ABSTRACT
Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) used their experiences in Albany to reflect on the mistakes that they had made there and to devise a better-planned strategy for their next campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. In choosing Birmingham, King and the SCLC went to a place that symbolized violent white southern racism, personified in public safety commissioner Bull Connor, who had allowed Freedom Riders to be beaten by a white mob in the city in 1961. The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), under the leadership of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, was one of the SCLC's most active affiliates and the leading civil rights organization in the city, which King and the SCLC hoped would ensure greater unity in demonstrations. Birmingham's black population, like Albany's, stood at around 40 per cent of the city population. James Bevel and Wyatt Walker moved to implement what turned out to be the decisive tactical decision of the Birmingham campaign.
