This story is part of a series of articles, “Bending Toward Justice,” focusing on the 60th anniversary of events that took place in Birmingham during 1963 that changed the face of the city, and the world, in the ongoing struggle for equality and human rights. The series name is a reference to a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The series will continue through 2023.

In the early 1960s, as Birmingham emerged as a pivotal arena of the civil rights movement, the city’s downtown area boasted a thriving retail district. Pizitz and Parisian, two large, locally owned department stores, anchored the district. Along with another department store, the local Sears store, and the Kress and Woolworth “dime” stores, this was the commercial hub of Birmingham and surrounding communities.

While the retailers welcomed – and profited from – all customers, the restrictive city ordinances that had made Birmingham known widely as “the most segregated city in America” meant that Black customers did not receive the same treatment as white ones. There were separate water fountains and restrooms, with signs denoting “White” and “Colored.” Black customers were not allowed to use dressing rooms or be served in the stores’ restaurants or soda counters. Blacks held only menial jobs in the stores, and none had Black salesclerks.

Very few white residents of Birmingham had questioned the racial status quo over the years. Nor were they inclined to, even after an outspoken local Black minister, Fred Shuttlesworth, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in 1956 and began leading demonstrations against segregation.

“Segregation was reality”

That didn’t mean white people were unaware of the enforced separation of the races, stressed Richard “Dick” Pizitz. In fact, Pizitz himself saw it in action every business day at the department store his family had owned and operated downtown since 1899, and where he went to work in 1953. By that time, Black customers were a substantial component of the Pizitz store’s established success, accounting for nearly one-third of its revenues.

“Anyone who lived in Birmingham had to be very conscious of it,” Pizitz said of the local laws and customs that governed race relations. “Segregation was reality. That’s the way it was and the way it always had been, and there was nothing to suggest that there would be any change in it.”

Richard “Dick” Pizitz (far left), and his brothers, Michael (second from left) and Merritt (far right), pose with their father, Isadore, in the early 1960s. (Courtesy Richard Pizitz)

Now 93 and long retired from a distinguished career as a business and civic leader – though he still keeps regular hours at the offices of Pizitz Management Group – Pizitz had come home to Birmingham in 1953 after earning degrees from Washington & Lee University and Harvard Business School. He went to work in the family business, making his way up the company structure as a merchandise buyer and department manager. He was named assistant to the store’s president, his father, Isadore, in 1959, a track that would make him its president from 1966 until the family sold it in 1986.

Climbing the company ladder as a young man, Pizitz also became increasingly engaged in civic affairs. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was making its way slowly toward center stage of an increasingly compelling drama in which Pizitz and the other large downtown retailers came to play a prominent role.

Pizitz recalled two specific events that he said began to increase white citizens’ consciousness of Birmingham’s racial inequities. The first occurred in April 1956, when three Ku Klux Klansmen assaulted popular singer Nat King Cole during a performance at Municipal Auditorium (now Boutwell Auditorium) in downtown Birmingham – a performance where, ironically, Birmingham City Commissioner Jimmy Morgan had appeared onstage to give Cole an official welcome prior to the show.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth on a stretcher at Birmingham’s Hillman Hospital in 1957, following a vicious beating by Klansmen while he attempted to register his daughters at all-white Phillips High School. He is touching the cheek of his daughter, Patricia. (Alabama Department of Archives and History, donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Ed Jones, Birmingham News)

Seventeen months later, in September 1957, Shuttlesworth decided to single-handedly integrate all-white Phillips High School by enrolling his two eldest daughters. Arriving at the school that morning, the minister was brutally attacked by a Klan-led mob with fists, kicks, brass knuckles, clubs and chains. Shuttleworth’s wife, Ruby, was stabbed in the hip and his daughter, Ruby Fredericka, suffered a broken ankle when the door of the car they were riding in was slammed on it. Shuttlesworth was taken to a local hospital where the attending physician expressed shock at his injuries and wanted to admit him, but the minister left to attend a civil rights rally that night.

“Those really were the first things that started to put more of a focus on what was going on in Birmingham,” said Pizitz. “Up until those events took place, there had been nothing that forced white people to begin to acknowledge it.”

