"One Doesn't Integrate on Sunday": The Creation of the Human Relations Council and the Origins of Desegregation in Anniston, Alabama, 1961-1963

Gary S. Sprayberry is an assistant professor of history at Columbus State University in Georgia . He would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Alabama Review for their suggestions about the manuscript. 1 Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York, 1964), 43; Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 336. There are several excellent studies on the Birmingham movement. See Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984), 250–74; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York, 1988), 673–802; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens, Ga., 1987), 111–39; J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa, 2002), 141–379; and Robert Gaines Corley, “The Quest for Racial Harmony: Race Relations in Birmingham, Alabama, 1947–1963” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1979). “One Doesn’t Integrate on Sunday”: The Creation of the Human Relations Council and the Origins of Desegregation in Anniston, Alabama, 1961–1963 IN APRIL 1963, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) commenced Project X in the city of Birmingham—a campaign designed to desegregate downtown businesses , open various public spaces to African Americans, and establish fair hiring practices in the “most segregated city in America.” For an entire month, protests engulfed the heart of the Magic City, as adults and children marched through the streets, weathering the fire hoses and dogs unleashed by Police Commissioner Bull Connor. On May 7, after much arm twisting and back-channel negotiating by the Kennedy administration, and after “representatives of the service and consumer economy” had finally tired of the chaos and loss of revenue, the SCLC and the city reached a settlement, handing King and his associates a hard-fought victory.1 G A R Y S . S P R A Y B E R R Y T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 106 Repercussions followed. On the evening of May 11, two bombs were detonated in Birmingham, one at the residence of King’s brother, Rev. A. D. King, and another outside the A. G. Gaston Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. had been staying. Both were obvious attempts to assassinate the embattled and much-reviled civil rights leader. Blacks in the city responded with bricks, bottles, and fire, venting their anger upon the police and anyone else who got in the way. Fed up with the situation in Alabama, President Kennedy ordered three thousand soldiers from Fort Benning, Georgia, into the state. They arrived at Fort McClellan in Anniston a few hours past sunset on Mother’s Day, May 12. Kennedy intended to send the troops into Birmingham right away and establish firm control over problem areas, but city leaders urged him to wait. Meanwhile, the troops sat outside of Anniston, waiting for deployment orders. According to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, they would remain there until “the situation [was] stabilized.”2 At approximately the same time that troop carriers from Fort Benning were rolling toward their hometown, Klan members Kenneth Adams and William “Red” Boyd were taking a drive through Anniston , shotguns across their laps, looking to contribute to the unfolding drama in central Alabama. They forced a car containing two African American women and their children to the shoulder of Highway 202. Boyd jumped out and fired a single pistol round over the roof of the women’s car, while Adams “ordered them to turn around and head the other way.” The terrified women did as they were told. Later in the afternoon, Adams and Boyd drove into a black neighborhood in west Anniston and sprayed the front of two homes with buckshot. Next, they sped over to St. John’s Methodist Church and did the same.3 It was a scenario that had become...