The Children's Crusade, May Nineteen Sixty-Three

On May second, nineteen sixty-three, a Thursday, more than a thousand students walked out of their schools in Birmingham, assembled at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and began marching toward City Hall. Some of the youngest marchers were about eight years old.

The decision to use children had been made deliberately by James Bevel, a young SCLC organizer working the Birmingham campaign. Bevel's argument was tactical and moral at the same time. Adult workers who marched could be fired. Students could not. Children in jail cells was a different kind of image than adults in jail cells. The children understood the risks and chose to come anyway.

Police Commissioner Eugene Connor, called Bull, had built his career on maintaining Birmingham's racial order, and he had his methods. On the second day of the marches, he deployed high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs against the demonstrators, many of them teenagers and children. The images were captured by press photographers and television cameras from news organizations across the country and around the world. The photographs appeared on front pages. The television footage aired on the national evening news.

President Kennedy, who had been cautious about civil rights legislation, publicly endorsed the need for a federal response. Within days, Birmingham's business community, fearing the economic consequences of a city whose brutality was now being broadcast globally, came to the negotiating table. By May tenth, an agreement was reached that included desegregation of lunch counters, dressing rooms, and restrooms in downtown stores, and the release of arrested demonstrators.

The campaign had lasted thirty-seven days. The images from Kelly Ingram Park that week are among the most widely reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. They did not represent the end of anything, but they moved something that had been immovable.