providing forty thousand dollars to almost twenty-five hundred riot victims and finding new jobs and homes for blacks. Just under a year later, Republican elites and New York City blacks publicly celebrated their renewed alliance. In December of 1863, the secretary of war gave the Union League Club permission to raise a black regiment. The Union League Club decided to march the regiment of over one thousand black men through the streets of New York to the Hudson River, where the ship that would take them south waited. On March 5, 1864, before a crowd of one hundred thousand black and white New Yorkers, the black regiment processed, making "a fine appearance in their blue uniform, white gloves and white leggings." They were preceded by the police superintendent, one hundred policemen, the Union League Club itself, "colored friends of the recruits," and a band. In a powerful display, the parade publicly linked blacks with the leaders of the new order being ushered in by the Civil War.

But the event could not completely erase the racial concerns that had been part of the draft riots, if indeed its organizers sought to. One account said of the soldiers, "a majority of them are black; indeed there are but few mulattoes among them," an attempt to downplay the obvious fears of racial mixing that white workers displayed before and during the riots, fears which many white elites may have shared. Observers also used the event to contrast the loyalty of blacks to the Union and their good behavior with the recent rioting as well as the general culture of white workers: "The 20th is emphatically an African regiment, and to its credit be it spoken, not one of its members disobeyed orders, no one broke ranks to greet enthusiastic friends, no one used intoxicating drinks to excess, no one manifested the least inclination to leave the service, and their marching was very creditable." The New York elite presented the black troops as symbols of the new orderly working class they desired: sober, solemn, obedient, and dedicated to the Union cause. But such simple symbolism obscured the complex divisions of status, class, outlook and aspiration that had been part of New York's free black community from its inception.

As the Union Army marched south, it brought with it black and white abolitionists (many affiliated with the American Missionary Assocition, others independent of organized efforts) who sought to reform southern blacks during and after the war. These largely middle-class activists carried ideas of racial uplift first promulgated in the northeast, from creating manual labor schools to moral reform to enhancing wage labor. They encountered newly free blacks eager for educational and economic betterment, but just as certainly shaping their own definitions of independence and equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction years, black and white people from urban and rural areas in the north and south were challenged to create new opportunities for the freed people. But New York City had never unified to overcome the problems of racism and fully embrace black freedom; neither would the nation.

[Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 279-288 of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 by Leslie M. Harris, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2003 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.]

1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike

"I Am a Man"

From the book, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Gerald Posner -- "I Am A Man." Those were the simple words on the signs carried by many of more than 1,300 striking Memphis sanitation workers--nearly all black--during the spring of 1968. Trouble had been brewing for years. Among the lowest paid of city employees, with no medical insurance, workers' compensation, or overtime pay, the sanitation workers had unsuccessfully tried twice before to get the city to recognize their union. The slide toward a strike had begun on February 1, 1968, when two workers seeking shelter during a torrential rainstorm hid inside the rear of a garbage truck. They were crushed to death when a switch was accidentally thrown. The city refused to compensate the victims' families, and other workers were infuriated. That tragedy was compounded a few days later when, in the midst of another storm, twenty-two black sewer workers were sent home without pay. The white supervisors who had ordered them home went to work after the weather cleared and were paid for a full day. Following a formal protest, the black employees received only two hours' pay. That prompted a work stoppage on Lincoln's birthday, Monday, February 12. The demands were straightforward: All garbage and sewer workers wanted a new contract that guaranteed a fifty-cent-an-hour increase and the right to have their union dues deducted directly from their paychecks.

The strike would have had a different history if Memphis had not had Henry Loeb III as mayor. The forty-five-year-old Loeb, who was six-five with a booming voice, had been elected only five weeks earlier. He was an heir to one of the city's wealthiest Jewish families, and had converted to Episcopalianism just after being sworn in. An opinionated and stubborn man, Loeb, while not a racist, had a plantation view of blacks--he would see they were taken care of since he knew what was best for them. That attitude ensured that in the recent election, forty-nine of every fifty blacks voted against him.

Now threatened with the sanitation strike, Loeb adopted a hard position. Since a strike of municipal workers was illegal, he refused to negotiate unless they returned to work, and in no case would he allow a paycheck deduction to the union, since that meant he would be the first major Southern mayor to recognize a black municipal union.

