Albert Belcher was worried. Even though there still had been no incidents at Rickwood, a racial tension still blanketed Birmingham. With the civil rights bill expected to be passed by Congress within days and signed into law by President Johnson, a backlash in Birmingham was feared… and predicted.
He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that the Barons’ first-place standing had dissuaded the Ku Klux Klan or any of the thousands of people in his city who believed with everything in their hearts that integration was wrong. In speaking at Rotary clubs and chamber of commerce breakfasts, Belcher heard their anger. He heard it when he talked to his friends on the Mules; he heard it from Birmingham’s old-money gentry in Mountain Park. He worried that a backlash would erupt in Birmingham, where editorial after editorial criticized the impending passage of the bill—and what better symbol was there than the Barons, the new model for how integration was supposed to work? A few well-placed sticks of dynamite could blow everything he’d worked for to smithereens. He ordered extra security.
Bull Connor had been the face of segregation in 1963, but with Bull’s removal from office, George Wallace took over that distinction in 1964. In his surprisingly successful presidential campaign, Wallace repeatedly accused the Johnson administration, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, of cramming its agenda down the throats of “the will of the people.” He predicted a quick repeal for the bill.
He promised that as governor of Alabama he would do nothing to enforce the Civil Rights Act, and that included any attempts to desegregate schools. The “racial mixing” of children, the Jim Crow crowd believed, would eventually lead to interracial marriage and the “ruination of society.” Threats to block this integration when school resumed in late August were endless.
Wallace also vowed to close all of the state’s parks if attempts were made to integrate them. The closure of Alabama’s parks, however, wouldn’t impact the Barons—Belcher owned Rickwood. But more than the fear of integrated parks was the concern that passage of a civil rights bill would lead to integrated restrooms… which would lead, according to the Jim Crow theory of hygiene, to the spread of venereal diseases.
The disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi—Andy Goodman and Michael Schwerner of New York, and James Chaney of Mississippi—was headline news in Birmingham. A large search party, including FBI agents and a hundred sailors from a base near Meridian, was organized to comb the bayous, gullies, swamps, and red hillsides near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they were last seen. But so far, all the searchers had gotten for their efforts were bad sunburns and a few encounters with copperheads and rattlesnakes. To cover the story, the Birmingham News sent reporter Don Brown to Mississippi. He compared what was happening in Mississippi to Birmingham:
Like Birmingham last summer, Philadelphia has been caught with an ugly face in the world spotlight. Birmingham need only put itself in their place for a moment. Those who know something here in Philadelphia—if anyone does—are afraid of a few, just as those Birmingham people are who might help solve the church bombing. But you can’t blame them. Their homes might be burned, their children run down in the streets.
Residents of Philadelphia, borrowing a page from the Birmingham playbook, blamed the disappearance on outside agitators. A local insurance man, who chose to remain anonymous, wrote:
All these “righters” came here trying to save us. Funny, we’ve been getting along fine for a long time. I supposed if someone would lose his temper and kill three or four of these Negroes, that would keep them in their place.
Mississippi politicians also weighed in on the missing “righters,” including Senator James Eastland:
I think those people are voluntarily missing. I’m pretty sure we’ll eventually discover this is all a Communist plot to stir up trouble.
The events in Mississippi did not go unnoticed by Tommie Reynolds. In a way, he and all of the Barons, black and white, were civil rights workers. They hadn’t volunteered to work for the cause, but it wasn’t a stretch to think that whatever hatred inspired the locals in Mississippi to cause the disappearance of the three young men could work in similar ways in Birmingham against the Barons. Reynolds and his teammates were part of the perfect symbol—the great American pastime—and by the reckoning of the segregation hard-liners, they were defiling the purity of America’s game.
Reynolds understood that next time, instead of howling like a monkey and jumping around like an idiot, the dirty-shirt guy could bring a rifle to the park. If these people had been vicious enough to bomb a church in broad daylight, and blow up a preacher’s house on Christmas night, what would stop them from dynamiting a baseball grandstand? Or what would prevent them from snatching a couple of the black players off the street and making them disappear like those three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi?
Belcher worried that the disappearance of the civil rights workers in Mississippi was a harbinger of a more violent resistance to the dismantling of segregation, a campaign that could eventually have a direct impact on the Southern League. With all the certainty of a life spent in Alabama, he believed that the enactment of a civil rights bill could exacerbate the violence.
On July 2, the House joined the Senate and gave its approval of the bill; all that was needed now for it to be enacted into law was President Johnson’s signature. Across the South, calls went out for flags to be flown at half-mast. Staunch segregationists worried that Johnson would sign the bill on July Fourth, and to them, that was treason. An editorial in the Birmingham News expressed the view of many:
The president should not tie his signature of the bill with the day commemorating establishment of this as a free nation. The two events—the signing of a civil rights bill and Independence Day—have nothing in common.
Sensing a potential problem, President Johnson signed the bill on the afternoon of July 3 rather than the Fourth, thus avoiding any conflict with traditional celebrations across the country. Reaction was immediate. The NAACP urged blacks to test it as soon as possible—to go into hotels and restaurants and demand to be served. Opponents wasted no time in declaring they would challenge the bill’s constitutionality. In Montgomery, Governor Wallace refused to participate in a conference on implementing the bill. In Washington, DC, Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater warned of a “civil rights explosion.”
