Similarities Through Differences: A Look at the Correlation Between Two Radically Different Civil Rights Campaigns in Albany and Birmingham

Abstract

In the early 1960s, two contrasting civil rights protests made very different impacts on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The Albany Movement, from 1961-1962, was a drawn-out campaign that struggled mightily to prevail against a pragmatic tactician while spreading activists too thin in their strategies. The Birmingham Campaign, in 1963, resulted in a violent reaction by a short-tempered white lawman, which in turn brought about a call to action by John F. Kennedy, sowing the seeds for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Civil Rights Act in 1964. One campaign kept the Civil Rights Movement at essentially a standstill, and the other gave the Movement momentum it needed to make a massive turnaround. However, I will be seeing how the two are actually more connected than one might originally assume, by analyzing the two movements side by side in an attempt to make a correlation.