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Birmingham Children's Crusade, nonviolent protest against segregation held by Black children on May 2-10, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. The protest is credited with causing a major shift in attitudes against segregation among Americans and with convincing Pres. John F. Kennedy to publicly support federal civil rights legislation.

Background of the march

On April 3, 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, launched "Project C," a protracted campaign of civil disobedience against segregation in Birmingham. The choice of Birmingham was strategic. Under the governorship of segregationist politician George Wallace, it was considered the most segregated city in the United States. For that very reason, the value of a victory there was high. The campaign leaders believed that winning concessions from a segregation stronghold would prove the effectiveness of nonviolent confrontation and reinvigorate the civil rights movement, which had begun to flag.

Initially, there was little enthusiasm in the local community for the campaign. Only 15 volunteers took part in the sit-ins staged on April 3. Another sit-in, led by Shuttlesworth, on April 6 attracted only a few dozen participants. Meanwhile, the city lived up to its reputation of upholding strict racial division by meeting protestors with increasingly hostile law enforcement tactics and filing a federal court order to halt the protests. On April 12 ( Good Friday), King, Shuttlesworth, and SCLC cofounder the Rev. Ralph Abernathy led a march of about 50 volunteers toward downtown Birmingham. The leaders and volunteers were arrested by the city's commissioner of public safety, Eugene ("Bull") Connor, and jailed. On April 16, while in solitary confinement, King wrote his famous " Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he rejected pleas to end the campaign.

After the leaders were bonded out of jail on April 20, Shuttlesworth declared to followers and the national press that a massive new phase of the campaign would begin on May 2. However, this announcement was merely a delaying tactic. In truth, the leaders had no clear plan or ideas-except one, but it was an idea they were reluctant to use. This was the Rev. James Luther Bevel 's suggestion that the campaign recruit students.

Since the beginning of the Project C campaign, Bevel and his wife, civil rights activist Diane Nash, had been holding youth meetings every day after school at Birmingham's St. James Baptist Church, two hours before the movement's regular meetings. The couple sought to recruit popular teenagers who might in turn recruit their peers, and soon the youth meetings had outgrown the adult meetings, becoming so large that they spilled over into a second church. Many of the students also stayed after the youth meetings to attend the adult ones. Some of these students had stood up at the adult meetings and volunteered to go to jail, although King had rejected their proposal, saying that Birmingham's jail was "no place for children."

Bevel disagreed and argued that the campaign's next moves should include children of all ages, even those just out of kindergarten. As part of his recruitment efforts with Nash, he frequently showed a film of the student movement in Nashville in 1960, in which college students had marched to desegregate the city's libraries and lunch counters. Bevel also pointed out that while adults who protested missed work and therefore risked being fired from their jobs, children would not face the same economic risks.

Bevel's reasoning prevailed, in no small part because of the desperate situation in which the movement found itself. It was decided that the campaign would welcome minors, although recruitment efforts were to focus on high schools. Over the objections of parents, teachers, and other members of the community, campaign volunteers passed out leaflets to teenage students ahead of May 2 and made further use of the recruitment of popular teens to convince their peers to not attend school and march instead.

March and aftermath

The Children's Crusade, as it was later dubbed, began on May 2 shortly after one o' clock at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Fifty singing students emerged from the church and marched two by two toward city hall and the downtown business district. The police awaited the students with squad cars and police wagons. As the police began loading the teenagers into the vehicles, another line of young protesters emerged from the church, followed by another, many of them singing hymns and waving picket signs. The students headed in different directions, making it harder for the police to intercept them.

More than 1,000 students marched on May 2. Most of them were teenagers, but some were as young as six years old. The police took at least 600 children into custody, and Connor commandeered school buses to transport all of them to Birmingham's jails. Some of the children were held at juvenile detention facilities and even at a local fairgrounds.

The following day hundreds more young people showed up to march. With the city's jails now filled to capacity, Connor ordered his officers to disperse instead of arrest the young protestors. The police proceeded to break up the demonstrators' lines with nightsticks, dogs, and high-powered fire hoses. The violence was captured by news photographers and television crews for dissemination worldwide, and the images of police committing acts of brutality against schoolchildren horrified Americans.

The campaign drew condemnation from many public figures, including then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who accused organizers of endangering children. But it had the intended effect of breaking through the country's indifference to segregation. On May 4 President Kennedy dispatched Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham and urged the city's white leaders to negotiate with the demonstrators. Marshall made a pragmatic appeal to the city officials, noting that the protests and police response were disrupting Birmingham's economy and that the disruption would not stop unless the city desegregated. With the number of demonstrators growing by the day and about 2,500 protesters of all ages in the city's jails by May 6, Marshall's appeal was heeded. On May 10, in the courtyard of Birmingham's A.G. Gaston Motel (which served as the movement's local headquarters), white city officials and Black civil rights leaders agreed to a tentative deal that included the desegregation of lunch counters, fitting rooms, restrooms, and drinking fountains.

