Amy Goodman
@DemocracyNow·3.2M subscribers·19.4K videos
"Fill the Jails": Rarely Seen Film Captures Martin Luther King on Success of 1963 Birmingham Boycott
Posted
February 25, 2013
Views
17,647
Likes
145
Comments
14
Engagement
February 25, 2013
17,647
145
14
0.90%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
3:34Now PlayingTo see much more from the film, "KingA Filmed Record," on Democracy Now!, visit In this clip from Democracy Now!'s coverage of the rarely seen documentary, "KingA Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis." In this clip, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reflects on the success of nonviolent direct action in the Birmingham campaign, a boycott of businesses in the Alabama city that discriminate against AfricanAmerican customers and refuse to employ them.
"The activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days, to my mind, mark the nonviolent movement coming of age," King says. "This is the first time in the history of our struggle that we have been able, literally, to fill the jails." The Birmingham boycott led to hundreds of arrests, including several arrests of Dr. King himself, who was moved to write his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: "The activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days, to my mind, mark the nonviolent movement coming of age. This is the first time in the history of our struggle that we have been able, literally, to fill the jails. And in a real sense, this is the fulfillment of a dream, for I've always felt that if we could fill the jails in our witness for freedom, it would be a magnificent expression of the determination of the Negro and a marvelous way to lay the whole issue before the conscience of the local and national community. And I think, in a real sense, this Birmingham movement is one of the most inspiring developments in the whole nonviolent struggle.
We must say to our white brothers all over the South who will try to keep us down, "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, and yet we cannot in our good conscience obey your evil laws. Do to us what you will, threaten our children, and we will still love you. Come into our homes at the midnight hours of life and take us out on some desolate highway and beat us and leave us there, and we will still love you. Run all around the continent, send your literature and say that we aren't worthy of integration, that we are too immoral, that we are too low, that we are too degraded, and yet we will still love you. Bomb our homes and go by our churches early in the morning and bomb them, if you please, and we will still love you. But we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. In winning the victory, we will not only win our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process."
To watch the entire special on Democracy Now! or to read the transcript, visit
Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,100+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday.
FOLLOW DEMOCRACY NOW! ONLINE:
Twitter: @democracynow
Subscribe on YouTube
Listen on SoundCloud
Daily Email News Digest
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
