“Three minutes.”—Anonymous warning
Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
Martin Luther King, Jr., called Birmingham, Alabama, the hardest city in the United States for blacks to live in. The city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was an outspoken racist who enforced the city’s Jim Crow laws with an iron fist. In the spring of 1963, civil rights leaders came up with a plan to integrate Birmingham’s downtown stores. Using the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as a base of operations, they sent groups out to demonstrate in front of the stores. They knew Connor’s police would arrest them, but the strategy was to fill up the Birmingham jails so completely that there would be no place else to put additional marchers, who would then be free to picket the stores. The strategy would also call the nation’s attention to a town that would arrest so many freedom fighters. But soon all the adults who were willing to go to jail were either behind bars or out on bail and not eager to go back. One night at a church meeting, Dr. King asked for new volunteers to be arrested. Only a handful of adults stood up, but Dr. King noticed that a large group of young people were also on their feet. Some appeared to be third and fourth graders, others teenagers. At first Dr. King told them
they were too young, but with few other volunteers available he changed his mind. He decided to train the children in nonviolence and let them take part. On May 2, 3, and 4, 1963, thousands of children poured from the church and from their schools and filled the streets of Birmingham. One was studious, church-going fourteen-year-old Carolyn McKinstry.
“My parents tried to shield me from the embarrassment of the segregation laws. When we’d go to a store downtown my mother would say we didn’t need to try on clothes. She’d say, ‘This is fine, this’ll fit.’ She would hold the jeans out in front of my brothers and say, ‘Oh yes, this is perfect,’ because she knew the stores wouldn’t let us try the clothes on. I was fifteen before I rode a city bus. We rode a special bus to school, but any time it wasn’t running my parents drove us. They drove themselves to death with six kids because they didn’t want us to have bad feelings about ourselves on the city buses.
“It was no use. You couldn’t help but know the rules in Birmingham. My dad worked at the Birmingham Country Club. He could wait tables but I couldn’t visit him there. My elementary and high schools were all black. I never really even had a conversation with a white person until I went off to college. I knew that our textbooks had been to white schools first because they were full of obscenities that seemed written to us. It all seemed so wrong.”
Carolyn was so sure that her parents wouldn’t let her take part in the civil rights demonstrations, she didn’t even ask permission. Besides, the center of action was the one building in town where they always let her go—her church.
“I could always say, ‘Mom, I have to work at the church today from ten to two.’ There were always excuses to be there: Choir rehearsal. Vacation Bible school. Volunteer candy striping. I was the only one in my family that went, so I heard a lot about what was going on and I knew when the mass meetings and rallies were. My parents didn’t know about all that was going on at the church.
“Those meetings were powerful. First there would be this wonderful music. Songs like, ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’ or ‘Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.’ You were feeling good, really motivated. You knew everybody around you. My classmates were beside me. And then Dr. King would speak. He said things in a way that we as children could relate to. He’d say, ‘We want the right to sit down in a restaurant and eat a hot dog after we shop … We want the right to use the water fountain because all water is water, and it’s God’s water.’
Fourteen-year-old Carolyn McKinstry (right) with her grandfather and cousin in the summer of 1963.
“Then there were classes for the children who were willing to march. It was all about nonviolence. They told us if we were knocked down we should stay down. They told us not to resist the dogs. Just stand there. Don’t run from them. Before we went out they passed around big wastebaskets and told us to put in anything that could be seen as a weapon. A fingernail file, even a sharp pencil. We were not to give police any reason to say, ‘We knocked that child down because she pointed that fingernail file at me.’”
On the morning of May 2, 1963, Carolyn was one of nearly one thousand children who marched out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and into the streets of Birmingham, carrying signs and chanting for freedom. Police arrested them by the hundreds. Singing, they climbed into the police wagons until the police ran out of wagons. Then they ran out of police cars. Then fire trucks. Six hundred young people were in jail after the first day alone. “I have been inspired and moved today,” Dr. King told their families at a rally that evening. “I have never seen anything like it.”
