For 60 years, Black citizens in Tuscaloosa, Ala., begged city and state leaders to tell the truth about one of the most violent days in the civil rights movement. They wanted the world to know that on June 9, 1964, police and Klansmen brutalized over 500 Black people huddled inside First African Baptist Church. They called it Bloody Tuesday. It remains the largest assault and invasion of a Black church by law enforcement during the civil rights movement. More were injured and arrested than on Bloody Sunday in Selma, eight months later.
Survivors of Bloody Tuesday, now in their 70s and 80s, recently shared their experiences with the FBI and local law enforcement. They preached a simple truth: “The memory you chose. That’s who you are.” The stories we tell—or don’t tell—shape our lives. Still, they worry their grandchildren will never learn their history in school, and it will die when they do.
On March 4, 1964, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, returned to Montgomery, Ala.,where he had launched the bus boycott that catapulted him to national prominence eight years earlier. He came to the state capitol to vent his anger over the slow pace of racial change and announce a bold new campaign to leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Time has come for massive assault on segregation in Alabama,” he vowed. “We will never stop until justice runs down like water.” He identified Tuscaloosa as an early target because breaking segregation there would carry enormous significance.
Black Americans protested. Their demonstration on June 9 was to be their largest one yet, to march downtown to drink from white fountains and use restrooms reserved for whites in the new county courthouse. But as they prayed inside First African Baptist, police and sheriff’s deputies smashed the stained-glass windows with water from a fire hose and filled the church with tear gas. When people stumbled outside, police beat and arrested as many as they could. They swept the inside of the church, routing out the elderly and the very young hiding in closets. Nearly 100 went to jail, 33 were hospitalized, and dozens more received care at a local barbershop.