Integration Corner

Integration Corner. March Route to Retail. After White business leaders failed to remove segregation signs and hire African Americans, by 1963 Birmingham Blacks felt betrayed by broken promises. Many Whites wanted the change that Blacks demanded to be gradual. Some Whites reasoned that quick change would provoke violent acts by the Ku Klux Klan. Other Whites wanted to maintain unfair Jim Crow laws despite federal court rulings against them So, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his fellow ACMHR clergymen believed they had no choice but to directly violate the City's segregation laws to force the issue in "Project C." Like other national Movement leaders, local ACMHR leaders used non-violent confrontations as well as moral persuasion to force White leaders to end racial segregation in Birmingham. , Paired marker , April 1963 , Police confront a woman protestor and take her sign during the 1963 demonstrations. Protestors carry many signs that point to the moral hypocrisy of American racial injustice. The woman's sign asks a basic moral question: "If a hated Russian communist leader could eat at a Birmingham lunch counter simply because he is White, then why could a Black United States citizen not enjoy the same right?” Questions and logic such as this often angered, but did not embarrass, most city leaders of this time. , "The Negro only asks for what America means; democracy means integration." , Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth , From one of his sermons , Awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, Lesson 18: Study and discuss why laws that kept people apart based on skin color were doomed to fail.