Heads in the sand

The attention intensified in May 1961, when civil rights Freedom Riders protesting segregated buses were beaten by a mob at Birmingham’s Trailways bus station. That was a turning point for white business leaders, who finally recognized the damage being done to Birmingham’s economic prospects by the violent opposition to integration for which the city was becoming internationally known.

Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor on the campaign trail, 1962. (Birmingham Public Library Archives)

The violence was encouraged and abetted by city government. With Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and the Birmingham Police Department continuing to harass and intimidate Black residents, there had been no changes in the city’s strict codes of racial separation, let alone any effort to eliminate the inequities that restricted 40 percent of the city’s population.

“Despite the increased awareness, there were no consistent efforts in the white community to achieve desegregation,” recalled Pizitz. “Bull Connor was dug in, and the major businesses that could have taken it on themselves to help effect change did nothing.

“It was the classic case of the ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.”

Pizitz singled out U.S. Steel, which had been the predominant industry in Birmingham for more than a half-century. In the early 1960s, the company employed roughly 40,000 people at its Birmingham mills, and Pizitz suggested that even a token move toward integrating its facilities would have had a tremendous impact on the subsequent actions of other companies. But no such move came.

“U.S. Steel was by far the largest employer in Birmingham,” said Pizitz. “But they refused to take any part in trying to improve the situation, publicly or privately. Their facilities, including the eating areas and restrooms, remained totally segregated. They had the power to be a leader for change, but they chose to remain mute.”

Pizitz also pointed to the lack of leadership from local news media, particularly the Birmingham News, Alabama’s largest newspaper. In contrast to the relatively progressive Atlanta Constitution, the News gave scant coverage to the movement gaining momentum on the streets of its city.

“The News was primarily interested in preserving the status quo,” Pizitz said. “That reflected the real problem in Birmingham. There was no white leadership voice for change.”

A transformative time

The move toward what would be the climax of the Birmingham movement – and the involvement of Pizitz and the other retailers – began in March 1962. Frank Dukes, a 31-year-old Korean War veteran, honor student, and president of the student body at Birmingham’s Miles College, organized the Anti-Injustice Committee. Including students from Miles and other local Black schools, as well as then-all-white Birmingham-Southern College, the committee called for desegregation of public buildings and the hiring of Blacks for positions in city government – including as policemen – and on the sales floors of local stores.

Frank Dukes, top left, with other leaders of the Selective Buying Campaign that took place in 1962 against segregated Birmingham stores. The campaign foreshadowed the climactic civil rights battles in the city the following year. (bendingthearctojustice.com)

“Dukes was very impressive, very articulate in his leadership,” Pizitz remembered of the student leader, who after graduating would be hired by Miles President Lucius Pitts as director of public and alumni affairs, and later entered the ministry. Dukes died in November 2023, at the age of 92.

“I was immediately attracted by the effort that was being led by Frank Dukes,” Retired judge U.W. Clemon said. Clemon, now 80, transferred from Atlanta’s Morehouse College to Miles as a sophomore, in the fall of 1961, just months before the Anti-Injustice Committee began organizing.

“He was a very powerful speaker,” continued Clemons (whom President Jimmy Carter would appoint to a U.S. federal judgeship in 1980, making him Alabama’s first Black federal judge). “He related to students well, and convinced a large number to become involved in the movement. That was the most formative era of my life.”

U.W. Clemon speaking to the graduating class at Miles College in 1965. (Birmingham Public Library Archives)

Dukes and other committee members, including Clemon, had several meetings with a group of white businessmen to discuss their demands. The owners of Parisian and the other major retail stores were in the meetings. Sydney Smyer, president of Birmingham Realty Company and the city’s most influential business leader, was also present, along with James A. “Jim” Head, who had owned and operated a successful office supply business downtown since the 1920s.

Head was also easily the most progressive of Birmingham’s business leaders, remembered by Pizitz as “very active and gutsy.” He had co-founded the Birmingham chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) in 1932 and chaired the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in 1955, during a run of progressive Chamber leaders that also included realtor Will Engel and Emil Hess, owner and president of Parisian. In 1962, Head was sympathetic to the civil rights protesters.

