When the Children Marched: The Birmingham Civil Rights Movement

But, lawyer Vann, they’ve turned fire hoses on those black girls. They’re rolling that little girl there, right there in the middle of the street now. I can’t talk anymore.¹

The marching children surprised and rattled Bull Connor. One Birmingham policeman observed, “You could see Bull moving, looking, concerned, fidgety. He was just desperate. ‘What the hell do I do?’”² The police had arrested and jailed more than five hundred protesters on Thursday, May 2, 1963. Connor knew that he did not have much more space in his prison, which meant that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign to fill the jails was succeeding. He needed a new strategy. Instead of locking up more demonstrators, Connor hatched a plot to brutalize the kids and frighten them off the streets.

While Connor schemed, the adults debated. Even after the impact of what was nicknamed “D-Day,” many in the community still questioned the wisdom of letting the young march. During a morning planning session on Friday, May 3, A. G. Gaston demanded, “Let those kids stay in school. They don’t know nothing.” King gently responded, “Brother Gaston, let those people go into the streets where they’ll learn some thing.”³ King prevailed. Given Connor’s ominous plans and King’s determination, the picnic mood of Thursday would turn ugly the next day.

On Friday morning students again heeded the call from local disc jockeys to attend the “party” in Kelly Ingram Park. Mary Gadson, a teenager at the time of the marches, describes her involvement this way: “I’d get to school and then go over the fence. We had listened to Shelley [disc jockey] on the radio that morning, so we knew what time to meet. Sometimes if the meeting was at ten o’clock, we would go to our first classes, and then be out for the rest of the day.”⁴

At Parker High School one fourth of the students failed to show up that Friday. Instead, they again filled the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, or they gathered in Kelly Ingram Park. Inside the church, King told the young people, “If you take part in the marches today you are going to jail but for a good cause.”⁵

“If you take part in the marches today you are going to jail but for a good cause.”

Outside in the park, anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred people crowded the square. People congregating in the park did not necessarily buy into the nonviolent philosophy preached within the walls of the churches. And throughout the area there were ominous signs. Fire trucks stood at several intersections around the park. Bull Connor, too, did not believe in the nonviolent approach, and a serious confrontation brewed.

At one o’clock the teens and young college students emerged from the church. The first groups served as decoys and headed west, away from the city. A larger group of sixty turned east, singing the word freedom to the tune of “Amen” as they moved forward. The young marchers had gone only two blocks when they encountered Connor, Police Captain G. V. Evans, and a group of firemen. Evans warned the kids to stop marching and disband “or you’re going to get wet.”⁶ The young people ignored the warning and kept advancing.

The firemen turned a half-spray on the demonstrators causing some marchers to fall back and others to sit down on the pavement. Seeing the limited impact, the firemen then decided to use monitor guns in order to merge two streams into one. The surge of water gained in strength growing to a thrust of one hundred pounds. The water lifted some young people into the air, sent others sailing across the ground, and left some bleeding from injuries. The marchers, trained in nonviolence, took the blow. The front page of the Saturday, May 4, The New York Times carried a dramatic picture of teens being blasted by hoses while huddling in a doorway. People in the park and people standing on the roofs of nearby buildings felt outraged by what they saw.

Image Credit: Associated Press

Young African-American demonstrators sit on the sidewalk with hands behind their heads as high-pressure hoses are turned on their backs on May 3, 1963, in Birmingham.

Connor watched as his plan to intimidate young people instead of hauling them off to jail unraveled. More kids spilled out of the church. Police and firemen, distracted by the crowd in the park, could not stop the children’s momentum. Groups made it to downtown where they were taken into custody.

The commissioner got even more desperate. First, Connor bolted the doors of the church and then he ordered, “Bring the dogs.”⁷ When Police Captain Evans gave the order to his men to “clear the park out” six German shepherds went to work.⁸ Led through the crowd on taut leashes, dogs tore at arms, legs, and clothes. At least three people were bitten severely enough to seek treatment at a nearby hospital.

One demonstration I remember well. 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 here 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. That water was strong. It could knock you down. And he let ‘em go and sprayed us. I got wet, and I almost got bitten. There were hundreds of us.⁹

Though Connor succeeded at arresting fewer that day, only 250 compared to 500 the previous day, he inflamed the crowd in and around Kelly Ingram Park. They booed the police and mocked the firemen. Then the firemen turned their hoses toward the crowd. The spectators continued to ridicule the firemen who in turn doused them with their hoses.

