Civil Rights Events

Birmingham 1963

16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

A Horrendous Event

 

Fast forward past Governor George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door,” barring the admittance of two qualified black students June 11 to the University of Alabama.

 

Fast forward past the murder of Mississippi activist Medgar Evers, ambushed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, June 12.

 

Fast forward past Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “March on Washington” and “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial August 28.

 

Fast forward past Governor Wallace’s attempt September 9 to prevent black students in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee from entering five all-white elementary and secondary schools in those cities despite being ordered by federal judges not to interfere.

 

Fast forward past President Kennedy’s order September 10 that the Alabama National Guard be federalized and that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara use any of the nation’s armed forces he deemed necessary to enforce school desegregation in Alabama.

 

We stop to focus on a horrendous event that occurred on Sunday morning, September 15, at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

 

Many of the civil rights protest marches that took place in Birmingham during the 1960s began at the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers like King.

 

KKK members had routinely called in bomb threats intended to disrupt civil rights meetings as well as services at the church (Birmingham 1).

 

… the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church … greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service (16^th Street NPS 1).

 

On September 15, 1963, 14-year-old Cynthia Morris Wesley and three other members of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church youth choir left their Sunday school class to freshen up for their roles as ushers in the main service. The lesson for the day had been “The Love That Forgives.” Eleven-year-old Denise McNair met Cynthia and her classmates in the women’s lounge, in the northeast corner of the basement.

 

Carole Robertson, 14, was the most mature of the girls. She was wearing medium-high heels for the first time, shiny black ones bought the day before. Carole’s mother had gotten her a necklace to go with the shoes and put a winter coat on layaway for her.

 

Also in the lounge was 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins. One of eight children, Addie was a little on the shy side, but she looked radiant in her white usher’s dress. Cynthia and Carole also wore white. The three ushers were standing with young Denise by the window, which looked out onto Sixteenth Street at ground level. So elegant was this church that even the restroom window was made of stained glass.

 

Addie’s younger sister Sarah Collins stood at the washbowl. At the request of a Sunday school teacher, 15-year-old Bernadine Mathews came into the lounge to encourage the girls to return to their classrooms. Cynthia said she needed to push her hair up one more time. “Cynthia,” Bernadine chided her, “children who don’t obey the Lord live only half as long” (McWhorter 1-2).

Carolyn McKinstry was the 15-year-old Sunday-school secretary of 16th Street Baptist Church.  In her book, While the World Watched: a Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement, she narrated this:

 

At the end of Sunday school, I would get up and make a report. Around 10:15 a.m. I got up to collect the reports. I started upstairs. You had to pass the girls’ bathroom. I paused at the doorway, because they [Addie Mae, Carol, Cynthia, Denise] were all standing there, combing their hair, playing, and talking. We were all good friends, and we were excited about two things that Sunday. It was Youth Sunday, and that meant we got to do everything. We were the choir. We were the ushers, the speakers. The second thing was, after church we were going to have a gathering with punch and dancing. I knew my report had to be done at a certain time, so I went on up the stairs. When I got to the office, the phone was ringing. The caller on the other end of the phone said, “Three minutes.” Male caller. But he hung up just as quickly as he said that. I stepped out into the sanctuary to get more reports, and I only took about 15 steps into the sanctuary, and the bomb exploded (Joiner 1).

 

Sarah Collins Cox, then 12, was in the basement with her sister Addie Mae, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, a friend, getting ready to attend a youth service. "I remember Denise asking Addie to tie her belt," Cox, now 46, says in a near whisper, recalling the morning of Sept. 15, 1963. "Addie was tying her sash. Then it happened." A savage explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite stashed under a stairwell ripped through the northeast corner of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. "I couldn't see anymore because my eyes were full of glass - 23 pieces of glass," says Cox. "I didn't know what happened. I just remember calling, 'Addie, Addie.' But there was no answer. I don't remember any pain. I just remember wanting Addie" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 1).

 

A motorist was blown from his car. A pedestrian calling his wife from a pay phone across the street was whooshed, receiver still in hand, into the Social Cleaners, whose front door had been whipped open.

 

Pastor John Cross moved toward the fog that clung to the northeast side of his church. There was a 7- by 7-foot hole in the wall of what had been the women’s lounge. The bomb had made a crater 2 1/2 feet deep and 5 1/2 feet wide, demolishing a foundation that had been a 30-inch-thick mass of stone facing over a brick-and-masonry wall (McWhorter 3).

 

Inside the church, a teacher screamed, “Lie on the floor! Lie on the floor!” Rafters collapsed, a skylight fell on the pulpit. Part of a stained glass window shattered, obliterating the face of Christ. A man cried: “Everybody out! Everybody out!” A stream of sobbing Negroes stumbled through the litter — past twisted metal folding chairs, past splintered wooden benches, past shredded songbooks and Bibles. A Negro woman staggered out of the Social Dry Cleaning store shrieking “Let me at ’em! I’ll kill ’em!”— and fainted. White plaster dust fell gently for a block around.