The day after the sanitation workers walked off their jobs, officials of the national union began arriving to lend their support. Loeb announced midweek that if workers did not return to work the following day, he would fire them. On Thursday, only four days after the walkout started, Loeb began hiring scabs, and with a police escort they made limited attempts at picking up garbage.

The racial overtones were evident from the start. The bulk of workers were black, and most white Memphians had little sympathy for their cause. Initially, the only support came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and local black pastors, led by James M. Lawson. Many of the strikers were members of Lawson's Centenary Methodist Church. Lawson himself was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., having met him shortly after the successful 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. Thirty-nine years old, he had served three years as a missionary in India, where he became a follower of Ghandi's principles of nonviolence, and had spent thirteen months in prison for refusing to fight in the Korean War. Lawson, together with the Reverend H. Ralph Jackson, called for a meeting between Loeb and the Memphis Ministers Association. Loeb refused to talk to them.

On Friday, February 23, more than a thousand strikers and supporters crammed a meeting of the city council's Public Works Committee. The rumor was that the committee had decided to recognize the union and approve the paycheck deduction, but, once the meeting started, the city council dodged the issue and threw the strike, as an "administrative matter," back to Loeb. The reaction was swift and furious, with strike leaders calling for an impromptu march down Main Street to Mason Temple, strike headquarters. It was the first defiant black march in Memphis history. The police shoved the men to the right side of the street, four abreast. After several blocks trouble started. A police car came too close to the crowd and ran over a woman's foot. In a moment, young black men were rocking the squad car. Riot police, clad in blue helmets and gas masks, then swarmed into the crowds, indiscriminately macing and clubbing protestors.

The violent police reaction converted the strike from the single issue of better conditions for the sanitation workers into a symbolic racial battle for better treatment of the city's black community. "It showed many people," recalled Lawson, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we were in a real struggle." That night, strike leaders met and elected a strategy committee, Community On the Move for Equality (COME). Lawson was chairman, Jackson vice chairman, and Jesse Epps, an international union representative, an adviser. The next day, COME presented a five-point program to all 150 of the city's black ministers and their congregations. The program included fundraising campaigns and rallies in churches, a boycott of all downtown businesses as well as companies with the Loeb name, and two daily marches through downtown Memphis, the first for strikers, families, and supporters, and the second for students.

When the police had attacked and maced the Memphis demonstrators, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Miami, at a ministers' retreat sponsored by the Ford Foundation. One of those attending was the Reverend Samuel "Billy" Kyles, a tall, thin, charismatic pastor of Memphis's Monumental Baptist Church. Kyles, in his early thirties, was a prominent Memphis pastor who, together with Lawson and Jackson, helped form public opinion in much of the city's black community.

"The Miami police begged Martin not to leave the hotel because there were so many threats against him," recalls Kyles. "So we stayed inside. And we got around to talking about the threats. `You just kind of live with it,' he said. `I don't walk around every day scared, but I was really scared twice.' Once was when the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi. At a church rally there, Ralph [Abernathy] and Martin were praying, and Martin said, `Oh Lord, the killers of these boys may be hearing us right now.' And a big sheriff who was standing there to guard Martin said, `Damn right!' The second time was when he had marched in Cicero, Illinois, back in 1966. He had never encountered that type of hatred, even in the South. People lined the streets hurling insults and threats at him. And when he walked along a street with trees, he said, `From those trees, I expected any moment to get shot.'"

When Kyles called home, he learned about the police attack on the demonstrators. His own seven-year-old daughter was among those maced. Later that day, "I mentioned it off-handedly to Martin, that they had a march in Memphis and had been attacked. Maybe you have to come down and help us out. `I may do that,' he said."

By coincidence, a few days after Kyles had spoken to King, Lawson proposed that prominent national figures be invited weekly to rally the strikers and their supporters. Memphis newspapers and television had given the strike minimum coverage. Lawson hoped to force their hand by transforming the strike into a national issue. Among those considered was Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, Bayard Rustin of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and Dr. King. Wilkins and Rustin, the first approached, agreed to speak in Memphis on March 14. When King was invited, he was hesitant, saying that his doctors had recently told him to get more rest. "All of his staff was against Martin coming," recalls Kyles. "He was way behind schedule for the preparation for the [Poor People's] march on Washington [scheduled for April 22]."