That was in contrast to Smyer, who had won Bull Connor’s former seat in the Alabama Legislature in the 1930s and was a founder of the States Rights Party that broke with the national Democratic Party over racial issues. In 1948 the “Dixiecrats” convened in Birmingham to nominate South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as its pro-segregation candidate for president.

At the time of the protests in 1963, Smyer remained a confirmed segregationist. But he was also adapting to the times, having been moved by the violence at the Trailways bus station in 1961 to understand that Birmingham would suffer economically from its continued hostility to calls for desegregation.

“I may be a segregationist,” Smyer would be famously quoted as saying, “but I’m not a damn fool.”

The groundswell

Still, the talks between the Anti-Injustice Committee and the businessmen proved inconclusive. The committee moved forward with what it called a “selective buying campaign” to avoid violating Alabama law, under which boycotts were illegal. Committee members distributed handbills in Black neighborhoods that asked, “Why spend hundreds of dollars at a store where you cannot spend twenty-five cents for a hamburger?” and began marching outside the downtown stores wearing sandwich boards with statements like “Don’t buy where you can’t be a salesman.”

The student-led protests were encouraged and supported by Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR, along with key members of the city’s traditional Black leadership. Deenie Drew, whose husband, John, was among the city’s most respected Black business owners and an advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King – led the Jefferson County Voters League to serve as a support group for the students. Among other things, League members and other affluent Black women transported students from their campuses to the downtown stores.

John Drew was a friend and advisor of both King, the movement’s national leader, and Lucius Pitts. The Miles president encouraged students to support the Anti-Justice Committee from the start, Clemon said, and backed it up by allowing students to make protest signs in the basement of his house.

As president of Miles College, Lucius Pitts, pictured here in 1971, encouraged and supported the student-led selective buying campaign. (georgiaencyclopedia.org)

“Pitts was full of civil rights,” said Clemon. “He created opportunities. He successfully courted Black and white businessmen who had not enjoyed good relationships with Shuttlesworth. He understood what the students wanted to accomplish and the importance of finding ways to support and contribute to that. He brought all of that together and there was a groundswell of support.

“It was galvanizing.”

At its peak, the selective buying campaign had at least some participation from an estimated 85-90 percent of the Black population. During the traditionally busy Easter season, sales at the stores were down by a collective 12 percent from the previous year.

Meeting with the same white business leaders whose inaction on their demands led to the boycott’s launch, the Anti-Injustice Committee was told that the merchants were between the proverbial rock and hard place; if the merchants took down “white” and “colored” signs, Connor would send city inspectors who were bound to uncover building code “violations” that would close the stores completely until addressed – at considerable cost to the owners.

The campaign lost momentum but made an indelible point. As historian Glenn T. Eskew wrote in his book, But for Birmingham, “the withdrawal of Black patronage hit merchants hard.”

1963

To a substantial extent, the blow inflicted on their bottom lines by the selective buying campaign in 1962 was one the merchants absorbed alone, with little support from the top echelon of Birmingham’s business community. That was repeated the following year, as events unfolded toward what Shuttlesworth later called “a sort of ultimate confrontation” in Birmingham.

Forcing that confrontation was the objective of “Project C,” the strategy followed by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when the civil rights leader came to Birmingham in the spring of 1963 to lead protests designed to topple legal segregation in the city. The strategy called for a series of sit-ins, demonstrations, and other acts of civil disobedience that would provoke direct confrontation and mass arrests by Connor’s police department – and, not coincidentally, attract national and international media attention to the movement’s calls for change.

Shuttlesworth, who had long urged King to make Birmingham a focal point of the national movement, worked directly with SCLC strategist Wyatt Tee Walker to develop Project C’s tactical plan. Compiling their program of mass meetings, marches and sit-ins, they recalled the waves generated by the boycott of big retailers the prior year and decided to repeat it.

The Pizitz building, in the heart of Birmingham’s busy retail district, targeted by civil rights protesters in 1962 and 1963. (Courtesy Richard Pizitz)

Faced with another boycott aimed at the Easter season, store owners were in the same “no-win” situation as before. Again, they appealed to the heights of the local power structure – the large banks, the major corporations, the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce – to join in committing to specific actions that would end segregation in Birmingham.