 

Police cars poured into the block — and even as the cops plunged into the church, some enraged Negroes began throwing rocks at them.

 

On top [of the rubble of bricks] was a child’s white lace choir robe. A civil defense captain lifted the hem of the robe. “Oh, my God,” he cried. “Don’t look!” Beneath lay the mangled body of a Negro girl.

 

Barehanded, the workers dug deeper into the rubble — until four bodies had been uncovered. The head and shoulder of one child had been completely blown off (Time 1).

 

“Lord, that’s Denise,” said Deacon M.W. Pippen, owner of the Social Cleaners. Denise McNair was Pippen’s granddaughter. Only then did Cross realize the corpses were girls. Pippen had recognized Denise’s no-longer-shiny patent-leather shoe. The clothes had been blown off the girls’ bodies.

 

Samuel Rutledge, looking for his 3 1/2-year-old son, instead found a female buried alive, moaning and bleeding from the head. He carried her through the hole toward the street. “Do you know who she is?” people asked one another. Again, Cross thought she had to be 40 or 45 years old. But Sarah Collins was only 12. After being loaded into an ambulance (colored), she sang “Jesus Loves Me” and occasionally said, “What happened? I can’t see.” The ambulance driver delivered Sarah to University Hospital and returned to pick up his next cargo, the corpse of her sister Addie Mae.

 

Approaching her father in the crowd on the sidewalk, Maxine Pippen McNair cried, “I can’t find Denise.” M.W. Pippen told his daughter, “She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.” Watching his daughter take in the significance of the shoe he held up, he screamed, “I’d like to blow the whole town up” (McWhorter 3-4).

The remains were … carried out to waiting ambulances. A youth rushed forward, lifted a sheet and wailed: “This is my sister! My God — she’s dead!”

 

The church‘s pastor, the Rev. John Cross, hurried up and down the sidewalk, urging the milling crowd to go home. “Please go home!” he said. “The Lord is our shepherd, and we shall not want.” Another Negro minister added his pleas. “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed,” he said. “We must have love in our hearts for these men.” But a Negro boy screamed, “We give love — and we get this!” And another youth yelled: “Love ’em? Love ’em? We hate ’em!” A man wept: “My grandbaby was one of those killed! Eleven years old! I helped pull the rocks off her! You know how I feel? I feel like blowing the whole town up” (Time 2-3).

 

Carolyn McKinstry recalled: When the bomb exploded, it felt like the building shook. Everything came crashing in, the glass and the windows in the church. I fell on the floor because someone said, “Hit the floor.” We were all on the floor for just a couple of seconds. And then I could hear people getting up and running out. I got up, and I went outside. I was looking for my two little brothers. One of the first things we noticed was that the church was already surrounded by policemen. People were in panic mode. They were everywhere looking for their family members.

 

When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb (Joiner 2-3).

 

“I will never stop crying thinking about it,” Barbara Cross, now 68, told TIME in an emotional phone conversation. Her father, John Cross, was the pastor at the church, which was Birmingham’s largest African-American congregation; she was 13 and in its basement the day that Ku Klux Klan members planted a bomb under the building’s stairs. The blast was strong enough to send stone shooting into cars parked across the street and to knock people off their feet in nearby buildings. And inside the church, things were worse.

 

The bombing killed four of Cross’ classmates who had gone to the bathroom: three 14-year-olds, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. (Sarah Collins Rudolph, often referred to as the “Fifth Little Girl,” lost an eye but survived her injuries.)

 

“Addie wanted me to come with her, but then the teacher stopped me and gave me a writing assignment that saved my life,” Cross recalls.

 

Soon after, she heard “the most horrific noises I had ever heard in my life.” That was followed by the smell of smoke.

 

Her first thought was that Birmingham had been attacked by Cuba, she says. “The building shook, and I was hit in the head with a light fixture. I remember everything getting dark,” she says, “and I thought the United States was being attacked.” A church official led her and her younger sister and brother out by the hand. Somehow, she made her way home, and stayed the night at the home of a neighbor who was a nurse, who removed the glass fragments from her scalp and treated the area.

 

Dale Long, now 66, was 11 and in the basement that day too. “Some of us boys should have headed upstairs [to services] by then, but we got carried away talking about who’s going to have the best football team,” he recalls. “Suddenly, the big floor-to-ceiling bookcases started moving, and we looked at each other and ran. Even though it was dark and dusty and smoky, I knew how to get out. I could see my dad running down the street. I had never seen my dad run before. He hugged us unlike anything I could ever remember and said we’ll be alright. He took us to his office in the motel, where reporters who were staying there were arguing over the two pay phones in the lobby that they were trying to use to report stories back [to their bureaus].”

 

“If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”

 

[Barbara] Cross says her father “blamed himself for the bombing.”

 

“My parents knew the church had bomb threats, but they never told us about them because they didn’t want to scare us from going to church,” she says. “My father took responsibility because he gave Dr. King permission to use the church for protests. When he got older, he’d cry when he talked about it. He carried those wounds to his grave” (Waxman 1-4).

