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141 12 Behind the Scenes By late 1962, racial tensions in Birmingham had built pressure that threatened to explode. People used different clichés: a powder keg waiting for a spark, a match near a short fuse, siing on a case of dynamite. But for us, it felt like a pressure cooker, with steadily increasing intensity and no sign of a safety valve. Ever since the 1954 Supreme Court decision overturning “separate-butequal ” schools, Birmingham’s uneasy race relations had polarized the community . Violence against blacks led to beatings, lynchings, and dynamite aacks. Unlike Atlanta—“the city too busy to hate”—Birmingham tolerated malicious hatred toward its black citizens. The “Magic City” touted in Chamber of Commerce brochures became known as “Bombingham.” So many blasts had occurred that one black residential neighborhood gained the nickname “Dynamite Hill.” The vicious beatings of black and white Freedom Riders at Birmingham’s Trailways bus station on Mother’s Day 1961 brought the city to worldwide aention. In Tokyo for an International Rotary Club convention, prominent Birmingham real estate aorney Sidney Smyer saw the front-page photograph of a white mob bludgeoning Freedom Riders in his hometown. “When you said you was from Birmingham,” he later told Dad, “boy, they didn’t have anything to do with you.” This jolt to his local civic pride did not convert the long-time Dixiecrat into a champion of civil rights. But it did make him realize that bigotry and violence harmed Birmingham’s reputation. This would not be good for business. Shortly a#er my father arrived in Birmingham in August 1961, Sid Smyer met with him several times. They talked about changing the city’s reputation by reducing racial violence and intimidation. Smyer declared his willingness “to take the bull by the horns.” He and other prominent businessmen recognized the harmful effects of intransigent racism. They found they could 142 shattered glass in birmingham confess their doubts to Jim Jimerson. As Diane McWhorter later observed in her 2001 book about Birmingham’s civil rights revolution: “It was as if the natives had been waiting for years to unleash their pent-up moral confusion on a stranger—Jimerson was from New York State—who wouldn’t tale on them at the country club.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum throughout the Deep South in 1962, Birmingham remained the strongest bastion of segregation. Immoveable and uncompromising, the three city commissioners, led by Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused to give an inch to demands for integration. Birmingham’s moderate segregationists—such as Sid Smyer—and its few liberal civic leaders—such as the Alabama Council ’s David Vann—realized that the only way to avoid catastrophe would be to remove Bull Connor from power. As president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, in February 1961 Smyer had asked the Birmingham Bar Association to create a special commi ee to examine the feasibility of altering the city’s form of government. Changing from the city commission, easily dominated by the autocratic Connor , to a mayor-council system might enable moderates to depose Connor by eliminating his office. By late 1961 the effort to change the form of city government had gained support from prominent white moderate businessmen and aorneys. One of the leaders in mobilizing support for this effort was my father’s friend David Vann, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Vann enlisted sympathetic members of the Young Men’s Business Club to create a new group, Citizens for Progress, to spearhead the reform campaign. Following the August 1962 primary elections for Democratic and Republican candidates for local offices, Citizens for Progress circulated petitions for a referendum to create a new municipal government. They set up card tables around the city and gathered more than enough signatures to put the measure on the city ballot for November. In a related effort, at the end of August, Smyer convinced the Chamber of Commerce to form a new group, called the Senior Citizens Commiee. The Senior Citizens, in turn, created a subcommiee on race, which Smyer chaired. Its biracial membership included reform-minded black and white businessmen, among them prominent black moderates John Drew, A. G. Gaston, and Lucius Pis. The Birmingham moderates at last seemed poised to respond to the city’s polarized racial climate. [3.144.151.106] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 03...

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