On the Thursday night that the civil rights leaders received the Birmingham injunction, everyone (save for the radical Shuttlesworth) counseled against violating the order: they just couldn’t afford the long prison sentences and fines. Somebody phoned Harry Belafonte to start raising more money. They debated late into the night and continued the next morning.
Then King went into his hotel room, got on his knees, and prayed. He emerged with a decision. It was time to disobey the injunction — never mind the courts and the appeals process.
On Friday the movement’s leaders held a press conference announcing their decision to disregard the injunction. They explained:
In the past we have abided by Federal injunctions out of respect for the forthright and consistent leadership that the Federal judiciary has given in establishing the principle of integration as the law of the land.
However we are now confronted with recalcitrant forces in the Deep South that will use the courts to perpetuate the unjust and illegal system of racial separation.
Alabama has made clear its determination to defy the law of the land. Most of its public officials, its legislative body and many of its law enforcement agents have openly defied the desegregation decision of the Supreme Court. We would feel morally and [legally] responsible to obey the injunction if the courts of Alabama applied equal justice to all of its citizens.
Here was a new relationship to the courts and the legal process. The movement’s leaders were openly stating that the last and putatively most independent branch of government in the South had shown itself to be just another instrument of segregation. The “machinery of state government and police power,” as they called it, had lost its legitimacy. After speaking to the press, they proceeded with their illegal, Good Friday March towards the Birmingham City Hall, during which King, Ralph Abernathy, and a few others were arrested. By Easter Sunday, the rest of the leadership would be taken into custody for leading illegal processions that weekend.
It is a historical irony that Birmingham is remembered as the iconic act of civil disobedience, for this was the moment that King decided the authority of the state itself had to be questioned. The very moment for which he is lionized is the point at which he and his fellow leaders became something more than civil disobedients.
King was well aware of the momentousness of the decision. In Why We Can’t Wait (1964), his history of the Birmingham campaign, King noted, “We did an audacious thing, something we had never done in any other crusade. We disobeyed a court order.”