Image Credit: Associated Press

African-American children stand behind a fence around the Birmingham jail after they were arrested. On the ground is a sign that reads “Justice for all, now!”

Image Credit: Associated Press

A boy peers out from behind the fence

The hosing persisted and intensified. Some moved to the roofs of buildings where they escalated their assault with rocks and bottles. King’s nonviolent philosophy was threatened. Now, both the police and the march leaders feared there would be a riot. The two sides negotiated and the marches ended at three o’clock. James Bevel worked with the police, encouraging people to vacate Kelly Ingram Park. In the end, a major tragedy was averted, but barely. As stated in The New York Times, “There was an ugly overtone to the events today that was not present yesterday.”¹⁰

The jails were filled to capacity and overflowing by the end of Monday, May 6. This headline from The New York Times captured a sense of the crammed conditions: “Birmingham Jail Is So Crowded Breakfast Takes Four Hours.”¹¹ The article explained that it took from 4:30 A.M. until 9 A.M. to provide everyone breakfast at the Birmingham city jail and the Southside jail. Officials told a reporter that the kids were being fed “as well or better than most of them have at home”; and the reporter noted, “The prisoners sleep on the floor almost shoulder-to-shoulder.”¹² The jails were so filled that girls who were arrested were being kept at the 4-H club building on the Alabama State Fairgrounds land. Boys were held in the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail.

I was in jail seven days. We slept in little rooms with bunk beds. There were about twelve of us in a room. I was in a room with my friends. We called ourselves Freedom Fighters, Freedom Riders. There were only one or two kids in jail who were delinquent. Everybody else was there because of the movement. We ate in a cafeteria. The food wasn’t home cooking. I remember some grits, and they weren’t too good. My parents could not get word to me for seven days.

We would get some news, like there was no more room in Juvenile Hall. They were taking the rest of the people to the fairgrounds because that was the only place to house them now. The jails were all full. I felt like I was helping to gain what we were trying to get, and that was freedom.¹³

Then they went to get school buses, and they hauled us to jail in Birmingham. …

Reverend King came by and he talked with us outside the fence. We felt better after that. We stood outside maybe two or three hours. Then they took us to juvenile detention by bus. By then it started to rain. We stood in the rain for a long time. I was in my white dress. Every senior girl started wearing white dresses the first of May, and wore them for a month until graduation. So there we were in our muddy white dresses.

Finally, we got inside. This must have been about eight or nine o’clock at night. We had left school at around one o’clock. They had prepared some peanut butter sandwiches and milk. This was the first thing we had eaten since noon.

The jails were full, so they loaded us on the bus again and took us to Fair Park. This was the same fairgrounds amusement park I couldn’t go to as a kid because they didn’t allow black people in there. It was pretty ironic.

They took us to the top floor of a two-story barracks building, which was nothing but a large empty room with mattresses on the floor. They had some policewomen assigned to the girls. They searched everybody, and then told us to fall in.¹⁴

Critics from all sides condemned King for using children in the marches. The recently elected mayor, Albert Boutwell, remarked, “When people who are not residents of this city, and who will not have to live with fearful consequences, come to the point of using innocent children as their tools … then the time has come for every responsible white and colored parent in this city to demand a halt.”¹⁵ And from another vantage, Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam leader, offered his view: “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.”¹⁶

For the African-American community in Birmingham, the dogs and fire hoses represented a turning point. Though it was certainly not his intention, Bull Connor had succeeded in bringing the people together. Those who were initially not pleased with the presence of Martin Luther King, Jr., in their town were soon moved by the sight of local police and firemen assaulting their children. Nothing reflects this change more than the transformation of millionaire A. G. Gaston.

