The prosecution continues its case against King.
King and other indicted leaders agree to forgo a trial by jury, allowing Judge Carter to hear their case.
King and other indicted leaders are arraigned in circuit court and plead not guilty to boycott-related charges. Judge Carter assigns a trial date for the week of 19 March.
King, his father, and family drive to Montgomery. King goes to the county jail, where he is arrested and released on bond. He agrees to plead guilty to the speeding charge filed against him in January. King and other leaders meet with Arthur D. Shores and Peter Hall, Birmingham attorneys sent to Montgomery by the NAACP to assist in defending the indicted leaders.
King, Jr., is arrested for speeding in Claymont, Delaware, on his way to Atlanta.
King leaves Dexter in his car with a friend and the church secretary. After picking up three others at an MIA station, King is stopped for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone. He is arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, and jailed. Abernathy arrives to bail him out; as a crowd gathers at the jail, prison officials escort King out of the jail and drive him back to town. According to King, on this day and the previous two more than one hundred traffic citations are issued to car pool drivers. Later that evening, a group of King’s friends decide to organize protection for him.
In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. As ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth stated in the group’s “Birmingham Manifesto,” the campaign was “a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive” (ACMHR, 3 April 1963).