Most of King's energies were going toward the Poor People's Campaign. His announcement the previous November that he wanted "waves of the nation's poor and disinherited" to descend on Washington, D.C., and stay there until the government responded with reforms had already caused many whites to fear that the summer would be racked by major civil disturbances.

However, the sanitation strike seemed a clear-cut issue of right or wrong, and King and his staff relented, finally shifting a March 18 meeting of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive committee from Jackson, Mississippi, to Memphis."

The strike, meanwhile, remained at a standstill. On Monday, March 18, King arrived shortly after 7:00 P.M. Lawson and Epps picked him up at the airport. He was tired, but the sight of a packed auditorium--15,000 people at Mason Temple--revitalized him. There were people standing in the rafters, in the back, and on the sides. "You fellows must really have something going on here," he told Lawson." A huge white banner--NOT BY MIGHT, NOT BY POWER, SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, BUT BY MY SPIRIT--was draped behind the podium. King, a rousing orator who was best before large crowds, was in rare form that night. Time and again, he had the crowd on its feet. By the end of his talk, the three shiny garbage cans on the stage near him had over $5,000 in contributions for the strikers.

"Martin, we are having daily marches," Lawson said to King on the podium. "Why don't you come back and lead a big march? You see how they receive you. It would be terrific!"

Lawson had approached King at the right moment. Reveling in the excitement of the tumultuous reception he had just received, King checked with two of his closest advisers, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, both of whom agreed it was worth returning. "He said it was like the old days," says Kyles. "It really energized him." King pulled out his appointment book and checked for an open date. The crowd fell silent as they saw him back at the microphone. "I want to tell you that I am coming back to Memphis on Friday. I want all of you to stay home from work that day. I want a tremendous work stoppage, and all of you, your families and children, will join me, and I will lead you in a march through the center of Memphis." That announcement prompted a thunderous response from the crowd.

During the following days, the union leaders and ministers prepared for the day Memphis would be shut down. King's entry into the sanitation strike exacerbated the division between blacks and whites. Many whites thought King was an interloper who had latched on to the strike as a way of burnishing his own image. They resented his involvement. Blacks, on the other hand, welcomed it. "We never viewed him as an outsider," says Kyles. "We didn't need Martin Luther King to come and tell us to be free, we just needed him to come and help us be free."

On March 21, the day before King's return, a freak storm hit the area. It began snowing about 4:00 P.M. Snow is rare in Memphis, and almost unheard of in March. "I looked at it with curiosity," recalled Lawson. "I really thought the stuff would stop, it won't last, it's too wet." It snowed, however, through the night, and by dawn a foot was on the ground, on the way to seventeen inches, the second-largest snowstorm in Memphis history. Lawson telephoned King, who was scheduled to take a flight into the city by 9:00 A.M. Everything was canceled, but they agreed on a new date, Thursday, March 28. Many white Memphians, however, greeted the snowstorm's arrival with relief. "Our prayers were answered," says the wife of the city's then police homicide chief. Yet the tension among whites only temporarily lessened, since a new work stoppage was only six days away.

[source: Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Gerald Posner]

The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing

From the Atlantic Monthly, "The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing: Appalled by the murder of four little girls, a white Alabaman spoke out against racism—and was forever shunned for it," by Andrew Cohen, on 13 September 2013 --  In the next few days, you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly divisive periods in American history, and it's not too much of a leap to suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.

What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:

Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it." Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.

He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it.

A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, "Why?" "Who?" Everyone then "deplores" the "dastardly" act. But you know the "who" of "Who did it" is really rather simple.

There was little in Morgan's early life to suggest that he would have the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always courteous to the "black help." Like so many other local sons and daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his life enmeshed in both.

The "who" is every little individual who talks about the "niggers" and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The "who" is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren't really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.

He was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom—"Big Jim"—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to 1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn't uncommon, but was also an early and ardent integrationist. "As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be held down alongside them," Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after Alabama went Dixiecrat.

It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.

I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time? That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept the pain of being left out.

Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would Negroes think this?

He got married. He became a lawyer. He was active in state and local politics. By 1958 he had his own firm. And through this era, of Citizens Councils and Little Rock, he struggled to reconcile his love of the South with his aversion to its racism, his loyalty to Birmingham with his frustration at its opposition to integration. What he learned during this time in both law and politics, he would later say, was that the topic of race was a trap and that "every white man in Alabama was caught up in it."

