Full Text of the Excerpt

A lot of people misunderstand why we got desegregation in Birmingham. It wasn't so much because of the protests and stuff like that, it was really because of the boycotts. The white businesses couldn't stand not having black customers. The way Birmingham is, not so much so now because the downtown area has expanded, but where most of the protests were going on at Sixteenth Street Church and Kelly Ingram Park was several blocks away from the white part of downtown. There was a black part of downtown called Fourth Avenue, which is where we shopped. There was only one professional building, the Masonic Temple Building, which is where the black doctors and dentists and lawyers and stuff had their offices all in one building. There were two black movie theatres, The Carver and The Famous, and they were all within a block of each other. So, most of the black businesses were centralized in sort of a four block area. Then you got to the white part of town. The protests didn't spill over into that area because if they did folks would have gone to jail. So they let you march and stuff like that in Kelly Ingram Park for a while until the children started getting involved. That was when they started using fire hoses and dogs and that kind of stuff. It was really when black people stopped shopping at white owned stores that the citizen's council got involved, because they were taking a very, very serious economic hit. Many of the five and dime stores, a large part of their business was black folk. When black people stopped shopping there, it was just like in the bus boycott in Montgomery when black people stopped riding the buses, the buses started going broke. So it was really to some degree for economic reasons that businesses decided to integrate, not because they thought it was the right thing to do. . .because it had always been the right thing to do.

KIMBERLY HILL:

It just was the pressing thing to do.

GLENNON THREATT:

Well, and then also again there was a lot of pressure placed on white businesses not to integrate. If you let black people try on clothes then it would get out and you would be ostracized by members of the white community or white people would stop shopping at your store. So there was a lot of social pressure from the white community to force other whites to be racist.