 

The bomber had hidden under a set of cinder block steps on the side of the church, tunneled under the basement and placed a bundle of dynamite under what turned out to be the girls' rest room (16^th Street NPR 1).

 

 

Works cited:

 

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.”  NPR.  September 15, 2003.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1431932

 

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).”  National Park Service.  March 23, 2016.  Web.  https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstreetbaptist.htm

 

“Birmingham Church Bombing.”  History.  A&E Television Networks.  August 28, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/birmingham-church-bombing

 

Joiner, Lottie L.  “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.”  Daily Beast.  September 15, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-years-later-the-sixteenth-street-baptist-church-bombing

 

McWhorter, Diance.  “The Stark Reminders of the Birmingham Church Bombing.” 
Smithsonian Magazine.  November 2013.  Web.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-stark-reminders-of-the-birmingham-church-bombing-4304931/

 

Smith, Kyle; Wescott, Gail Cameron; and Craig, David Cobb.  “The Day the Children Died.”  People Magazine.  Web.  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm

 

Time Magazine.  September 27, 1963.  Web.  http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-baptist-church-bombing-anniversary/

 

Waxman, Olivia B.  “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.”  Time.  Web.  http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-baptist-church-bombing-anniversary/

Civil Rights Events

Birmingham 1963

Children's Crusade

Resolution and Retaliation

 

On Monday, May 6, Comedian Dick Gregory arrived in Birmingham and marched with the young demonstrators. Like hundreds before him, he was arrested. Law enforcement officials were working over time to keep up with the arrests. …  Once again, Bull Connor summoned his firemen. With no place to run, no trees for protection, the demonstrators were hit with the full force of the water. By Monday night, 2,500 demonstrators had been arrested, over 2,000 of them children. All jails in the city and county were filled (No 5).

 

Tuesday, May 7th.  Fighting broke out between blacks and whites in the downtown area. Leading a group of child marchers, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was hit with the full force of a fire hose and had to be hospitalized.  The situation was rapidly approaching the riot proportions that James Bevel had feared.

 

Attorney General Robert Kennedy [had] sent Burke Marshall, his chief civil rights assistant, to facilitate negotiations between prominent black citizens and representatives of Birmingham’s Senior Citizen's Council, the city’s business leadership.  The Senior Citizen’s Council sought a moratorium on street protests as an act of good faith before any final settlement was declared … Marshall encouraged campaign leaders to halt demonstrations, accept an interim compromise that would provide partial success, and negotiate the rest of their demands afterward. Some black negotiators were open to the idea … Hospitalized Shuttlesworth was not present at the negotiations … On 8 May King told the negotiators he would accept the compromise and call the demonstrations to a halt.

 

When Shuttlesworth learned that King intended to announce a moratorium he was furious—about both the decision to ease pressure off white business owners and the fact that he, as the acknowledged leader of the local movement, had not been consulted. Feeling betrayed, Shuttlesworth reminded King that he could not legitimately speak for the black population of Birmingham on his own: “Go ahead and call it off … When I see it on TV, that you have called it off, I will get up out of this, my sickbed, with what little ounce of strength I have, and lead them back into the street. And your name’ll be Mud” (Birmingham Campaign 7).   

 

Despite Shuttlesworth’s strong disapproval, the decision had been made and there was no going back.  Even after Burke Marshall tried to calm the ACMHR leader, he continued to rant and rave.  “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this.  You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T.  I’m sorry, but I cannot compromise my principles and the principles we established.”  Frustrated and disappointed, Shuttleworth went home (Jeter-Bennett 173-174; 349).

 

 King made the announcement anyway, but indicated that demonstrations might be resumed if negotiations did not resolve the situation shortly (Birmingham Campaign 7).   

 

Birmingham lawyer and social activist David Vann recalled: “After we reached the settlement, … to say we were going to take down the [segregationist] signs. We'd have a 60 day cooling off period and desegregate lunch counters and begin a program of employment in downtown Birmingham with at least three clerks hired. I think somebody in New York asked Reverend Shuttlesworth, did he -- Why he would settle for just three clerks in downtown Birmingham. And he said, ‘I meant three in every store.’ And the thing almost came unglued” (No 7).

 

The settlement [agreed upon May 10] called for desegregating lunch counters, department store dressing rooms, public restrooms and drinking fountains within the next 90 days; hiring and promoting African Americans on a nondiscriminatory basis, hiring blacks in stores and other industries by a newly appointed private fair employment committee within 60 days; releasing movement demonstrators on bond or “on their personal recognizance,” and creating an official biracial committee to convene two weeks later (Jeter-Barrett 179-180).

 

The next evening, May 11, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in the nearby town of Bessemer to express its outrage at and opposition to the accords.  Grand Dragon Robert Shelton criticized white negotiators for their involvement.  “These stores that want the Negro trade so much, these people who are selling out the whites, they don’t need our business.”

 

Threatening to harass those responsible for the recent settlement, Klansmen returned to Birmingham, raiding black neighborhoods, setting off a series of riots.  At 10:45 p.m. a group of vigilantes bombed the home of Dr. King’s younger brother Reverent A. D. King in an attempt to kill the SCLC leader.  Luckily, all seven members of his [A. D. King’s] family made it out safely.  Nearby neighbors quickly ran to the scene of the explosion to check on the King family.

