In the early 1960s Birmingham was the most segregated city in the US, according to Martin Luther King. It was also here he achieved one of his greatest victories, but a new immigration law coming into force in September has echoes of the past for many residents

Were it not for the success of the Birmingham campaign Dr King could not have gone on to give the ‘I have a dream’ speech

THE TOWERING figure of Dr Martin Luther King jnr stands at the entrance to the park that changed American history. “His dream liberated Birmingham,” the chiselled words explain. Although King was from Atlanta, he is closely associated with Birmingham, which he described as “the most segregated city in the United States”.

It was here that King led the 1963 campaign that broke apartheid in the American South. Two years later he would lead the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. “Dr King is probably more popular for what he did in the state of Alabama than any place else,” says Rev Arthur Price, pastor of the historic 16th Street Baptist Church, across the street from Kelly Ingram Park, where black protesters were arrested by the thousands.

Price calls King, who was assassinated in 1968, “the greatest American that America ever produced”, a sentiment widely shared among African-Americans. Many consider him a prophet. “Dr King instilled hope. He had a vision, vigour. Ultimately he achieved victory,” Price adds. “Were it not for the success of the Birmingham campaign he could not have gone on to give the ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington in August.”

When Price hears present-day conservatives talk about “states’ rights” (political powers reserved for state governments rather than the federal government) and “taking the country back”, he says it reopens the wounds of the 1950s and 1960s. “Taking it back to what?” he asks. “The good ole days were not good for African-Americans. They say they want to return to the values of the 1950s, but in the 1950s I couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter . I couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain. I couldn’t go to the same bathroom.”

The local white clergy opposed King’s Birmingham campaign, saying that civil rights should be won through the courts, not on the street. “For years now I have heard the word ‘wait’,” King wrote to them in his famous letter from Birmingham Jail in April 1963. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never’.”

The goal of King’s “non-violent direct action” was to flood the prisons with protesters. But Eugene “Bull” Connor, the arch-segregationist commissioner of public safety, seemed willing to go ahead with imprisonments, and quadrupled the bail required for release.

Black adults were reluctant to endanger their jobs and savings. King’s leadership was so much under attack that he avoided taking direct responsibility for the “children’s crusade” of early May, when thousands of black children crowded into the 16th Street Baptist Church. “They were sent out 50 at a time, to march in waves across the park and down to city hall,” Price recalls.

Public opinion in the US and worldwide was revolted by news photographs of school children attacked by police Alsatians and knocked down with high-pressure fire hoses. The South’s main industrial city ground to a halt. The fire department ceased obeying Connor’s orders. Birmingham’s business leaders promised to end segregation.

Connor, the man who had vowed that “we ain’t gonna segregate no niggers and whites together in this town ”, resigned in disgrace.

The Ku Klux Klan took revenge on September 15th, 1963, planting a bomb under the cinderblock steps at the side of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Four girls, Cynthia Wesler, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins (all aged 14) and Denise McNair (11), were killed by the blast.

Carolyn McKinstry, who was also 14, was carrying attendance records into the sanctuary when the bomb went off. Now 62, the retired telecommunications worker is a minister at the church she has attended her whole life.

“We saw each other every Sunday,” McKinstry says. “Cynthia was petite and ladylike. Carole was very smart – I pictured her as president of an organisation. Denise was younger. She probably would have become a teacher like her parents.

“Imagine how horrible it was for a 14-year-old girl to get the message that white people hated her. What was I supposed to do about the colour of my skin?

“We didn’t have counselling. We were left to process it on our own. Our parents didn’t talk about it because there was nothing they could do about that bombing or the ones before and after.”

There were dozens of racially motivated bombings in Birmingham, nicknamed “Bombingham” in the 1950s and early 1960s. McKinstry says the first, in 1948, targeted a black family who had bought a home on the white side of an invisible line.

“We were used to the sound of explosions,” she recalls. “The phone would ring after two or three minutes, somebody telling us what had been hit. The prayer was always that no one was hurt. For black people, terrorism did not start on 9/11.”