A MESSAGE TO BIRMINGHAM PARENTS
“Your daughters and sons are in jail … Don’t worry about them. They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the parents of children jailed in Birmingham
Word raced around the country. The next morning, dozens of reporters and photographers flew into the Birmingham airport. A second march started at midmorning. The police were angry and embarrassed. They felt the children had made them look foolish. This time they were determined to keep them away from the downtown business section without making arrests. Carolyn hadn’t been arrested the day before, though she had wanted to be. Her parents didn’t even know she had marched. As she joined nearly four hundred students from her school and began the second day’s march downtown, she was hoping she could be more fully involved. She was with a large group of students from her school when she first saw the police.
“I couldn’t believe the firepower they had. They had giant water hoses that took several police just to lift and aim. They yelled through megaphones and told us to disperse. ‘Go home.’ Then it was, ‘You have two minutes … You have one minute.’ And they counted to ten.”
Police hoisted the heavy fire hoses into place and turned the water on. The blast of water slammed into the fleeing students, sending them sprawling onto the sidewalk. Some held on to one another and tried to sing. The police waded forward, increasing the pressure. The children tumbled backward and smashed into buildings. Carolyn was running for the church when the water reached her.
“It felt like the side of my face was being slapped really hard. It hurt so bad I tried to hold on to a building so it wouldn’t push me down the sidewalk, and it just flattened me against the building. It seemed like it was on me forever. When they finally turned it off I scooted
around the side of the building and felt for my sweater. They had blasted a hole right through it. And then for some reason I reached up and touched my hair. It was gone, on the right side of my head. My hair, gone. I was furious, and insulted. Why did they have to do that?
A police-directed “water cannon” finds Carolyn McKinstry (left) and two schoolmates with no place to hide.
“I couldn’t call my dad to pick me up, he’d ask too many questions, so I walked home, feeling wobbly inside. My mother could see in one look what had happened. My dad came home right after that and hit the ceiling. He tried to tell me I was grounded. I barely heard him. Nothing he was saying meant as much as what had happened to me.”
Many other children were injured and shaken, but their courage had mattered. News photographers sent images from Birmingham, Alabama, around the world. Their photos showed
young, nonviolent marchers being bitten by police dogs, clubbed in the head, and blasted by water cannons. Millions of people who read the paper the next day were outraged. Overnight, white leaders in Birmingham felt the intense pressure of national public scorn. Within weeks, an agreement was made between black and white leaders in Birmingham, ending legal segregation in the city. But the new rules didn’t change the way many people felt. Carolyn, still shaken, spent much of her summer in the one place that always gave her peace—the church. She was just starting to feel like herself again on a pleasant Sunday morning in September:
“We had come to Sunday school that morning. My two little brothers, five and eight years old, were in class downstairs. I was delivering the attendance reports around the church. I dropped off a report downstairs and had just walked up to the second floor when I heard the phone ring in the church office. I picked it up and someone said, ‘Three minutes.’ I didn’t know what it meant. I hung up and I had taken three or four steps into the sanctuary when the bomb went off. I thought for an instant it was thunder because it sort of rolled. Then all of the windows came crashing out. The building shook and there were screams everywhere. Everybody hit the floor and so did I. My first thought was for my brothers. I couldn’t find them. I went in and out of the church. It turned out they had just started running. One was four blocks away; the other was three blocks in another direction.
“Soon the church was surrounded by whites passing by in cars. Maybe they didn’t really understand how bad what had just happened was. I hope not. But they were singing this song, ‘2-4-6-8/We don’t want to integrate.’ I was frightened. My parents never preached hatred, but I couldn’t understand something like this.”
Inside, four girls, all friends of Carolyn’s, lay dead. Their names were Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson. Twenty others were injured. Until the day she left for college, Carolyn wondered if any place was safe in Birmingham.
She graduated from high school with honors, went to Fisk College in Georgia at seventeen, married, and became a mother. She taught school for several years. She was proud to talk with her students about what happened in Birmingham during her girlhood. At this writing, she trains new employees for a large communications company. Of her marches she says, “I haven’t changed. I still feel proud that I participated. I’m proud of what we accomplished. Segregation was wrong.”