Kelly Ingram Park: Where the Dogs and Fire Hoses Faced the Children
Near Birmingham, Alabama
The park across from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham has a name most people do not know and an image most Americans have seen. Kelly Ingram Park was where, in the first days of May nineteen sixty-three, Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on nonviolent demonstrators. Many of those demonstrators were children.
The confrontations grew out of the Birmingham Campaign, organized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. After weeks of marches and arrests had filled the jails, organizers launched what they called the Children's Crusade, sending thousands of Black students from elementary through high school age into the streets on May second. Connor's response the next day was to escalate. The images that emerged from Kelly Ingram Park that week, teenagers knocked against walls by water cannons and K nine units lunging at protesters, went out on wire services and appeared on front pages across the country and around the world. President Kennedy called them nauseating. The photographs helped build the political will for the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four.
Today the park carries those events in its physical fabric. A circular Freedom Walk threads through three installations by sculptor James Drake, each depicting a moment from the nineteen sixty-three confrontations: kneeling figures, attack dogs, a child behind bars. A limestone sculpture by Raymond Kaskey, installed in nineteen ninety-two, shows three ministers, John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith, and A. D. King, kneeling in prayer. A fourth work, the Four Spirits sculpture by Elizabeth MacQueen, was unveiled in September twenty thirteen to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and to name all four girls who were killed.
The park is four acres. The history it holds is considerably larger than that.