The repercussions of the Children's Crusade extended beyond Birmingham. Concerned that the campaign might inspire Black citizens in other American cities and hoping to prevent further violent backlash from segregationist authorities, Kennedy made a televised address on June 11 to announce his support for federal civil rights legislation to ban racial discrimination in public accommodations, education, employment, and housing. In the address, he asked Congress to enact such legislation. The revived civil rights movement held more demonstrations throughout the summer of 1963, including the March on Washington on August 28. Yet confrontations and violence continued; on September 15 a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four young girls. However, sustained pressure from the movement and the presidency (first Kennedy's, then Lyndon B. Johnson's) ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Birmingham Children's Crusade | History, Facts, Purpose, & Civil Rights Act

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Birmingham Children's Crusade, nonviolent protest against segregation held by Black children on May 2-10, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. The protest is credited with causing a major shift in attitudes against segregation among Americans and with convincing Pres. John F. Kennedy to publicly support

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Toward the end of April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fellow leaders in the civil rights movement faced a grim reality in Birmingham, Alabama. With diminished support and fewer volunteers, their campaign to end segregationist policies was teetering on failure. But when an unorthodox plan to recruit Black children to march was implemented, the movement reversed itself, reinvigorating the fight for racial equality, in what became known as the Children's Crusade.

King had traveled to Birmingham in the spring of 1963, along with Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Rev. Ralph Abernathy, hoping to shore up resistance against segregation in the state. The pair partnered with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a local civil rights organization led by Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent minister and activist.

But the Alabama movement was fresh off a failed attempt to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. Overall, fewer people were attending meetings, sit-ins and marches. After King was arrested and confined to a jail cell, where he wrote his famous work, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he knew, along with other activists, that a new strategy was essential if the campaign were to succeed.

"The number of adults who were willing to volunteer, to get arrested, had steadily dwindled those last two weeks of April and it looked like the movement was about to fall apart," says Glenn Eskew, a history professor at Georgia State University and author of the 1997 book, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle.

Recruiting Children to the Cause

James Bevel, a member of SCLC, came up with an idea to include school-age children in protests to help desegregate Birmingham. The strategy involved recruiting popular teenagers from Black high schools, such as the quarterbacks and cheerleaders, who could influence their classmates to attend meetings with them at Black churches in Birmingham to learn about the non-violent movement. There was also an economic reason to have children participate since adults risked being fired from their jobs for missing work and protesting.

Janice Kelsey was 15 when she attended her first meeting for the Children's Crusade. "I knew what segregation was and separation, but I didn't understand the extent or the level of the inequities in that separation," recalls Kelsey, a Birmingham native who wrote about her experience in the movement in her 2017 memoir, I Woke Up with my Mind on Freedom.

Bevel posed questions to the students who discovered that hand-me-down books and football helmets were not what white students used. Nor was there just one typewriter in the entire school, like Black students had, but rooms with typewriters at the white schools, says Kelsey. "Things like that became personal to me and I decided I wanted to do something about it," she says.

King, along with other activists and members in the Black community were adamantly opposed to involving children in marches because of the threats to violence from white mobs, as well as from policemen led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham notorious for his racist policies.

Bevel, undeterred, told the children to gather at 16th Street Baptist Church on May 2, 1963. More than 1,000 students skipped school to participate in the protest. The youth, ranging from ages 7-18, held picket signs and marched in groups of 10 to 50, singing freedom songs.

"We were told what to expect," says Kelsey. "We even saw some film strips of people who had sat at lunch counters and were spit on and pushed and all that. We were told that if you decide to participate that this is a nonviolent movement, so you can't fight back."

Nonviolent Student Demonstrators Faced Hosing, Arrests

The demonstrators had several destinations: some went to City Hall, others went to lunch counters or the downtown shopping district. They marched daily for almost a week.

"It was well thought out," says Vicki Crawford, director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection. "It was not just a bunch of people calling up to meet downtown. There was mobilization and organization, following King's Six Steps of Non-Violence to bring about social change."

As the children bravely took to the streets, the Birmingham police were waiting to arrest them, putting them in paddy wagons and school buses. Kelsey says she was arrested on her first day marching and remained in jail for four days.

The sight of young people peacefully protesting reinvigorated the Birmingham movement and throngs of people started attending meetings again and joining the demonstration. King changed his mind as well about the effectiveness of the Children's Crusade. Although the police were mostly restrained the first day, that did not continue. Law enforcement brought out water hoses and police dogs.

Television crews and newspapers filmed the young demonstrators getting arrested and hosed down by the Birmingham police, causing national outrage. More than 2,000 children were reportedly arrested during the days-long protest.

"They had locked up as many people as they could possibly lock up, and they couldn't control it anymore. And that's what broke the back of segregation," says Eskew. "A civil order collapsed because there weren't enough police. "

Children Became 'Catalyst for Change'

When influential white businessmen and city officials saw the business district swarming with demonstrators, in addition to President John F. Kennedy demanding a resolution and sending assistant attorney general Burke Marshall to Birmingham to facilitate negotiations, white city leaders called a meeting with King. An agreement was made to desegregate lunch counters, businesses and restrooms and improve hiring opportunities for Black people in Birmingham.

"I think we served as a catalyst for change," says Kelsey.

Improvements hardly happened overnight in Birmingham. In September 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four Black girls. Yet, the civil rights movement kept up the momentum, and the following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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The Children's Crusade: When the Youth of Birmingham Marched for Justice | HISTORY

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Facing a dwindling movement in Alabama, civil rights leaders recruited Black students to revive the march to end segregation.

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Children's Crusade of 1963 | American Freedom Stories | Biography

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The Fight Against Segregation in Birmingham | Black American Heroes

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https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179125099/birmingham-childrens-crusade-civil-rights-60th-anniversary

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https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179125099/birmingham-childrens-crusade-civil-rights-60th-anniversary

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Caption: "Sixty years ago, Birmingham authorities turned firehoses and police dogs on protesters, a pivotal period in the civil rights movement. Now, six decades later, people in the Alabama city reflect on the struggle then and now"

Bill Hudson/Associated Press

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https://npshistory.com/publications/bicr/index.htm