There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff's deputies. Few Negroes have served on juries; few have been allowed to vote; few have been allowed to accept responsibility, or granted even a simple part to play in the administration of justice. Do not misunderstand me. It it not that I think that white policemen had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous bombings. It's just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder. They throw rocks and bottles and bullets. And we whites don't seem to know why the Negroes are lawless. So we lecture them.

In 1960, The New York Times' correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote a flammable piece on Birmingham titled "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham. In a tone Morgan would echo three years later, Salisbury wrote of the city: "Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus." Furious, Alabama officials quickly sued the Times for libel.

Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city's "image." Did those ministers visit the families of the Negroes in their hour of travail? Did many of them go to the homes of their brothers and express their regrets in person or pray with the crying relatives? Do they admit Negroes into their ranks at the church?

The libel lawsuit (remember, this was before the Supreme Court issued New York Times v. Sullivan, a decision that broadened first amendment protections for journalists) immediately impacted Morgan. He was asked to represent the Rev. Robert L. Hughes, a white Methodist minister who was a director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, a group designed to act as a liaison between the white and black communities in Birmingham. Hughes had been served a subpoena to produce the records of all those who supported the council. And he had decided to fight the request.

Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the law is not, when they know full well what the law is?

Representing Rev. Hughes immediately made Morgan the target of the Klan. Its members accosted him in a courthouse at a hearing. There were anonymous nighttime phone calls. "How come you'd represent that nigger-lover Hughes?" he would be asked. "You better watch out, tough guy. Some night we'll get you alone." The experience made Morgan realize that he and Hughes, that all moderates seeking to foster equal rights in the South at that time, were "in the same boat." Whether he had wanted to or not, he had chosen a side.

Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the "good people," whose ready answer is for those "right wing extremists" to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this morning, "Me? I'm not guilty!" he then proceeding to discuss the guilt of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court did not properly interpret the law. And that's the way it is with the Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for speaking while they sit in fearful silence.

He became radicalized—but only to a point and always within the structure of the law. He represented a black murder defendant named Boaz Sanders, a case that further opened his eyes to the state's unequal justice under law. Then he sued the University of Alabama, his beloved alma mater, after it refused to admit two black men around the same time it was stalling the admission of Hood and Malone. These were formal acts of subversion against a culture he could neither abide nor quit. It was tough love. It was the tiny ripple of hope that Robert Kennedy, years later, would talk about in South Africa.

Birmingham is a city in which the major industry, operated from Pittsburgh, never tried to solve the problem. It is a city where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.

The Alabama of the early 1960s was the Alabama of George Wallace and the Freedom Riders. It was the Alabama of Vivian Malone and James Hood and Eugene "Bull" Connor. It was the Alabama from which came many blacks and whites who believed in integration and in civil rights and who participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And then, just 18 days later, it was the Alabama that detonated a bomb inside a church on a Sunday. "My God," a woman on the scene screamed, "you're not even safe in a church."

And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said "they ought to kill that nigger," every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.

What's it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.

And with those words—"It is dead"—Morgan sat down. In his powerful book, "A Time to Speak," from which the speech has been transcribed, Morgan wrote: "There was applause, and then one member rose. He suggested that we admit a Negro into the club. There was silence. The motion died. Soon the Young Men's Business Club of Birmingham, Alabama, adjourned its meeting of September 16, 1963. It was one o'clock. Downstairs, the troopers still laughed and talked, and blocks away the carillon again played 'Dixie.'"  

Postscript

Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. "Is the mortician there yet?" a voice asked. "I don't know any morticians," Morgan responded. "Well, you will," the voice answered, "when the bodies are all over your front yard." Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. "They'll shoot you down like a dog," the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.

"Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech," recalls Steve Suitts, the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of Morgan's longtime friends. "Once we discussed the anonymous threats that Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black's papers saying 'Nigger-lovers don't live long in Alabama.' Chuck smiled and said he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.

"But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles," Suitts told me this week via email. "He once told me that he had received a note that he did not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something like, 'Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain't always getting home. Next time?' That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had actually followed his family all day."

What did he do when he left Alabama? A great deal. He led an extraordinarily vital life on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed and the accused.   (source: Atlantic Monthly)