Reading Birmingham

Book Casts Light on Tuscaloosa’s Bloody Tuesday

 

“Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa,” by John M. Giggie (Oxford University Press, 2024)

In his new book, “Bloody Tuesday,” historian John M. Giggie reminds us that our country did not experience one Civil Rights Movement. There have been many civil rights movements, in many places, made possible by many courageous people.

An associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, Giggie also directs the Summersell Center for the Study of the South. He created a pioneering African American history course for public schools in Alabama and directs the Alabama Memory Project, in which students document the lives of people murdered by lynch mobs in our state.

The story of civil rights in the city of Tuscaloosa has been overshadowed by the dramatic events surrounding efforts to desegregate the University of Alabama, the white riots that erupted following the 1956 enrollment of Autherine Lucy, the university’s first black student, and Gov. George Wallace’s theatrical 1963 stand in the schoolhouse door. These were, to a large degree, the results of events that occurred in courthouses and capital buildings outside Tuscaloosa.

But in Tuscaloosa’s African American community, with encouragement and support from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., citizens protested segregated businesses, segregated buses and other public facilities. In a city that was the national headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan, black activists braved police brutality and white mobs to secure the rights due them as Americans.

The movement participants took their foot off the brake, to paraphrase Dr. King, following the arrival in 1964 of the Rev. T.Y. Rogers Jr., a King protégé who came to pastor the First African Baptist Church. On June 9, 1964, hundreds of activists gathered at Rogers’ church to march on the new Tuscaloosa County Courthouse and desegregate the building’s water fountains and restrooms. Led by Tuscaloosa’s William Marable, a police chief who admired the crowd control techniques of Birmingham’s Bull Connor, white Tuscaloosa had picked June 9 as the day they would try to crush the movement with overwhelming violence. As one white police officer confided to a reporter, “Something bad is going to happen today.”

With as many as 600 people inside the church, police and firefighters surrounded the building with vehicles and lines of officers armed with night sticks. The officers were reinforced by deputized Klansmen carrying pool cues, broom handles and other weapons. The white mob taunted the activists inside, calling for them to come out. When Rogers went out to try to talk with the police chief, he was arrested and placed in a squad car. From that spot he witnessed what was then unleashed on his congregation.

When the first group of about 100 protestors came down the front steps of the church, the officers and deputies attacked, hauling some away to jail while beating others to the ground. As many protestors as could retreated into the church, pulling wounded comrades with them. Marable ordered the firefighters to knock out the church windows with their high-pressure hoses and then had his officers fire teargas into the building. Adults and children as young as 12 retreated into back rooms, closets and the basement. Those who jumped from windows risked being beaten. Several teenagers escaped across a field behind the church and found safety and medical care at a nearby barbershop. Police stormed into the church and arrested people still inside.

After about an hour, most of the police and the white mob left the area because, as Giggie writes, “There was no one left to beat.”

Bloody Tuesday did not stop civil rights activism, and demonstrations resumed after a few weeks. But despite the courage and determination of the city’s black community, Tuscaloosa was slow to grant even limited access to desegrated public spaces. Slower than Montgomery, slower than Birmingham.

Many of the people who lived this history are still alive and active in their community today. John Giggie has done more than take their stories and retell them. He has partnered with these remarkable people to share their stories and experiences, both in his book and through the creation of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation. This group has created a Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History Trail and educational programs.

For too long, Tuscaloosa’s civil rights movement was largely forgotten outside the city’s African American community. Sandwiched between Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965, and occurring the same year as Mississippi’s Freedom Summer voting rights campaign that included the murders of three young activists, Bloody Tuesday slipped through the cracks of historical memory. But Giggie and his activist partners have taken major steps toward correcting that. “Bloody Tuesday” is a vivid and gracefully written account of a neglected but vitally important event in Alabama history. And this book reminds us how much of our history we have yet to learn.

 

Jim Baggett

James L. Bagget is a writer and historian. From 1997 until his retirement in 2023, he served as archivist for the Birmingham Public Library and archivist for the City of Birmingham. He lives with his family in Birmingham and Mentone. He can be reached at BirminghamBaggett@gmail.com.