Bending Toward Justice: August 1963
Black protestors in Gadsden, 1963. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Anthony Falletta or Bud Gordon, Birmingham News)
Events that shaped Birmingham in a year that altered the city forever.
Sixty years ago, Birmingham became ground zero in the struggle for human rights. Many events in Birmingham and Alabama made 1963 a transformative year that would change the city, and the world, forever. Throughout 2023 in “Bending Toward Justice,” Alabama News Center is featuring stories about the events of 1963 and their impact, including a month-by-month timeline listing many of the year’s milestones.
AUGUST 1963
Saturday, Aug. 3
Law-enforcement officers break up a mass anti-segregation demonstration in downtown Gadsden, jailing about 300 protesters.
Monday, Aug. 5
Black stars including James Baldwin, Ray Charles, Dick Gregory, Johnny Mathis, the Shirelles, Nina Simone and others entertain at a peaceful, integrated concert, known as Salute to Freedom ’63, at Miles College. The event is to raise funds for the planned March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom later in August.
Wednesday, Aug. 7
The Birmingham City Council approves Mayor Albert Boutwell’s $15 million general fund budget for fiscal year 1963-64.
Thursday, Aug. 15
A man detonates a tear-gas bomb on the main floor of Loveman’s department store in downtown Birmingham, sending at least 22 people to area hospitals.
Monday, Aug. 19
U.S. District Judge Clarence Allgood approves the Birmingham Board of Education’s plan to desegregate schools, as ordered by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The plan calls for Birmingham to begin integrating some 12th grades and possibly lower grades in all-white public schools.
Tuesday, Aug. 20
A bomb explodes and damages the home of attorney Arthur D. Shores, who has led efforts to integrate Birmingham schools; there are no injuries.
Wednesday, Aug. 21
Black attorneys seek a federal court order forcing the Board of Education to begin desegregating all grade levels in the fall instead of only the 12th grade.
Tuesday, Aug. 27
Six buses depart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bound for Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
A paper pennant from the March on Washington, August 1963. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Wednesday, Aug. 28
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to Alabama’s “vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification” in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in the nation’s capital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to more than 250,000 people.
Friday, Aug. 30
Birmingham School Board attorneys announce that West End and Ramsay High schools and Graymont Elementary School will be desegregated Wednesday, Sept. 4. Five Blacks are to be enrolled at the schools, two each at West End and Graymont, and one at Ramsay.
Sources: “1963, How the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement Changed America and the World,” by Barnett Wright; Pennsylvania State University, “The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement” Birmingham Timeline; BHAMWIKI 1963; “Parting the Waters, America in the King Years 1954-63,” by Taylor Branch; Alabama Department of Archives & History.
