Bending Toward Justice: On New Year’s Day 1964, The Birmingham News looks back on a year of ‘Trials and Blessings’
The following is the final installment in Alabama News Center’s yearlong series, 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.”
To view the complete series of stories, click here.
On Jan. 1, 1964, The Birmingham News published a nearly 6,000-word editorial, “… Trials and Blessings of 1963 …,” beginning on the paper’s front page.
Looking back, many historians and journalists have been critical of how the city’s two daily papers, the News and the Birmingham Post-Herald, covered the events of 1963 – and the positions they took on their editorial pages. Some of the most significant civil rights stories in the city that year were relegated to the inside pages of the papers – if they were covered at all.
Indeed, hundreds of photos taken by Birmingham News photographers during the civil rights era were never published by the newspaper. Many of them can now be viewed in the Alabama Media Group Collection of photographs donated to the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
In a public radio interview in 2013, Hank Klibanoff, an Alabama native, former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, described the coverage by The Birmingham News as that of “a newspaper that was either afraid of the civil rights story or sort of paralyzed by it.”
But, on the first day of 1964, reflecting on the past year, The Birmingham News had a lot to say.
Below are excerpts from the Jan. 1, 1964, Birmingham News editorial, reprinted with permission from Alabama Media Group:
1964 Challenges Birmingham & Alabama –
The Trials and Blessing of 1963 Point the Way
“… Nineteen sixty-three was a year of uncertainty. But to some Birmingham leaders and rank and file, this new uncertainty was welcomed.
… A time will come when you must explain to some young man or young woman about 1963 in Birmingham and Alabama. Your explanation might go about like this ….
You don’t remember it, but when you were small some things happened which determined the kind of city you now live in.
Birmingham always seemed to have more than its share of problems. It either appeared too absolute about what it thought – or confused as it could be.
But in 1963, the city’s people made some changes. The Birmingham condition began to seem different.
Birmingham Police use dogs to attack a civil rights demonstrator, April 1963. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Birmingham News photo.)
… A majority of Birmingham citizens had said new approaches to problems were in order. But the city was obliged to go through open-street turmoil, mass arrests and a packed jail. A flood of newspaper and TV reporters swept into town.
Birmingham, in the hour of apparent shift in emphasis, was displayed to the entire U.S.A., even to the world, as a city not trying to deal sensibly with such a tough problem as race. It was a distorted picture.
But the city was tough. It endured the most massive civil rights efforts by Negroes any American city in our time yet had experienced. After anguished days when everybody feared the whole community would erupt, there was a limited compromise ….
Still, Birmingham was bloodily harassed. There were more bombings. Much of the entire world joined white and Negro of Birmingham in shock at the starkest horror:
Four Sunday school children, Negroes, were killed in a Sunday church dynamiting …
… The question of moral responsibility for what happened in Birmingham was written in blood down main street. But even great tragedy may have pointed a way toward more thought for many thousands.
… In 1963 Old Man Birmingham wasn’t a spring chicken. He had to face responsibilities which maturity and experience thrust on anyone. He was given a chance. In that year, at least the city seemed to hitch up its trousers, tighten its belt and take that chance to move on.
… Did the older folks make the tough but right decisions in 1963 – did they carry them out in year after year following? Did we serve you youngsters – our children – by putting you ahead of our own personal wishes or prejudices or desires? Did we pay the price for your future?
Now, today, thinking ahead as we enter 1964, we may have to “just wonder” what is the answer.”
Alabama Gov. George Wallace meets with members of the Alabama Sovereignty Commission on Jan. 4, 1964, in Montgomery. Created by Wallace and Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor, the panel was established to combat desegregation and also doubled as an intelligence network that kept files on civil rights activists. Several of the members were lawyers from Birmingham. The panel continued to operate until 1973, nearly a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation nationwide. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Birmingham News photo.)
