To the state of Alabama and its people, you had better fasten your seatbelts. There will be no peace and tranquility until the Negro has had his conquest. Time has come for massive assault on segregation in Alabama. Alabama has fallen behind just about every other state in the union…. We will never stop until justice runs down like water.
[ THE AFTERMATH ]
But King also realized that Tuscaloosa was an ideal location to launch a major civil rights offensive in 1964 because of the critical resources it offered. Nearly 18,000 Black citizens lived there and had built a dense network of churches, businesses, social clubs, and organizations. They had staged civil rights protests during the 1950s and early 1960s, though none produced lasting change. Locals had founded the Ministerial Alliance and the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee (TCAC), an affiliate with the SCLC, which organized a short-lived bus boycott in 1962. Many attended or had graduated from Stillman College, one of the jewels of Black higher education in the state, which sat on one hundred acres in the western section of the city and historically had been a hotbed of political activism. Most importantly, Rev. T. Y. Rogers Jr. had moved to town in January 1964 and become pastor of First African Church, whose roots traced back to the Civil War era. The twenty-nine-year-old firebrand, who was born about an hour's drive southeast in Coatopa and was a disciple of King, arrived with the goal of desegregating the city.
Rogers relocated to Tuscaloosa from a church in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, because, as he told his mother, “he heard the cry of this people.” But he also came because King wanted him there. The two had met in Montgomery, while King was at the helm of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Rogers was a student at Alabama State University. King had hired Rogers as his assistant pastor at Dexter, ordained him, and steered him to attend King's alma mater, Crozer Theological Seminary. He also had strongly recommended him to the pulpit committee at First African Baptist and met with Rogers’s parents to quell their concerns over their son’s return to Alabama. They knew he would come back with the purpose of leading the fight against discrimination, and they feared what the Klan might do to a strong-minded, outspoken Black preacher.
King preached the installation sermon for Rogers at First African Baptist on March 8, 1964. The church overflowed with the faithful and the curious. Newspaper men sat in the front row, notebooks on their laps. Police circled the church, directing traffic and keeping a watchful eye on the crowd. “There are [those] who will tell you to put on the brakes,” King thundered from the pulpit. “Tell them you have had on the brakes. Now you want to get going down the highway of freedom and equality.” Their leader would be Rogers, he said, who embodied his personal ideal of minister as social critic and would lead them to the promised land of liberty. King ended on a prophetic note, as if he knew of the troubles to come: “Some of you may have to go to jail for standing up in the struggle, and some may lose jobs. Some may even face physical death to free your white brothers and their children from the death of the spirit.” Ultimately, King concluded: “Love is the only way to solve the problems in Tuscaloosa, the state, and the nation.”
[ CHAOS ENSUES ]
Rogers was the first person arrested on June 9. Police sat him, along with two other protesters, in a cruiser positioned near the front of the church. They wanted him to watch what was to come next. As the violence unfolded in front of him, Rogers stared in disbelief. “How could this happen in Tuscaloosa? How could it happen in America?”, he later asked. As thin streams of white gas curled through the broken windows and some of his friends lay bleeding on the pavement in front of First African Baptist, he prayed that his wife, LePelzia, who was hiding inside, was safe. He wondered if he had preached the right message earlier in the week; “We first told them, ‘If we are arrested, if we are beaten, if we are disabled, move over us and get to town.’” Now, he only cared that no one was killed. He would learn later that LePelzia was indeed unharmed, but she would never forget the sight of police in gas masks removing her from the church’s office.
As the tear gas canisters exploded inside First African Baptist, people panicked. “All bedlam broke loose,” LePelzia said. Irene Issac, sixteen years old, was nursing her side where a policeman had cattle-prodded her when the barrage began. “It was like hell—the bang, the smoke, the screaming,” she remembered. Deborah Bush tried to run but could not. “Just the fumes and the gas just burned our eyes, the coughing going on,” she said. Relief from the fumes was hard to find. Twelve-year-old Alfred Jones struggled to follow directions being shouted at him by other protestors. “But when the tear gas came, everybody immediately said, ‘Well, go down to the bathroom,’” he remembered. “And tear gas rises, so they are telling us, ‘If you get tear-gassed, put your head in a garbage can or something.’ So we were puttin’ our faces in the toilets, you know. Put our faces down in there so that tear gas couldn't —because, man, if you’ve never been tear-gassed, it’s bad. And they were using the good stuff then.”