Just as in 1962, the store owners could not persuade Birmingham’s most powerful businesses to join them in meeting protesters’ demands. Dick Pizitz described a meeting with one of the city’s top bankers to tell him that the merchants had decided to come to an agreement with the protesters. Pizitz asked if the man’s bank would support the merchants by agreeing to hire Black tellers in their downtown office, starting the same day as the salespeople the big stores were going to hire.

Sixty years later, Pizitz recalled the response. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Richard, this is a retailer problem. It’s not our problem.’

“The retailers were out there alone. Birmingham was ready to explode at that point, and without the way we ultimately responded to the pressure to end segregation, I’m not sure what would have happened right then.”

The merchants agreed to desegregate water fountains, restrooms and dressing rooms, removing all “white” and “colored” signage. Black customers could have any available seat of their choice in the stores’ restaurants and soda fountains. The workforce assisting customers on sales floors would be integrated.

Discussing the position in which the retailers found themselves, Pizitz called the boycott “extremely well organized and effective.” Store owners saw not only another steep decline in Black business but found many white customers avoiding the possibility of becoming involved in the “disturbances” downtown that, in addition to the protest campaign against the stores, included sit-ins and marches that culminated in demonstrations in and around Kelly Ingram Park, where protesters – mostly schoolchildren – were met by police dogs and fire hoses under the command of Bull Connor.

Popular singer Al Hibler (left) joined the 1963 demonstrations against downtown retailers. (Alabama Department of Archives and History, donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Norman Dean, Birmingham News)

The merchants knew they could not sustain continued blows to their livelihoods, and so they embraced the social realities of change. Pizitz is quick to say that, while the big stores were locally owned and concerned about the future of the city, they were finding the futures of their family businesses threatened.

“It was not decided altruistically,” Pizitz said with a wistful grin. “The merchants collectively decided that something had to be done to stop this, to move things beyond this dangerous point they were beginning to reach.

“I wish I could say we did it just because it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing do, and I’m proud that we had the guts to do it. But it took the spur of the economic boycott to move us in the right direction.”

“Time for things to happen”

At least for some time, agreeing to desegregate brought new troubles for the retailers. Now they drew new attention from the KKK and other anti-integration whites.

“We got lots of bomb threats,” said Pizitz. “We had thousands of charge accounts closed by white people. I had never owned a gun in my life, but I borrowed one because I was getting threatening calls at home and I had three little children. I kept it for a while, and then I gave it back and never had one since.

“Nothing terrible happened.”

Richard “Dick” Pizitz, with speaker, talks to a group touring Birmingham civil rights sites, in the courtyard outside the Pizitz Building, now a popular residential/dining/entertainment location. (Michael Sznajderman / Alabama News Center)

As events transpired, what was true for Pizitz and the other retailers was not true for the city as a whole. For Birmingham, it took the tragedy of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing to truly move the wheels of justice and reconciliation. After that, real communication between Blacks and whites opened up for the first time. Racism didn’t go away, but there was general agreement that the time for change in Birmingham had come.

“There were still segregationists, of course,” Pizitz said. “But most people realized that it was past time for things to happen. Personal relationships developed where they hadn’t existed before, regular conversations took place, changes began to occur. What happened in Birmingham over the next several years is something we all should take pride in.”

Pizitz saw the people and forces working to improve Birmingham during the most challenging and pivotal time in its history. Recalling those who stood out to him, then and now, as agents of transformation, he mentioned Deenie and John Drew, along with future Jefferson County Commissioner Chris McNair (whose daughter, Denise, died in the Sixteenth Street church bombing), attorney and future Birmingham mayor David Vann, labor lawyer and civic leader Jerome “Buddy” Cooper, and Clemon.

U.W. Clemon unveils his portrait in a ceremony on Oct. 15, 2007, commemorating his service as a federal judge. (Encyclopedia of Alabama)

“I’m very proud to have been a part of that,” Clemon said of his involvement in the Birmingham movement as a college student. “That experience affected me at every stage that has come after. It made me committed to civil rights.”

Asked to weigh the role his family and the other large retailers played in changing Birmingham, Pizitz instead repeated the names of Clemon and the others he had just listed, as if underlining them verbally.

“There are people you can point to,” Pizitz concluded. “Most of them are Black, but there were some white people, too. Together, they truly made Birmingham better.

“That’s why change was effected.”