The Birmingham campaign was a movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to draw attention to the efforts of the African-American population in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth and others, the nonviolent confrontation campaign culminated in confrontations between young black students and widely publicized white civic authorities. Finally, this led the municipal government to change the discriminatory laws of the city.
At the beginning of the decade of 1960, Birmingham was one of the cities of the United States with greater racial division, caused by the laws and the culture. Black citizens faced economic and legal inequalities and violent retribution when they tried to draw attention to their problems. The protests in Birmingham began with a boycott led by Shuttlesworth to pressure business owners to employ people of all races and to end racial segregation in public facilities, restaurants, schools and shops. When local and government business leaders resisted, the SCLC agreed to support them. Organizer Wyatt Tee Walker joined Birmingham activist Shuttlesworth and began what they called Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke mass arrests.
Historian Glenn Eskew wrote that the campaign "led to an awakening to the evils of segregation and the need for reforms in the region." The middle class of people of color generally assumed leadership in Birmingham and the SCLC, while the lower class still struggled. According to Eskew, the riots that followed the bombing of the Gaston Motel were a precursor to riots in the larger cities in the late 1960s.
Wyatt Tee Walker wrote that the Birmingham campaign was "legend" and had become the most important chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. It was "the main basin of the nonviolent movement in the United States, it was the maturation of the SCLC as a national force in the field of civil rights, on the land that had been dominated by the NAACP."
Jonathan Bass, stated that "King has won a great public relations victory in Birmingham", but also, emphatically stated "it was the citizens of the Magic City, both white and black, and not Martin Luther King and neither the SCLC, who performed the true transformation of the city. "
