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1963...
- In Alabama's Dallas County (where Selma is located) more than 15,000
black men and women are eligible to vote, yet less than 250 have been able
to register.
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- May, 1963...
- 2,400 civil rights demonstrators are jailed in Birmingham. Police Commissioner
Eugene "Bull" Connor gives the orders to use police dogs and
fire hoses on the demonstrators. Newspaper photos depict the mayhem creating
national sympathy for the Civil rights Movement.
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- June, 1963...
- NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers is shot and killed outside his
home in Jackson, MS by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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- June, 1963...
- Governor George Wallace stands at the doors of the
University of Alabama, barring the entrance of black students and challenging
federal intervention. Later that day, Wallace capitulates to Asst. Attorney
Gen. Nicholas Katzenbach and the federalized Alabama National Guard, and
Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood are allowed to register. [VIDEO]
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- Aug, 1963...
- Federal courts order the integration of Alabama schools in Birmingham,
Huntsville, Tuscaloosa and Mobile.
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- Sept. 15, 1963...
- A bomb, planted by white
supremacists, rips through Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
on Sunday morning as five 11-14 year old girls prepare to participate in
a children's service. Four of the girls are killed, the fifth girl is seriously
injured. Anger and outrage pulse through the city but Martin Luther King
Jr. urges mourners to "not lose faith in our white brothers."
Nationally, the press indicts Governor George Wallace for his moral irresponsibility.* [VIDEO]
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* In 1977, attorney
William Baxley brought Robert Chambliss (known by Klan members as "Dynamite
Bob") to trial for the murder of the four girls killed in the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church bombing. Chambliss was convicted of murder, though
he would not violate his "Klan oath" of secrecy and name his
accomplices.
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