 

As news of the bombing spread, more than one thousand people converged on the site.  A number of bystanders suggested retaliating against the vigilantes as well as the police officers who were trying to disperse the crowd.  Afraid a riot might break out, A.D. King addressed the bystanders about the importance of nonviolence.

 

Just as the reverend and other church leaders worked to disperse the crowd, a second bombing occurred at the Gaston Motel.  Vigilantes targeted Room 30 in hopes Dr. King would be there, but the SCLC leader had already left town to spend the weekend in Atlanta.  Moments after the explosion a crowd of black onlookers formed near the motel (Jeter-Bennett 182-183).

 

When law enforcement arrived, bystanders broke into frenzy.  “We threw rocks at white folks’ cars,” said Washington Booker, “roamed the streets, vandalized, burned anything the white folks owned.”

 

Once peaceful bystanders now began throwing bricks and bottles at police officers.  Chanting, “lill ‘em, kill ‘em”, they took to the streets, attacking patrol cars, fire trucks and storefronts.  As fires raged, Birmingham’s evening sky glowed in hues of red and orange.

 

Not everyone went downtown to riot.  Some came out of curiosity.  The Streeter family drove downtown that night.  “We got into a car and we came downtown.  It was scary – a full riot,” remembered Arnetta Streeter Gary.  Audrey Faye Hendricks rode downtown as well.  As they neared the Gaston Motel, they saw fires and turned around.  “It was a dangerous situation,” Hendricks said.  James Stewart’s parents decided not to go downtown, but he was aware of the rioting and what it all meant.  “The battle intensified,” he said.  “We went to jail … and we won-like a soccer game… The bombing were at a different level; they were trying to kill somebody.”

 

After having spent days in jail, some of the youth demonstrators were shocked by the amount of violence following the agreement.  At its height, nearly 2,500 people vandalized white and black owned businesses, as well as looted grocery stores, liquor stores, and other businesses.

 

Local law enforcement and sate patrolmen arrived downtown determined to restore order.  They stormed the streets beating rioters, releasing police dogs, and threatening to shoot protestors.  With so many rioters and onlookers crowding the roadways, it was impossible for firemen to extinguish burning buildings or for medics to care adequately for the injured.  Bull Connor’s infamous whiter armored truck thundered across the city, with an officer blaring through its loudspeaker, “Everybody get off the streets now.  We cannot get ambulances in here to help people unless you clear the streets.”

 

Witnessing the violence and the increasing danger, movement leaders began assisting police in their effort to restore calm.  SCLC’s Wyatt Walker used a megaphone to speak to the crowd.  “Please do not throw bricks anymore,” he pleaded.  “Ladies and gentlemen, will you cooperate by going to your homes?”  The rioters refused to comply. Some even yelled back: “They started it!  They started it!”

 

A. D. King tried to reach the people.  “We’re not mad anymore.  We’re saying: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’”  He voiced his vehement opposition to the use of violence claiming it was the “tactic of the white man” and asked the people to join him in prayer and song before returning home peacefully (Jeter-Bennett 368-372).

 

 A few hours before dawn, the demonstrators finally made their way back to their homes.  The riot, the first of its kind in the 1960s, was over.  The uprising, though, illustrated to citizens, black and white, that it would require more than schoolchildren and nonviolent protests to fix Birmingham (Jeter-Bennett 183-184).

 

  Only dismantling the city’s historic white power structure and the ideology of white supremacy would provide black citizens full rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Until then, the unholy trinity of economic, social, and political oppression continued.

 

 On May 12 President John F. Kennedy ordered 3,000 federal troops into position at military bases near Birmingham and began to make preparations to federalize the Alabama National Guard.

 

On May 20 the Birmingham Board of Education announced all students who participated in the demonstrations would be either suspended or expelled. The SCLC and the NAACP immediately went to the local federal district court, where the judge upheld the ruling. On May 22, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision (King 8).

 

On May 23, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on the municipal conflict in Birmingham.  The justices sided with Birmingham voters and declared Albert Boutwell and the rest of the newly elected city council the official governing body of the city.  … Bull Connor’s career as a political leader was over (Jeter-Bennett 190).  On the same day more than one thousand black student demonstrators were permitted to return to their classes.

 

Virulent supremacists were not done. 

 

 

Works cited:

 

“Birmingham Campaign.”  Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  Web.  https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/birmingham-campaign

 

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell.  “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.”  The Ohio State University.  2016.  Web.  https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1452263338&disposition=inline

 

“King, Children's Crusade sparked new dynamic in Civil Rights Movement.”  The Philadelphia Tribune.  January 8, 2016.  Web.  http://www.phillytrib.com/special_sections/king-children-s-crusade-sparked-new-dynamic-in-civil-rights/article_32a1f9dd-66df-574c-8ddb-83be1a2e77ce.html

“No Easy Walk.”  Amazon AWS.  Web.  http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/EYES%20ON%20THE%20PRIZE/Transcripts/EOTP-104-NoEasyWalk_TRANSCRIPT.pdf

 



Civil Rights Events

Birmingham 1963

Children's Crusade

Crisis Conditions

 



Even with Bevel’s activist training, nothing could prepare the young people for their time in jail.  “Jail was a totally different experience,” recalled Larry Russell.  “I’d never been on the other side of the big wall before.”

