Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. displayed a brilliant understanding of public relations throughout the campaign to integrate the South in the 1950s and 1960s. King knew that it would take a combination of action, words, and visibility in the media to eliminate segregation laws and integrate lunch counters, restrooms, water fountains, and businesses. He practiced public relations in churches, hotel rooms, and even jail.
In 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group, wanted to do something highly visible that would let the entire nation see the evils of segregation. The goal of the campaign was to hold nonviolent demonstrations and resistance that would force segregated stores and businesses to be opened to African Americans.
King and his colleagues picked Birmingham, Alabama, as one of their targets, in part because the city’s police commissioner was Eugene “Bull” Conner. Conner was a racist who could be counted on to attack peaceful marchers. King’s campaign was called Project C, for confrontation, and it included press conferences, leaflets, and demonstrations in front of hundreds of reporters and photographers. Starting in April 1963, African American volunteers marched in the streets, held sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, and boycotted local businesses. As the protests started, so did the arrests. The story was covered by the New York Times and the Washington Post. King and his colleagues knew that all the protests in the world would be ineffective if they were not covered by the press, and that being beaten up by police would accomplish little if no photographers were present to document the event.
David Halberstam, who was a newspaper reporter in the South at the time, commented on civil rights leaders’ understanding of public relations:
The key was to lure the beast of segregation out in the open. Casting was critical: King and his aides were learning that they needed to find the right venue, a place where the resistance was likely to be fierce, and the right local official to play the villain. Neither was a problem: King had no trouble finding men like . . . Bull Connor, who were in their own way looking for him, just as he was looking for them.
On Good Friday, King and Ralph Abernathy joined in the marching so that they would be arrested. While King was in jail, he wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which was smuggled out and published as a brochure. His eloquent words, given added force by having been written in jail, were reprinted across the country.
After King was released, he and his followers raised the stakes. Adults would no longer march and be arrested; instead, children became the vanguard of the movement. The images, which appeared in print media throughout the world, were riveting. In his biography of King, Stephen Oates writes, “Millions of readers in America—and millions overseas—stared at pictures of police dogs lunging at young marchers, of firemen raking them with jet streams, of club-wielding cops pinning a Negro woman to the ground.”
King faced criticism for allowing young people to face the dangers of marching in Birmingham. But he responded promptly by criticizing the white press, asking the reporters where they had been “during the centuries when our segregated social system had been misusing and abusing Negro children.”
Although there was rioting in Birmingham and King’s brother’s house was bombed, the campaign was ultimately successful. Business owners took down the “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs from drinking fountains and bathrooms, and anyone was allowed to eat at the lunch counters and sit on the buses. The successful protest in Birmingham set the stage for the March on Washington in August 1963, where King would give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
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