Gaston’s conversion came while he watched the confrontation from his office window overlooking Kelly Ingram Park. White attorney and reformer David Vann described it this way:

Bull Connor brought the police dogs to the scene of the marches … and I remember I was talking to A. G. Gaston on the telephone, and he was expressing a great deal of resentment about King coming in and messing up the thing just when we were getting a new start, and then he said to me, “But lawyer Vann, they’ve turned fire hoses on those black girls. They’re rolling that little girl there, right there in the middle of the street now. I can’t talk anymore.” And there in a twinkling of an eye, the whole black community was instantaneously consolidated behind King.¹⁷

At the mass rally held on the evening of Friday, May 3, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, King addressed some important issues. With the rage and rock throwing fresh in their minds, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) wanted to reinforce the philosophy of nonviolence. Here is what King said: “Birmingham was a mean city today. But in spite of the meanness of Birmingham, we must confront her with our kindness and our goodness and our determination to be nonviolent. As difficult as it is, we must meet hate with love.”¹⁸ Andrew Young had earlier told them, “We have a nonviolent movement, but it’s not nonviolent enough.”¹⁹ And King knew that many of the parents in the community were scared to have their children involved in the demonstrations. He tried to quell their fears with these remarks:

Now, finally, your children, your daughters and sons are in jail, many of them. And I’m sure many of the parents are here tonight. Don’t worry about them. They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make the nation a better nation. … See, they’re not there for being drunk. They’re not in there for stealing chickens. They’re not in there for embezzlement. They are political prisoners. … Don’t worry about jail, for when you go to jail for a cause like this, the jails cease to be jails, they become havens for freedom and human dignity.²⁰

Throughout that talk, King made it clear to any who doubted it that the marching would continue, saying, “Now yesterday was a D-Day. And tomorrow will be a double D-Day.” He told them, “And we’re going on in spite of the dogs, in spite of the hoses, in spite of the tank. We can’t stop now. We’ve gone to far to turn back.”²¹ When King spoke about demonstrating over the coming weekend, the crowd in the church cheered.

People throughout the world started to see the troubling images produced by events in Birmingham. The nightly news included footage of the battle in Kelly Ingram Park. And a famous picture of a young man being bitten by police dogs appeared on the front page of The New York Times, in Time magazine, and in other newspapers that week. Readers of the Times could gaze at the photo of a Birmingham policeman holding a dog leash in one hand and the young man’s sweater in the other, while the dog dug his teeth into the victim’s stomach. Birmingham was starting to be news.

Image Credit: Associated Press

A seventeen-year-old member of the Birmingham community, not part of the demonstrations, is attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963. This photo was published nationwide and made Americans take notice of what was happening in Birmingham.

In particular, Birmingham captured the attention of President John F. Kennedy. Throughout April and early May, Kennedy had said and done little about the events in Alabama. For instance, no one mentioned Birmingham at an April 24 press conference, but at a May 8 press conference, the topic dominated the conversation. With ugly images staring him directly in the eye, President Kennedy was hard pressed to ignore the dramatic marches.

On the afternoon of May 4, Kennedy was meeting with members of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal political organization. He told participants how seeing the picture of the dog biting the young man made him “sick.” Kennedy expressed anger over Birmingham: “I think it’s terrible the picture in the paper. The fact of the matter that’s just what Connor wants. And, as I say, Birmingham is the worst city in the South. They have done nothing for the Negroes in that community, so it is an intolerable situation, that there is no argument about.”²²

President Kennedy agreed when his brother Robert, the attorney general, sent Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, to Birmingham. Marshall’s task was to nurture the limited negotiations that had already begun between the black and white communities. Arriving in Birmingham on Saturday, May 4, Marshall began the diplomatic process by meeting first with members of the Birmingham business community and then with SCLC. Marshall quickly discovered the truth of a sign hanging in his office that read, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they catch hell from both sides.”²³

Marshall weaved back and forth between the two communities. He arranged summits between small numbers of local blacks and whites, groups that rarely met. With the result from one conference, he would go speak with King, sometimes late into the night. Marshall worked hard to attain a wedge of agreement and then he would try to build from there. As Arthur Shores, a local African-American activist and lawyer, told a reporter: “He is here trying to bring about a meeting of minds between the two groups.”²⁴ These behind-the-scenes negotiations took place while demonstrations continued.

On Saturday, Wyatt Tee Walker employed a new strategy. Around noon, demonstrators strolled into town in twos and threes and they carried no signs. Others carpooled into the boundaries of the city’s white shopping district. As the duos and trios got close to City Hall, groups converged and one girl opened a banner that read, “Love God and thy neighbor.” Bull Connor, coming from City Hall, saw the marchers and ordered their arrest. The New York Times reported, “Policemen marched them down a ramp into a detention pen in the basement of the big sandstone building. … They smiled at cameramen standing on the wall above them as the police led them away.”²⁵

Being unable to clearly identify protesters, Connor had his men detain any African Americans around city hall for fear they were part of the demonstrations. Another 127 were arrested that day. Connor successfully contained the demonstrations by having his police lock the doors of the two churches being used as staging grounds for the marches.