 

Bull Connor ordered every demonstrator interrogated.  Audrey Hendricks, who was 9-years-old at the time, recalled: “They were asking me a lot of questions about ‘Why did you march?  Who told you to march?  Did they force you to march?”  By the end of the first day, one of the city jails had reached capacity.  As a result of the overcrowding, other jails and the fairgrounds had to be used.  Girls ages 13 to 18 were housed at the 4-H Club building, while the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail took in the young boys.

 

Police held those children younger than thirteen in the same cellblocks as the older children.  “We was in there about two weeks.  About two weeks, and we be singin’.  Oh my God we be singin’,” said Mary Hardy Lykes.  “When they put us in jail, the guys was in one side and the girls in another side, and you could hear them.  And they would sing songs, then the girls would sing a song to answer them back.”

 

When a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of black girls at the Jefferson County Detention Home and asked if they wanted to go home they all replied, “Yes!”  12-year-old Anita Woods, however, added that she would do it all again.  “I’ll keep marching till I get freedom.”  The reporter then asked her what is freedom and she answered, “It’s equal rights.  I want to go to any school and any store downtown and sit in the movies.  And sit around in a cafeteria.”  Freedom for her meant enjoying the same rights and privileges afforded whites.

 

Not every demonstrator remembered his or her time in jail fondly.

 

James W. Stewart recalled being in a cell with close to three hundred boys and deplorable toilet facilities.  “You went to the bathroom in front of three or four hundred people.  The only ventilation was a screen that ran across the ceiling, high up over the toilets, and the ceiling was very high.”

 

An article written in the Chicago Daily Defender reported that it took officers over four hours to serve a breakfast to grits, applesauce, and bacon to the demonstrators.  “It took from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. to feed the 1,319 persons, which included 800 demonstrators, breakfast at [one particular] jail.”  According to chief city jailer Robert Austin, one jail “ran out of food and had to provide a slim diet for breakfast.”  When no more beds were available, prisoners, both male and female, slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the jailhouse floors.

 

Some of the children had the fortune of sleeping with a blanket, but others had only the clothes they wore, and the body heat of a nearby demonstrator to keep them warm.

 

When the jail cells reached maximum capacity, which meant the officers could not cram another soul into the space, they started putting children in isolation chambers.  Miriam McClendon recalled being placed in a “sweat box” as a form of punishment.  “The sweat box was a little small room, closet size and you had to step down into it.  Just a few inches, not far and they had water at the bottom of it.  It was like a steel coffin.”

 

McClendon was forced to stand in the “sweat-box” with a group of girls.  It was so tightly packed, the warden and a guard had to use their own body weight to shut the door.  She remembers feeling the heat from the other bodies and hearing the other girls cry and moan from discomfort and fear.  A similar experience took place at the south side jail where officers placed male protesters into “The Pit,” a “three-story high room with a concrete floor where drunks usually dried out.”

 

“The ladies had a lot of stories of being mistreated – not abused necessarily, but just mistreated,” said Carolyn Maull McKinstry.  “Many felt deprived, disrespected.”  She recalled stories of imprisonment from a female classmate that included a young woman stationed at the state fairgrounds who shared with an officer her need for certain personal products but no one tended to her requests during the five days she spent in jail  Reports of these types of conditions worried parents and others.  Then again, filling up the jails strained the city’s financial and personnel resources.  The jail-in put added pressure on the city to negotiate (Jeter-Bennett 155-158: 309-318).

 

Gloria Washington Lewis…recalled peanut butter sandwiches, and an attempted rape.

She had her own reasons for protesting. ''I wanted to know why I couldn't ride a train, why I couldn't see a duck in a park,'' she said. ''Those are wounds that don't ever heal.'' And her father, a coal miner afraid of risking his job, winked. ''He had a little look in his eyes: 'I can't go, but you can,' '' she said.

 

She was arrested at City Hall after sneaking through police lines and finally pulling a poster from her pants. ''Free at Last,'' it said. She had just turned 16, but gave her age as 15, hoping for more lenient treatment. She did not get it.

 

At the state fairgrounds where Ms. Lewis and hundreds of other girls were jailed and fed peanut butter sandwiches, she shared a bunk bed with one girl who arrived disheveled, ''a mess, her clothes torn off.''

 

The girl said the officer who arrested her had raped her in the back of a police wagon. That night, a man in uniform tried to attack the same girl, Ms. Lewis said. She and a few other girls fended him off, but the next day they were charged with attacking him and taken to the county jail.

 

She said she spent two weeks in the stifling ''sweat box,'' then waited even longer for someone to figure out where she was and get her. ''Every time somebody would get out, I'd say, 'Call my daddy,' '' she said. ''But the jail kept saying I wasn't there'” (Halbfinger 7).

