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
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
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
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
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington , D.C. Marshall ’s
task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham Marshall
On Sunday, May 5th, a
mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim
Baptist Church Sixth Avenue 10th Street South
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
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
Halbfinger,
David M. “Birmingham
Jeter-Bennett,
Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children
of the Birmingham Ohio State University
Levingston,
Steven. “Children have changed America Washington
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