The power of the water knocked people over and tore bark off the trees in the park.

With those pledged to nonviolence trapped in the church, the streets were left for those less committed to the nonviolent philosophy driving the movement. Around three thousand people congregated in Kelly Ingram Park across form the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, but the mood on the street got even worse than it had been the previous day.

Bull Connor, who had arrived on the scene from city hall, wanted to clear the park and again used the fire hoses. The power of the water knocked people over and tore bark off the trees in the park. Many left, but others stayed to taunt the police. Again, spectators stationed on rooftops hurled rocks and other projectiles at police. Wyatt Tee Walker described the scene in the park that day in this manner: “The blacks were waiting for something to happen; they started teasing the firemen; [the firemen] started putting water on them. It was a game. … They [the blacks] were trying to see who could stand up against the fire hoses. … It wasn’t any damn battle; It was a Roman holiday.”²⁶ And a young person who took part in the events confessed: “We thought it was fun.”²⁷

Image Credit: Associated Press

The Reverend James Bevel uses a policeman’s megaphone to try to disperse a crowd of protesters that he thought could turn violent.

What appeared to be a festive atmosphere to some scared James Bevel. While wandering in the crowd, Bevel noticed twenty-five guns and several knives. He feared that violence might explode and lead to mayhem at any moment, so he asked the police for their bullhorn. Using his preacher voice, Bevel worked to quiet the crowd. Here is how he described his involvement that day:

I took the bullhorn and I said, “Okay, get off the streets now, we’re not going to have violence. If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement.” It’s strange, I guess for them: I’m with the police talking through the bullhorn and giving orders and everybody was obeying the orders. It was like, wow. But what was at stake was the possibility of a riot.²⁸

Bevel succeeded in quelling the disturbance. Overall, during the three days of the children’s marches, eleven hundred had been arrested.²⁹

There was no lull in activity on Sunday, May 5. Much to the chagrin of Wyatt Tee Walker, Bevel challenged his authority and called off marches for that day. People still held a prayer meeting and rally at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church. Bevel, who had been part of the gathering, encouraged people to march inside the church. With spirits high, and again to the displeasure of Walker, at six o’clock Bevel led around fifteen hundred people out of the church on a “walk.” “Let’s not march. Let’s walk,”³⁰ he told them.

The Reverend Charles Billups, a colleague of Fred Shuttlesworth’s, replaced Bevel at the head of the line. Bevel was scheduled to lead marches the following day. The crowd, still dressed in their church clothes and singing “I want Jesus to walk with me,” headed to Southside Jail in support of demonstrators being held there. Unlike previous demonstrations, young and old participated together in this march. Spectators, many sitting on porches along the parade route, were hushed.

The parade had walked about five blocks when they approached a barricade of policemen on motorcycles and firemen aiming their hoses. Bull Connor was there. Billups told the marchers to stop and to then get down on their knees and pray. He addressed the firemen directly proclaiming that the marchers would not turn back. Then he started chanting, “Turn on your water, turn loose your dogs, we will stand here till we die.”³¹ Others chanted with him. Myrna Carter, a teenage participant, recalled:

And tears just started running down his [Reverend Billups] face. I’ll never forget it. Bull Connor told the firemen, “Turn the water on! Turn the water on!” But they stood there frozen. “Turn the water on! Turn the water on!!” Then he started using profanity, cursing them, shaking the hose and shaking them. “Turn the hose on! Turn it on!” But those people just stood there. They would not turn the hoses on that Sunday. Then the whole group started singing Negro spirituals. It was just something in the air.³²

Walker negotiated with Connor to let the people go to nearby Julius Eikberry Park to demonstrate. For thirty minutes they prayed in the park. They then headed back to the church, singing as they went.

Though some called the events that day a “miracle,” the miraculous was explainable in more human terms. John Swindle, the fire chief and no fan of using fire hoses for crowd control, apparently “didn’t hear” Connor’s orders. Swindle’s men “didn’t hear” either.³³ This comment, overheard that day, seems to capture the spirit of most firemen present: “We’re here to put out fires, not people.”³⁴ But perhaps the most miraculous aspect of this event was the exuberance of the marchers. The adults discovered the spirit of their children and were now ready to march alongside them.

Chapter 6

“FIRE HOSES ON THOSE BLACK GIRLS”