Maxie Thomas, another protestor arrested, almost died in his cell. Police had struck him above his left eye with a billy club, and no one could stop his head from bleeding. Jailers ignored his calls for help. His cellmates grew angry. “And the guys in the jail, they just started tearing it up. So, the jailor came up, and they insisted that they take me somewhere to get medical care.” The jailor, perhaps fearful that Thomas might bleed to death, arranged for him to be transported in the back of a sheriff’s department’s car to meet a physician in the alley behind his office. “And we went in the back door, and this doctor was up in front, and he was using some real colorful language,” Thomas remembered. Thomas was shoved into a small room and ordered to wait for the doctor: “Couple seconds later, he kicked the door in, he looked at me, and he said… ‘Even if you were Martin Luther King, I would sew your whole blankety-blank eye up.’ And he just grabbed it, no anesthetic, no nothing, just sewed it all up.” The suturing halted the bleeding, but it was touch-and-go for Thomas for the rest of the day. “I had lost a lot of blood,” he remembered. Sheriff’s deputies brought him back to the jail, took a picture of him to prove his injuries were tended to, and placed him in his cell.
[ IN HINDSIGHT ]
White newspapers certainly carried the story of the sacking of First African Church, but only for a day or two. Most parroted what was being reported by the Tuscaloosa News, which lauded law enforcement for subduing a “riot.” It disregarded claims of excessive police force voiced by Black protestors or described them as unfortunate but necessary acts to save the city. Several Black newspapers ran stories about it but were short on details. They only published one story each about the violence. Other events soon grabbed the nation’s attention. A few days after Bloody Tuesday, three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney—went missing in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson sent the FBI and National Guard to aid in the search. Freedom Summer began, bringing thousands of white activists from the North to Mississippi to register Blacks to vote. Governor Wallace barnstormed across the Midwest in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. The US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Reynolds v. Sims on June 15, ordering Alabama to reapportion its legislature. The Civil Rights Act, despite being stalled in the Senate, appeared likely to pass very soon. The University of Alabama, which the national press closely monitored in the aftermath of its integration, made no public statement about Bloody Tuesday. The university’s silence made national coverage of the violence less likely.
There is, however, much to be learned by remembering Bloody Tuesday. We often tell the story of the civil rights movement by featuring King as recorded by newspapers, radio, and television. We are drawn to heavily documented events, often ones featuring extreme violence, and hope they are exceptions. What we lose in this narrative is the reality that the movement was a series of small orchestrated and interconnected battles in towns and cities like Tuscaloosa, and acts of police violence and white resistance were, sadly, all too common.
The planned march and protest in Tuscaloosa was part of King’s larger vision for desegregating the state and nation. It emboldened Black protestors and unnerved white politicians, leading the latter to sanction extreme measures like the attack by State Troopers on marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The story of Bloody Tuesday reminds us that TV cameras and reporters did not capture the struggles for justice beyond King’s reach nor did they accurately communicate the widespread and violent nature of white resistance to racial change.
Most importantly, the story of Bloody Tuesday centers on the courage of everyday Black citizens to resist and persevere despite the overwhelming power of police and white citizens intent on stopping them. Within weeks of Bloody Tuesday, TCAC resumed protests. Many were again jailed and assaulted.
Aided by the passage of the Civil Rights Bill on July 2, a series of anti-segregation federal court orders, and the Klan’s declining power in Tuscaloosa, TCAC integrated the county courthouse and some local businesses in mid-July. Still, whites resisted. More than 1,000 whites tried unsuccessfully to block the integration of the Druid City Theater, and the Black movie-goers were forced to call the Defenders, a local Black armed self-defense group, to rescue them. In August, TCAC launched a boycott of Druid City Transit over its refusal to hire Black drivers and protect Black passengers from threats by white riders. Despite pressure from city officials to end the boycott, TCAC kept it in place for three months, eventually bankrupting the company, and established integrated travel as the local norm in the city. Integrating public schools and the city commission took until the 1970s, occurring after a federal court order, new legal battles, and protests.
Preserving the history of Bloody Tuesday and its place in the civil rights movement has been the enduring mission of its survivors and their families. They have kept the memory of it alive by sharing stories, collecting newspaper articles and photographs, and recording oral histories. For them, there is no more important story of the civil rights movement. It embodies the ability of local citizens to organize and defeat legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and it testifies, for new generations, how communities can marshal the power to right historic wrongs. Since 2014, many have gathered to commemorate the day at a community-wide service at First African Baptist.
As the sixtieth anniversary of Bloody Tuesday approaches, they are again organizing to record and share their history. They hope that more of us will listen this time.