Mayor Albert Boutwell dodged giving his approval of the law. “The city has made no recommendation, either for compliance or non-compliance,” he said. “This is a Federal law and there are private businesses involved. It is not our business to enforce the law or to tell private businesses how it must operate or whom it must serve.”
The immediate reaction in Birmingham was better than many expected. No incidents were reported at any of the nine restaurants and four downtown movie theaters that blacks entered around noon in small groups. The Birmingham Hotel Association issued a statement that its hotels would comply.
This unexpected compliance earned kudos, sort of, in a News editorial titled “A Good Beginning”:
This newspaper opposes the Civil Rights bill as a measure of invasion of individual rights far too sweeping in scope. It is the product of political pressure unparalleled in recent years. We can only hope that in time public opinion will bring changes. In the meantime, let us keep the peace.
A few days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, six black men entered McClellan’s, a variety store in Bessemer, not far from where Stan Jones grew up. They took a seat at the lunch counter and ordered sandwiches. The assistant store manager told them they wouldn’t be served.
When the men refused to leave, the assistant manager called the police, as well as a couple of his friends. Within minutes, eight white men, all carrying baseball bats, entered the store. The assistant manager locked the door behind them. For the next ten minutes, as a loudspeaker across the street blared “Dixie,” the men with bats flailed away as the black men tried to fend off the savage attack. The melee knocked merchandise to the floor. Blood flew. The police finally arrived, but remained in their cars, parked outside.
When the attack was finally over, two black men were in the hospital. No arrests were made. The next day, a dozen blacks attempted to register to vote in Birmingham but retreated after being threatened by a group of angry whites. Although these attacks received scant coverage by the local media, a flurry of letters to the editor unanimously opined that the bill was not worth the paper it was written on. A. C. Brasher of Birmingham wrote:
The bill has been passed, but the right to be respected has to be earned.
The passage of the bill brought Bull Connor out of the woodwork. He promised that he would attend the Democratic National Convention and, just as he’d done in 1948, lead Alabama delegates in a walkout to protest the bill’s passage.
One indirect impact of the bill’s passage on the Barons was a complaint filed by the white owner of Ollie’s Barbeque in Birmingham, a popular restaurant where blacks had always been refused service even though the restaurant was located in a black neighborhood. Several times Lindblad had stopped in to pick up an order of ribs for his black teammates. When ordered to be in compliance with the law, the owner sued.
“It makes no sense that Negroes can’t even eat in their own neighborhood,” concluded Lindblad.
Ollie’s wasn’t the only restaurant refusing to comply with the law. Defiance quickly spread. Restaurant owners and innkeepers across the South refused service to blacks… just as they always had. In Atlanta, restaurant owner (and future governor) Lester Maddox defiantly stood in front of the front door of his restaurant, Pickrick, holding an ax handle to block entry. When a lower court reiterated the order to integrate, he continued to refuse. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he handed out ax handles to supporters, read from the Bible, and vowed to take his fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
And then he padlocked his restaurant.
President Johnson vowed to enforce the new law. In response, Maddox turned his restaurant into a Goldwater for President campaign office.
The backlash intensified. On a rural highway in northern Georgia, a carload of whites drove up behind a car carrying three black men and fired two unprovoked shotguns blasts through the rear window, killing Lemuel Penn, the director of five Washington, DC, vocational schools. A lieutenant colonel in the army reserve, Penn was returning home from a training session at Fort Benning. (Arrests were eventually made, but an all-white jury acquitted the defendants.)
On the same day of that shooting, a rabbi in Mississippi was attacked walking down a street in Hattiesburg, while in Greenwood, a black Baptist church used for meetings by activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was burned to the ground as a fire truck called to the scene stood idly by.
In Birmingham, Jonathan McPherson, a chemistry teacher making $522 a month at Mills College, passed the physical and written tests for certification to become the first black police officer in Birmingham, a job paying $380 a month. He was quickly ruled ineligible because a background check revealed he lived in Hueytown, a community outside the city limits, even though several white officers didn’t live within the city limits, either.
As race riots spread in the North, the Birmingham press seemed—if not to gloat—to at least find a measure of redemption in publicizing the demonstrations. The latest riot in Jersey City was greeted with a large, bold headline in the News: MOB OF NEGROES ATTACKS WHITES AND POLICE IN JERSEY RACE EXPLOSION.
Whites in Birmingham believed that the Johnson administration’s sympathy for the civil rights movement had somehow authorized black people to take the law into their own hands and deny the civil rights of “innocent citizens.” An editorial in the News accused the Johnson administration of not understanding the effects of the bitterness and resentment sweeping the country. City after city, it noted, was being subjected to mob violence and riots in the name of “civil rights demonstrations,” and allowing the “civil rights to be taken away from white people by means of riots or mob violence.”
As proof of this hypocrisy, an editorial in the News pointed out that the FBI was now offering a substantial reward for information about the three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi, and yet providing no assistance for help in apprehending blacks allegedly “responsible for the lawlessness burning American cities.”
The News did not report that thousands of black “rioters” had been arrested.