The church sealed off the ladies’ room where the four little girls were killed, in the hope that someone would eventually investigate. “We didn’t expect any justice,” McKinstry says. “In Birmingham, white people were not punished for crimes against black people.”

It took the Alabama authorities 14 years to arrest and convict Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, a Klan leader, for the quadruple murder. In 2001 and 2002 two more Klansmen, Thomas Blanton jnr and Bobby Frank Cherry, were also convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The killing of the four girls was a turning point that led John F Kennedy’s administration to draft the Civil Rights Act, banning all racial discrimination. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law the following year, after Kennedy’s assassination.

The church clock froze at 10.22am that Sunday when the bomb went off. It is still on display in the church basement. Rev Price believes there were white people in Birmingham “rooting for the bombing to happen”, but when it took place it prompted soul-searching. “People asked: ‘What are we doing?’ They said: ‘I may not want my children to go to school with somebody who looks different, but I didn’t sign up for terrorism, I didn’t sign up for murder.’”

Some 200,000 people visit the 16th Street Baptist Church each year. Price calls it a “place of remembrance” and says it is “a shrine of freedom” equivalent to the Liberty Bell. “People flock here to see what happened in 1963, how that one event shaped the history of the US.”

Price and McKinstry see echoes of the terrible pre-civil rights era in the new immigration law just passed by Alabama’s state assembly, the most severe in the US. When it takes effect on September 30th schoolteachers will be turned into de-facto immigration officers, obliged to determine the status of children. It will be an offence to give a lift, food, shelter or clothing to an illegal immigrant. Scott Beason, the Republican state senator who sponsored the Bill, has called blacks “aborigines”. Georgia and South Carolina are in the process of passing similar legislation targeting Hispanics. There are already more Hispanics than African-Americans in the US, and it is predicted that they will outnumber whites within decades. Blacks see Hispanics as the new underdogs.

“It’s like a blast from the past,” says Price. “When our parishioners hear they are stopping people because they look like they’re illegal, it reminds them of what happened in the 1950s and 1960s.”

“We spent a long time trying to change the image of Birmingham,” says McKinstry. “And then we turn around and pass that immigration law.”

When conservatives say illegal immigrants must be deported, she remembers that “for a long time, the sentiment aimed at black people was ‘go back to Africa’”. Due to the flight of whites to the suburbs, nearly 80 per cent of the population of Birmingham is black now. The city has had black mayors since 1979, though the conservative state government tends to thwart local officials. There is no longer de-jure discrimination or segregation, according to Valerie Hicks Powe, a prominent civil-rights lawyer. The campaign for civil rights has been replaced by the fight for “silver rights”, meaning economic opportunity.

Hicks Powe cites the fact that only 1.3 per cent of $390 million (€280 million) in department-of-transportation contracts went to black contractors in Alabama last year. When Roy Woods, a columnist at the Birmingham News, raised the issue this summer, he was accused of “playing the race card”. Education, meanwhile, is funded by local taxes, so affluent white areas have better schools.

“In inner cities and poor rural areas, schools barely function,” says Hicks Powe. “You may graduate at the top of your class, and you may get into college, but you haven’t had the same access to books and resources. The affluent areas say: ‘Why should we divert our money? That’s socialism.’”

The mass incarceration of African-American men in the 40-year-old “war on drugs” constitutes “a form of Jim Crow”, Hicks Powe says, alluding to the segregationist laws passed after the American Civil War and left in force until the Civil Rights Act. Until last year the punishment for possession of cheap crack cocaine, used by blacks, was 100 times greater than penalties for possession of the expensive powder favoured by white people. The disparity in punishment is still 18 to one.

“We overcame slavery, and they put in place Jim Crow,” Hicks Powe says in conclusion. “We overturned Jim Crow and they put in place the drug war.

“Those in power refuse to acknowledge there is an underclass that they created, of individuals who are black and brown.”