ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 travels 60 years forward in time and several hundred miles south, to the heart of segregation in the United States: Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. The chapter opens by describing the rhetorical situation leading up to the “Children’s Crusade,” including weeks of fruitless protest actions among the civil rights movement’s adults. The chapter also posits that the success of the Birmingham campaign turned the tide of the wider civil rights movement – that by succeeding in integrating the South’s most segregated city, the movement demonstrated a replicable proof of concept. The chapter then traces the chronology of the key events of the children’s protests, starting with the Palm Sunday march, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and the first wave of schoolchildren protests. The chapter then turns to the climax of the protests, including Birmingham’s civil servants turning fire hoses and police dogs on children, the ensuing national outrage, and the eventual truce called between Birmingham’s white power structure and the movement. The chapter identifies all three theoretical dimensions in the movement’s rhetorical strategies and concludes with a discussion of the movement’s rhetorical force and the legacy of the Crusade.
