Kelly Ingram Park: Where the Fire Hoses Ran

Kelly Ingram Park is a four-acre square in the heart of Birmingham's Civil Rights District, and in May of nineteen sixty-three it became the most photographed public space in America.

The park had was laid out in the city's original plan in eighteen seventy-one, named for a Birmingham sailor who was the first American sailor killed in the First World War. For most of its history it was simply a downtown park across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Then the Birmingham campaign began.

On May second, nineteen sixty-three, more than a thousand children assembled inside the church and marched out into the park as their first step toward City Hall. Police Commissioner Eugene Connor, called Bull, met them with arrest wagons and sent more than six hundred young people to jail. The next day, when more marchers came, Connor deployed fire hoses capable of generating pressure sufficient to strip bark from a tree, and police dogs. Press photographers and television cameras from national news organizations were positioned in the park. The images they captured, of children and teenagers being knocked down by water jets and menaced by German Shepherd police dogs, ran on front pages and evening newscasts across the world.

President Kennedy saw the images. Foreign governments saw the images. The business community of Birmingham, whose trading partners were watching, saw the images. Within days, the economic pressure produced negotiations. Within a week, a settlement had been reached requiring desegregation of downtown businesses.

Today Kelly Ingram Park is a national landmark and an outdoor museum. Bronze sculptures installed in nineteen ninety-two depict the events of May nineteen sixty-three: children in a jail cell, a police dog lunging, a fire hose aimed at a kneeling figure. The sculptures do not allow the park to be simply decorative. They insist that the visitor understand what happened here.