Birmingham 1963 Part 2

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Birmingham 1963 Part 2

Weapon of Melodic Dissertation

Jim Scott

Jun 12, 2025

Transcript

Okay, you can see I got my “weapon of melodic dissertation” here. Now - so it was April 6th, (I got my notes).

Reverend Shuttlesworth and 45 people kneel at City Hall, they're arrested. April 7th, 1963, 65 people led by A.D. King, Martin Luther King's brother, get arrested. April 8th, 85 people arrested. April 9th, 130 people arrested.

Soon there's a thousand people in jail, and the business owners are saying, “let's just calm everything down. Of course, they're doing no business. On Good Friday, Martin Luther King met with the businessmen and clergy and the movement leaders. And he listens to them, and he walks out. And he comes back later and says, “I don't know what to do. I don't think we can raise enough money to get people out of jail. But I can go to jail with them.”

So he does. He walks out and he goes to the church and he gets arrested and goes to jail.

May 2nd, the children are arrested. May 7th, Bull Connor's jails are full of 4,000 people. So that's when America woke up to all of this, and leaders all over. I say there was not a famous leader there were certainly leaders, powerful leaders at this point A Philip Randolph, now that's NALC, the National American Negro American (we used that word then) The Negro American Labor Council.

And Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington. He was not so affiliated with one of the Big Six because he was gay, and he'd kind of been outed for that. And so he worked in the shadows for all this. And there's a movie about it. Check it out.

So there was the Big Six, NALC, James Farmer and CORE, (that's the Congress of Racial Equality), and Martin Luther King is with the Southern Christian Leadership Council. John Lewis, SNCC, Roy Wilkins, NAACP, and Whitney Young, the National Urban League. These were groups working for justice and equality that had been going a long time.

And there's something we should mention, the Highlander School, now called the Highlander Center. Everybody went to the Highlander Center. Rosa Parks went to the Highlander Center. There were other people that had been arrested, a teenager (Claudette Colvin) arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. But it was an orchestrated thing that Rosa Parks, a well-trained, NAACP I believe, activist, was ready to do this. She knew the bus driver. And the world... woke up to this.

So then this Martin Luther King's famous speech, “I Have a Dream” speech at the August March on Washington. And it's not always, it's not replayed, every year like Martin Luther King's speech, but Bayard Rustin got to read “The Demands” and check that out, hear the crowd at that point. So we go on from there.

Events more than 60 years ago that sound an awful lot like what's going on now. This is some songs that would have been sung in there.

And many of them are in this book.

Come and go with me to that land, Come and go with me to that land.

Come and go with me to that land, where I’m bound…

Over my head, I hear music in the air, (Music in the air)

Over my head, I hear music in the air, (music in the air)

There must be a heaven somewhere.

Over my head, I hear trouble in the air…. (etc.)

Someone’s cryin’ Lord. come by here, Someone’s cryin’ Lord. come by here,

Someone’s cryin’ Lord. come by here, Oh, Lord, come by here.

Someone's praying, Lord, come by here.

Someone's praying, Lord, come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here.