 

The morning newspapers that landed on Kennedy’s breakfast table showed students braving the assaults on the front lines. In one shot, a uniformed officer in round shades and a narrow tie yanked on high school sophomore Walter Gadsden’s sweater while a German shepherd lunged toward the student’s stomach with mouth open, fangs bared.

 

Gazing at the images of water cannons and police dogs, Kennedy was disgusted. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later noted the students’ impact: “What Bull Connor did down there, and the dogs and the hoses and the pictures with the Negroes, is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done.”

 

It was then that the president and the attorney general began considering a path toward comprehensive civil rights legislation. Until students took to the streets, John Kennedy had failed to act; for two and a half years, he had been slow to recognize the plight of blacks in America. Throughout his brief term, he had been focused on other matters: foreign affairs, the national economy, the space program. But now his eyes had been opened  (Levingston 5).

 

Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington, D.C. anti-trust lawyer Burke Marshall to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.  Marshall’s task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham city officials and business leaders to facilitate attainment of a compromise settlement that would restore order to the city.  Urged by Marshall, the opposing parties began negotiations.

 

On Sunday, May 5th, a mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church (Sixth Avenue and 10th Street South). The rally culminated with a march to the Southside jail and a massive demonstration in Memorial Park across from the jail.

 

Black adults became more involved in the campaign.   A number of them joined youth marchers on the front lines, while others continued to stand on the sideline, showing support through their presence.  … From behind the fence parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children.  Emma Smith Young remembers her granddaughter going to jail for marching without a permit.  “One of my grandchildren was jailed at Fair Park.  She started calling back to her mother, saying that she wanted to get out of that place.  They had her in there in the rain.  They didn’t have anywhere else to put them.  They put them out there in that [jailhouse] yard with the high fence.  Up so high, they couldn’t get over the fence.

 

Several [parents] had visited the fairgrounds where the police held more than 800 children in hog pens.  Separated by high barbed wired fences, parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children.  As they stood yelling out to their children, it began to rain.  Police officers walked to their cars and sat inside to stay dry.  With nothing to keep the children from being rained upon, parents grew increasingly concerned about their children’s safety and demanded that the ACMHR-SCLC leaders address the situation (Jeter-Barrett 166-167; 322).

 

Freeman Hrabowski, previously arrested, was held for five days. When the jails became full, he and many other children were confined at the fairgrounds.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement officials visited the grounds outside where they were incarcerated.

 

I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand (Birmingham 5).

 

Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.”  R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.  April 26, 2013.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/04/26/april-26-2013-birmingham-and-the-childrens-march/16051/

 

Halbfinger, David M.  “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.”  The New York Times.  May 2, 2003.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us/birmingham-recalls-a-time-when-children-led-the-fight.html

 

Jeter-Bennett, Gisell.  “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.”  The Ohio State University.  2016.  Web.  https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1452263338&disposition=inline

 

Levingston, Steven.  “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.”  The Washington Post.  March 23, 2018.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/20/children-have-changed-america-before-braving-fire-hoses-and-police-dogs-for-civil-rights/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e1bfba8a276



Civil Rights Events

Birmingham 1963

Children's Crusade

Fire Hoses and Police Dogs

 

On May 3, more than 3,000 student protesters and onlookers filled the streets of Birmingham.  Unlike the day before, Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor wanted his officers to keep the marchers away from the downtown business sector without arresting anyone because the city and county jails were filled to capacity.  Toward this end, Conner ordered Captain G. V. Evans of the Birmingham Fire Department to use fire hoses on the demonstrators.  The fire hoses, explained, Connor, “were equipped with monitor guns that had the ability to remove bark off a tree at a distance on one hundred feet.

 

Capt. Evans warned the marchers to disperse, and when they ignored his command, he signaled the firemen to hose the schoolchildren.  In the nonviolent workshops conducted by James Bevel and other movement organizers, the children learned to protect themselves by placing their hands on their faces and tucking their bodies into a ball.  But the pressure from the hoses forced many demonstrators to retreat.  “The little bit of training we had did no good,” said Arnetta Streeter Gary. “I can remember us balling up hugging together, and the water just washing us down the street. … Forceful.  It was like pins maybe, sticking you in your arms and legs and things.  The water was very, very forceful (Jeter-Bennett 147-150; 285).

 

To fight the high-powered blasts, some children joined hands trying to keep their balance in a human chain. But the torrents were too fierce; hit by the rocket-bursts of water the kids whirled one way, then the other, dragging down their comrades.

 

To supercharge the water jets, firefighters had funneled the flow of two hoses into one nozzle, packing it with such ballistic fury it dislodged bricks from buildings. These jets were driven across the kids’ bodies, lacerating their flesh, tearing clothing off their backs; hitting the elm trees in nearby Kelly Ingram Park, the blasts ripped off the bark. The children, knocked to the pavement, crawled away; some struggled to their feet with bloody noses and gashes on their faces (Levingston 4).

