Talk:Birmingham riot of 1963

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A fact from Birmingham riot of 1963 appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 June 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that two 1963 bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, (effects pictured) caused a crisis that eventually involved 18,000 federal troops?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/June.

Wikipedia

A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on May 11, 2022.

Lack of citations in opening section

These are the first two paragraphs of this article:

The Birmingham crisis was a conflict in Birmingham, Alabama, that began with bombings on May 11, 1963. The bombings targeted leaders of the Birmingham campaign, a mass protest for racial justice. Their targets were a motel owned by A. G. Gaston and the parsonage of Rev. A. D. King, brother of Martin Luther King, Jr. The bombings were probably planned and carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The attacks triggered riots by nearby blacks, who met with repression from the Birmingham Police Department. The situation provoked a controversial military response from the United States federal government.

There are no citations given. I am not asserting that the statements are not accurate, but the lack of citations could easily lend itself to criticism, especially with phrases like "...probably planned and carried out..." and "...met with repression..." and "...controversial military response...". Some good citations would help make those statements fit better; Unsourced, they are open to accusations of POV. Could one of the editors who built this article look into this? Thanks KConWiki (talk) 11:51, 11 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The WP:LEAD can summarize the contents of the article, as long as those are well sourced. I think the statements made within the lead are well-established in the article, generally speaking. But I agree we can do better with the wording.

IMO, the trickiest claim is the attribution of the bombing to the KKK... the eyewitness report from the first bombing suggests that the perpetrators got out of a police car. They have since also been linked to the KKK, hence: "Contemporary historians tend to believe that the bombing was carried out by four KKK members, including Gary Rowe and known bomber Bill Holt" — sourced to Gary May. (Diane McWhorter reaches a similar conclusion.) The statement in the lead is a shorter summary of this claim, but I think still accurate.
"Controversial military response" to me lacks clarity and might be changed to something more literal, such as "a large-scale military mobilization". (Even "unprecedented large-scale military mobilization" would still be fairly accurate.)
I guess "repression" might be a loaded word. And whatever it was, it came from Alabama State Troopers in addition to Birmingham Police. From what I have read: it was Saturday night, and most everybody was drunk, including the Black folks hanging out, the cops, and the journalists. People witnessed the bombing directly, got pissed, and got rowdy; a cop got stabbed; skulls got cracked; eventually a 28 block area was sealed off and eventually everybody either went inside or went to jail. (Many people ended up inside houses they didn't expect to end up in!)

Does that info help? Maybe we can draft a lead rewrite? Peace, groupuscule (talk) 01:51, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In general all material in lead will be in sourced sentences in sections in body of the text, hence there is no need for inline references in the lead. Sometimes folks leave inline citations in lead if it is an exceptional claim and someone keeps adding ^{[citation needed]} tags there. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:14, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Title change

Hello, I am questioning the title "Birmingham crisis". The reason is this term for the event doesn't appear much, if at all, in the literature on the event, either academic or journalistic. It's almost always referred to as the "Birmingham riot" or "riots in Birmingham". I suppose it could be argued that the historically notable event here is BOTH the bombings and the riot, yet bombings in Birmingham had been going on for years, and bombings against MLK and his associates had also been going on for years. The central and novel event, as the quotes from Malcolm X indicate - as well as the scholarship that I've cited in the "Significance" section show - was the riot. The military mobilization, while unprecedented, was an after effect of the black unrest. The military order was also quite restrained, as the troops were never actually deployed on the streets (the full National Guard deployment on the streets of Cambridge Maryland in June of 1963, is probably more historically significant). I think the real significance of this event is the long-term effect on government policy, including the Civil Rights Act (as well as the long-term effect on movement culture and strategy, which I plan to write more about on the page).

Furthermore, if someone searches on Google for "Birmingham riot 1963," they will not find this page (at least not in the first 40 results)! They will find the "Birmingham campaign" page, which is ironic, since the riot is not supposed to be part of SCLC's campaign. I propose that the title be changed to "Birmingham riot" to conform to the literature and correspond with people's web searches. Either that or the information in the article be fully absorbed into the "Birmingham campaign" page. GPRamirez5 (talk) 17:44, 25 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Groupuscule- originator of the page- and I discussed suspending the infobox pending the successful location of a public domain photo to replace the current one (the current one is of the bombing by -presumably- the KKK, not of the riot or its results). I'll do this tonight unless there are objections. --GPRamirez5 (talk) 14:53, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Inaccuracy of this article

Too much of this article is a direct lift from Carry Me Home, by McWhorter. Almost to the point of cut and paste. Which unfortunately is inaccurate in places. It is inadequately sourced. I was there at the time as a Journalist and it does match my memory or contemporary accounts in many aspects.

There is a reference to State Troopers on horseback with submachine guns. Typically, to my memory and Hedrick Smith’s Article in the NYTIMEs at that time had State troopers there with riot guns, i.e. carbines and shotguns in a some instances.

The State Troopers were a problem, always, with Al Lingo as head. But the majority of the anti-riot active was by Birmingham Police. As bad as they could be, they wanted to avoid Lingo’s involvement as much as possible.

What bothers is that this article tends to be a cut and paste from one book. It was Pulitzer Prize winner, but that does not mean that it was fully fact checked. JosephMChapman (talk) 13:34, 6 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]