BLOODY TUESDAY

Searching history of an event long hidden in the annals of the Civil Rights Movement.

Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham: Alabama’s cities have long been commemorated as flashpoints in the Black struggle for equality. Tuscaloosa, writes University of Alabama professor Giggie, should be mentioned in the same breath as “an important battleground in the escalating conflict between Black activists and white segregationists in the South during the 1960s.” There, on June 9, 1964, a combined force of city police and KKK members attacked Black protestors, sending almost 100 to jail and badly injuring dozens more. One of the instigators was Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, who drew on a force of an estimated 10,000 members and sympathizers in Alabama alone. Local police were squarely on the side of the segregationists, backed by the infamous Bull Connor in Birmingham. That the violent suppression in Tuscaloosa isn’t better known, writes Giggie, can be attributed to many factors. Other events crowded it off the front page, most survivors and onlookers kept silent out of fear, and “none of the white people responsible for the violence were compelled to explain themselves and be held accountable.” Justice slowly arced all the same: One KKK attack met with armed response from the Black community; a confrontation with actor Jack Palance (assumed to be Black due to his deeply tanned appearance) led to negative publicity for the city; Shelton lost his job; the chief of police eventually turned on the KKK; and, in time, the University of Alabama was desegregated, along with other city and state institutions. For all that, notes the author, the current right-wing move to suppress the history of civil rights means that it will be all the more difficult for the lessons of Tuscaloosa to be aired.

A welcome resurrection of a forgotten episode in the sorrowful history of segregation.