On March 8, 1964, King installed one of his closest disciples, Rev. T. Y. Rogers, as pastor of First African Baptist Church and told him to desegregate the city. “There are [those] who will tell you to put on the brakes,” King thundered from the pulpit. “Tell them you have had on the brakes. Now you want to get going down the highway of freedom and equality.”
As soon as King left Tuscaloosa, Rogers went to work. The Black community picketed stores that refused to serve them, boycotted merchants that overcharged them, and paraded in front of a city hall that ignored their calls for equality. King sent top SCLC leaders to provide counsel, including Rev. C.T. Vivian and Rev. Andrew Young.
Klansmen took notice and beat protestors, shot them with pellet guns, and doused them with acid. Police did little to stop the violence, and sometimes joined in.
Still, 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.
The scale and ferocity of the assault dwarfed prior acts of police aggression in the city and recalled memories of Bull Connor’s brutal attack on protesters in Birmingham a year earlier in May 1963. It sparked doubts that the promise of democracy would ever extend to Black citizens. “How could this happen in Tuscaloosa?” cried Rogers, who had been arrested before the start of the attack and forced to watch it unfold from the front seat of a police car. “How could this happen in America?”
The Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace publicly defined the assault as an act of Black rebellion and the start of a coup against the state. Founded in 1963 to monitor Black activism for the governor and legislature, the commission spied on civil rights workers and threatened their lives. Most white journalists blamed Black protesters for instigating the violence. Black newspapers reported more accurately, but only briefly. The University of Alabama made no public statement about Bloody Tuesday. And other events soon grabbed the nation’s attention during the summer of 1964, which civil rights activists called “Freedom Summer.”