 The situation reached a crisis on May 7 , 1963 . Breakfast in the jail took four hours to distribute to all the prisoners . Seventy members of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce pleaded with the protest organizers to stop the actions . The NAACP asked for sympathizers to picket in unity in 100 American cities . Nineteen rabbis from New York flew to Birmingham , equating silence about segregation to the atrocities of the Holocaust . Local rabbis disagreed and asked them to go home . The editor of The Birmingham News wired President Kennedy and pleaded with him to end the protests . 