 

 

Captain Evans had now ordered all marchers and onlookers to evacuate Ingram Park.  One person reported having seen “two girls run through Kelly Ingram Park clad in their undergarments after the water streams ripped away their outer clothing.”

 

 

“Once that water … hit me,” said Gwendolyn Sanders, “I didn’t know if I was going to survive it or not because the pressure from that hose was so great that it would knock your breath away” (Jeter-Bennett 148-149; 288).

 

 

Carolyn McKinstry recalled: The water came out with such tremendous pressure and, uh, it’s a very painful experience, if you’ve never been hit by a fire hose and I thought, whoa. You know, I got knocked down and then we found ourselves crouching together and trying to find something to hold onto. People ran, people hid, people hugged buildings or whatever they could to keep the water hoses from just…just knocking them here and there (Birmingham 6).

 

 

The water hose hurt a lot.  I was hit with the water hose on this side running from the water.  I had a navy blue sweater on.  The water tore a big hole in my sweater and swiped part of my hair off on that side.  I just remember the sting and pain on my face.  It was very painful, and you couldn’t escape.  There were a few points where we were trying to stand up and hold onto a wall.  It was a terrific pain from the force, which I later learned was something like one hundred pounds of force per inch.  That was the point at which I started thinking, ‘Do I really want to be a part of this, or do I have what it takes to continue on this level?’  … I honestly was afraid of dogs, did not like being wet up.  I felt very disrespected when I was wet up with the water and my hair.  We were just marching (Jeter-Bennett 148).

 

 

As marchers screamed, firemen could be heard yelling, “Knock the niggers down.”  Some of the spectators grew angry at the sigh of young people being knocked down by the torrents of water.

 

 

Arnetta Streeter Gary’s parents witnessed it all. “My daddy and mother, a lot of adults, came around.  … Little did my daddy know I was participating.  When he saw the firemen putting water on me, he got upset,” she said.  “He was going to … turn the water off.  My mother, she was struggling with him to keep him from going over there.  They would have killed him.  That’s what she told me.  … ‘You could have gotten your father killed.’”

 

 

While Mrs. Streeter successfully restrained her husband, other bystanders began to retaliate by throwing rocks, soda bottles, and bricks at the officers and firemen.  Washington Booker III had not attended the nonviolent workshops and there was no one there to restrain him and his friends.  “We would throw a brick, a bottle, and then we’d take off … That’s what we were doing while everybody else was peacefully marching – looking for opportunities to strike a blow” (Jeter-Bennett 150, 292).

 

 

Washington Booker, … a student at Ullman, … had been reluctant about participating in the marches — not because he didn't believe in the cause, but because he knew what could happen. Booker grew up in the projects in a place called Loveman Village. "It was nothing for the police to call you over to the car and tell you to stick your head in the window so they could tell you something. Then they would roll up the window on you," he said. "Rarely did a day go by when you didn't hear about a black man or a black boy being abused by police (King 3).

 

[Bull] Connor responded [to the rock and brick throwing] by ordering the police department’s K-9 unit to the park.  “All you gotta do is tell them you’re going to bring the dogs.  Look at ‘em run.  … I want to see them dogs work.  Look at those niggers run,” said the police commissioner.

 

 

Mary Gadson, a teenager demonstrator, vividly remembered Bull Connor threatening to sic dogs on her and some other marchers.  “We were in a group that was supposed to march downtown, but we never made it because the police stopped us.  Bull Connor was right out on Sixth Avenue.  He had the dogs out there, and he said if we marched, he was going to turn the dogs on us.  They had the fire hoses also.  The water was strong.  It could knock you down.  And he let ‘em go and sprayed us.  I got wet and almost got bitten” (Jeter-Bennett 151, 296).

 

 

The next day [Saturday, May 4], King offered encouragement to the parents of the young protesters in a speech delivered at the 16th Street Baptist Church. According to biography.com, he said, “Don’t worry about your children; they are going to be all right. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are not only doing a job for themselves, but for all of America and for all of mankind” (King 4).

 

 

President Kennedy had already called Dr. King to ask him to remove children from the protests.  King had refused, recognizing that “the welfare of the black schoolchildren afforded the Birmingham movement the leverage it needed to move the state and federal governments to act in their favor.”  King had announced that the demonstrations would continue through the weekend, that the ACMHR and SCLC “remained committed to the cause and refused to quit until city officials met their demands.”

 

 

By now, some children had been in jail for forty-eight hours and stories about rat bites, inadequate food, a lack of beds, and aggressive interrogations were beginning to circulate.  “Don’t worry about them,” he told the parents.  “They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this a better nation” (Jeter-Bennett 308).

 

 

Marchers concealed their involvement in the movement by hiding in the crowd; they looked like ordinary pedestrians and spectators.  The goal was to confuse Bull Connor and policemen so they could make their way downtown before being stopped and sent to jail.  Movement organizers referred to day 3 as “Operation Confusion.”  As students exited Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the staged protesters began making their way downtown.  This made it difficult for Connor and his officers to contain the protesters and prevent them from entering Birmingham’s business district.  Arnetta Street-Gary’s mother and family friend Mrs. Robey and other “movement mothers “ drove youth demonstrators to the white business district.

