Miles College: The HBCU That Launched Birmingham's Movement
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Just west of downtown Birmingham, on a campus in the city of Fairfield, sits Miles College, a small school that punched far above its weight in one of the most consequential chapters of American history.
Miles was founded in the eighteen nineties by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as Miles Memorial College, in honor of Bishop William H. Miles, himself a formerly enslaved man who had risen to lead the church, and the college was formally chartered by the state of Alabama in nineteen oh five. By the nineteen sixties it was a four-year liberal arts institution with roughly a thousand students, located six miles from Birmingham's downtown department stores.
In the spring of nineteen sixty-two, that proximity mattered enormously. Frank Dukes, the student body president and a Korean War veteran, organized an Anti-Injustice Committee and launched what the students called a Selective Buying Campaign. They urged Black consumers to stop spending money at Birmingham's downtown merchants until those merchants desegregated their lunch counters, drinking fountains, and hiring floors. Miles President Lucius Pitts, who took office in nineteen sixty-one, backed the students openly and worked behind the scenes, arranging secret meetings between Black leaders and sympathetic white business owners like Emil Hess of the Parisian department store.
The boycott worked. It drained enough revenue from downtown merchants to crack the city's hardened resistance, and it demonstrated to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that Birmingham's Black community was organized and ready. That intelligence persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and the SCLC to choose Birmingham for Project C, Confrontation, in nineteen sixty-three, the campaign whose photographs of fire hoses and police dogs shocked the world and accelerated the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four.
Miles alumni went on to shape the city they had fought for. Richard Arrington, a Miles graduate, became Birmingham's first Black mayor in nineteen seventy-nine. U.W. Clemon, also a Miles alumnus, became Alabama's first Black federal judge. The campus is quiet now, its brick buildings shaded by old trees, but the movement that changed America had one of its crucial early rehearsals right here.
