The Rev. Frank Dukes was the recipient of the 2018 Mountaintop Award for his efforts in leading the Birmingham Selective Buying Campaign of 1962, while working as director of alumni affairs and public relations at Miles College, his alma mater. At the time, blacks legally could only work labor jobs and blacks and whites could not intermingle in shops and offices. “If we could stop the black people from shopping in downtown Birmingham, we could make Bull Conner understand,” said Dukes, referring to Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, who served as the elected commissioner of public safety for the city of Birmingham and became an international symbol of segregation. “We met with the power structure of white men,” Dukes said. “When we first started to meet with them, they tried to stop us from boycotting.”
After learning that retail stores operated on a 20 percent profit margin and black shoppers accounted for 25 percent of their shoppers, he planned the boycott that had a huge impact on the stores’ bottom lines. However, law continued to prevent stores from hiring black clerks. “If we are ever to have a just society for everybody [it will be] when all people regardless of race, creed or color have a right to justice, freedom and equality,” Dukes said. “Then that will be the ideal society that Jesus Christ would want us to have.”
Realizing the Dream Awards are presented annually by the University of Alabama Division of Community Affairs.
Cinematography by Preston Sullivan.