 

 

Once again, Conner resorted to police dogs and fire hoses to coral marchers.  Protesters and onlookers ran in the streets and around Kelly Ingram Park to avoid being attacked.  Other police officers arrested demonstrators.  Freeman A. Hrabowski III squared off against Bull Connor in front of the steps of City Hall.  “My heart was pounding, and my head was swimming with fear (Jeter-Barrett 320).

 

The police looked mean, it was frightening. We were told to keep singing these songs and so I’m singing, [sings] I ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, keep on a walking, keep on a talking, marching on to freedom land. And amazingly the other kids were singing and the singing elevates when you can imagine hundreds of children singing and you feel a sense of community, a sense of purpose.

 

There was Bull Connor, and I was so afraid, and he said, “What do you want little nigra?” And I mustered up the courage and I looked up at him and I said, “Suh,” the southern word for sir, “we want to kneel and pray for our freedom.” That’s all I said. That’s all we wanted to do. And he did pick me up, and he did, and he did spit in my face, he really…he was so angry (Birmingham 5).

 

At 16, Cardell Gay had watched his father get involved in the movement, helping to guard Mr. Shuttlesworth's home at night. Then he began attending the Monday night meetings himself. When the call went out for student volunteers, he responded -- in spite of, and because of, his teachers at Hayes, an all-black high school.

 

 

''In class, they'd say, 'Don't leave campus or you'll be expelled,' '' Mr. Gay recalled. ''But in private, they'd say, 'Go on. I can't do it, I'd lose my job. But do it up. Keep it up.' ''

 

 

The first time he marched, he was picked up by the police near a hot dog stand on Second Avenue. The next day, he was arrested for praying and blocking the entrance to the Pizitz department store, and spent three days in the city jail.

 

 

The third time he went [Saturday], he got wet. ''The hoses were so strong,'' he said. ''And it was warm water, too. It would knock us all over the place, send you tumbling' (Halbfinger 3).

 

 

On Saturday, the dogs and water hoses provoked [more] angry responses from bystanders, some of them carrying weapons. Seeing the beginnings of violence, James Bevel borrowed a bull horn from a nearby policeman.

 

 

So I took the bull horn and said, "Okay, get off the streets now. We're not going to have violence. If you're not going to ... (inaudible) policemen, you're not going to be in the movement and, you know." So it was strange, I guess, to them. I'm with the police talking through the bull horn and giving orders and everybody was obeying the orders. [laughter] It was like, wow. But what was at stake was the possibility of a riot and that once in a movement, once a riot break out, you have to stop, takes you four or five more days to get reestablished and I was trying to avoid that kind of situation (No 4).

 

 

While King faced criticism for exposing children to violence—most notably from Malcolm X, who said that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line”— King maintained that the demonstrations allowed children to develop “a sense of their own stake in freedom” (King 4).

 

 

Media coverage from the second day of the Children’s March generated sympathy and outrage nationally and internationally.  Dr. King and other movement organizers timed the protests to take advantage of the deadlines for nightly news programming and print media.

 

 

Images and film footage of young protesters being strayed with high pressure hoses and attacked by police dogs drew attention to the “horrors of segregation and the moral authority of southern black folk.”

 

 

This was exactly what ACMHR/SCLC had intended when they organized D-Day and Double D-Day; they wanted to expose America’s racial dilemma.  “We knew we were being mistreated by our society and we wanted a different world,” said Freeman Hrabowski.  “We wanted society to look us in our faces and treat us as human beings worthy of respect.   We deserved respect; we were American citizens.  We were asking our country to live up to its Constitution” (Jeter-Bennett 299-301).

 

 

Works cited:

“Birmingham and the Children’s March.”  R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.  April 26, 2013.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/04/26/april-26-2013-birmingham-and-the-childrens-march/16051/

 

“Birmingham Campaign.”  Stanford: The martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  Web.  https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/birmingham-campaign

 

Halbfinger, David M.  “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.”  The New York Times.  May 2, 2003.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us/birmingham-recalls-a-time-when-children-led-the-fight.html

 

 Jeter-Bennett, Gisell.  “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.”  The Ohio State University.  2016.  Web.  https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1452263338&disposition=inline

 

“King, Children's Crusade sparked new dynamic in Civil Rights Movement.”  The Philadelphia Tribune.  January 8, 2016.  Web.  http://www.phillytrib.com/special_sections/king-children-s-crusade-sparked-new-dynamic-in-civil-rights/article_32a1f9dd-66df-574c-8ddb-83be1a2e77ce.html

Levingston, Steven.  “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.”  The Washington Post.  March 23, 2018.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/20/children-have-changed-america-before-braving-fire-hoses-and-police-dogs-for-civil-rights/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e1bfba8a276

 

“No Easy Walk.”  Amazon AWS.  Web.  http://wgbhprojects.s3.amazonaws.com/EYES%20ON%20THE%20PRIZE/Transcripts/EOTP-104-NoEasyWalk_TRANSCRIPT.pdf