On April 3, 1963 Martin Luther King issued the “Birmingham
Manifesto” (not the letter). He was 34 years old, married and
with four children, one of them five days old. The manifesto
called for all lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains
in downtown department stores to be desegregated. Some called
the city the most segregated city in the country. Its bombings
and torchings of black churches and homes had given it the name,
“Bombingham” – the “Johannesburg of the South.” That day sixty-
five blacks staged sit-ins in five stores, and Police
Commissioner Bull Conner dragged twenty of them away to jail.
King arrived with unparalleled eloquence in the service of non-
violence. In nightly meetings in the black churches he rallied
the troops: We did not hesitate to call our movements an army.
But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity.
No uniform but its determination, no arsenal, except its faith,
no currency but its conscience. It was an army that would move
but not maul. It was an army