For an additional sum, those cops who accept pay-offs (and again, reliable estimates are not to be found) are willing to overlook a number of other offenses which may be carried on at whiskey houses -- gambling, prostitution, sale of stolen items. The general rule of thumb: add $5 per man for each additional vice.
"A Negro alley is just an entirely different world," muses Charles Denaburg, a white lawyer who sits occasionally as judge in Recorder's Court (police court). He doubts that more than a few policemen take bribes, and he also believes that a police crack-down on whiskey houses would have little effect. "If you made it a capital offense," he says, "they're going to drink and gamble."
Denaburg estimates that, exclusive of traffic cases, more than 80 per cent of the defendants in Recorder's Court are Negroes ("that's because of the conditions they live in"), but he insists that 'they get more than a square shake." The meaning is clear: crimes involving only Negroes are simply not regarded as serious by law enforcement officials. One top prosecuting attorney has remarked, for example, that a Negro who kills another Negro is generally charged with man-slaughter, while a white man who kills another white under similar circumstances is usually tried for murder.
As to lesser offenses, Denaburg says, "They have a hell of a lot of whiskey houses operating in niggertown. It doesn't really hurt society for Negroes to sit in a house and drink whiskey and have skin games. They're not bothering anyone else besides themselves."
Still, in the higher reaches of City Hall, the talk is of equal and exact justice for all. "We know the law isn't being enforced out there," commented a top aide to Mayor Albert Boutwell soon after the city hired its first Negro policemen last April. "Those people just don't call the police. We know they don't trust them." That, he said, was one of the main reasons for putting two Negroes (two more have since been hired) on the 572-man force. Until then, Birmingham was the largest city in the nation without a single Negro cop.
Hiring Negroes on the police force was the recurrent demand of civil rights groups since 1955. The lily-white police force was cited again and again as the symbol of the segregated life of Birmingham. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who stepped into the national limelight when he asked Dr. Martin Luther King to lead massive demonstrations in 1963, became a well-known local leader eight years earlier when he began carrying petitions to Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor asking that the force be integrated.
Piecemeal Integration
But the hiring of Negro policemen is, perhaps, more significant as an illustration of the complexities of piecemeal integration. For putting Negroes on the force has, it is safe to say, done little to overcome the alienation of many Negroes towards the white government; in many ways, it has compounded the alienation.
One portent of that was Bull Connor's own statement, when he first became commissioner back in the '30's, that he favored Negro police on the force. The idea, no doubt, was to relieve whites of the task of looking after Negroes. The cops themselves were adamantly opposed. As late as October, 1963, five months after Birmingham's voters ousted the three-man city commission and replaced it with a racially moderate mayor and city council, and one month to the day after the Birmingham church bombing, the Fraternal Order of Police issued a statement asserting that hiring Negro policemen would lower the morale of the force.
The police were bitter at the forced departure of their long-time boss, whose claim to international fame was his order to sic police dogs on Negro demonstrators earlier that year. "When Albert Boutwell was elected mayor," recalls a Boutwell aide, "85 per cent of the police here wouldn't even look at him when he said hello."
There is little wonder that Boutwell approached with timidity the demand, raised during the 1963 demonstrations and frequently thereafter, to put Negroes on the force. Officials of the new mayor-council government privately assured prominent Negroes that the force would be integrated. But it seemed that Negroes just couldn't pass the stiff civil service exam administered by the county Personnel Board. Encouraged by city officials, Negro businessmen organized schools to train Negroes to take the test, while the city diligently quaried officials in some 89 other Southern towns to see how they had made out with Negro cops, and even paid $10,000 for an independent study of the personnel exam to see if it was rigged against Negroes (the report said no).
All the assurances were not reassuring to Negroes. Arthur D. Shores, a wealthy attorney and political wheeler-dealer who is one of five Negroes on the local Chamber of Commerce, said during one lull in the dialogue with city officials, "It's really hard to trust them after so much foot-dragging."
Last February, a white man shot into a crowd of Negroes picketing the Liberty Supermarket. The already effective demonstration picked up, and the huge store, losing $100,000 per week in Negro business, agreed to hire Negro checkers. But Negro civil rights leaders planned one more demonstration--a march on the courthouse to protest city inaction in other areas, such as hiring Negro policemen. Leaflets calling for the late-March demonstration also recommended a "period of self-denial"--Negroes would not buy new clothes for Easter "to call attention to the need for renewing our commitment to justice."
Boycott
Among downtown businessmen, word spread that the Negroes planned to go store by store through the down-town shopping district, boycotting each one until it agreed to hire vast numbers of Negroes. Two of the city's most powerful businessmen called in the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a middle-class minister who had helped organize the courthouse march. They promised that if the boycott were called off, Negroes would be in uniform by the third week in April; not seeing a way to effect the boycott in any event, Lowery agreed. The businessmen kept their promise. "When these racial things flare up, who gets it in the neck?" rasped one of them afterwards. "City Hall? Hell, no; we do."
