BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Birmingham’s mayor offered a blanket pardon Tuesday to thousands of demonstrators charged in this cauldron of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, a mostly symbolic forgiveness he acknowledges few may actually want.
Many blacks who braved police dogs and fire hoses say they carry their misdemeanor record with them as a badge of honor.
Mayor Larry Langford said he expects many will reject the mass pardon for that reason, but he felt it was important to offer.
“Sometimes saying you’re sorry does more for the person saying it than the person who was victimized,” Langford, who is black, said during a City Council meeting.
Gwendolyn Webb-Happling, who is now a pastor, said she and other protesters are not interested in a pardon now. She was 14 when she was arrested in Birmingham in 1963 and spent a week in custody at the city fairgrounds, charged with demonstrating without a permit. She never heard any more about the charge after she was released.
“We went to jail for a purpose — to be free,” she said. “Not just us but our children and our children’s children. We are proud of what we did.”
April Odom, a city spokeswoman, said court employees are now trying to verify how many protesters were arrested and how many of those were convicted.
Langford’s proclamation Tuesday urged those convicted to apply for pardons, but Odom said protesters who were just arrested may also apply for pardon documents to commemorate their actions.
A longtime civil-rights leader, Bishop Calvin Woods, accepted the pardon Tuesday on behalf of thousands of people.
Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted two former Ku Klux Klansmen for a church bombing that killed four black girls in downtown Birmingham in 1963, praised Langford’s offer.
“It is a big step . . . that I hope will be replicated throughout the country,” Jones said.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, an Atlanta resident who has been arrested countless times for civil disobedience since the 1950s, though not in Birmingham, said that while he felt Langford’s decision was probably politically motivated, it is a nice gesture.
“It vindicates the people who went to jail and says that what they did was a good thing,” Lowery said. “It shows that the city has grown to recognize the jail-ins as spiritual acts, not criminal acts. They didn’t violate the law; they helped fulfill the law.”
But some believe seeking a pardon would amount to an acknowledgment that they had committed a crime.
“That’s a slap in the face to the people who put their lives on the line in the civil-rights movement,” said the Rev. Joseph Rembert, a former pastor at the Montgomery church that Rosa Parks attended in the 1950s.
