Integration Begins: Desegregating Graymont School

Integration Begins: Desegregating Graymont School. March Route for Education. As Birmingham's civil rights leaders pushed to desegregate city schools, radical opponents in Birmingham pushed back, sometimes violently. Responses against school integration included death threats by telephone to parents who dared send their children to all-White schools. It also included the August and September 1963 bombings of the home of Arthur Shores, a prominent Birmingham civil rights attorney. As a former lawyer for Autherine Lucy, Shores had filed scores of lawsuits to end segregation in city schools and other public facilities. Despite rising anti-integration mob violence, the families of five Black children bravely moved ahead with their mission to integrate three Birmingham Public Schools. , Paired marker , September 11, 1963 , James Armstrong had waited several years to open the doors that allowed his sons and other Black children to get a better education. Here, Armstrong, his sons Floyd and Dwight, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, foot soldiers and national reporters walk toward Graymont Elementary. This time, the Armstrong group is armed with a federal court order against the Alabama state troopers, who had blocked them days before. In a counter-move, Gov. George Wallace sends in the state's Alabama National Guard instead. But President John F. Kennedy federalizes the Alabama National Guard, who then must protect the Armstrongs and the other Black students who integrated three Birmingham public schools on this day. , "Court orders, like Constitutional rights, cannot yield to violence." , Bob Marley , Musician and activist, Lesson D11: Walk a mile in his shoes: Read the book "Black Like Me" by John Griffin, a White Southerner who tanned his skin to experience the brutality facing Blacks in the Jim Crow South.