Sixty years ago this week on May 2, 1963, the campaign against racial segregation in public accommodations in Birmingham, AL entered a crucial and decisive stage. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been jailed the previous month along with many others engaged in nonviolent direct action against racial segregation. While in jail, Dr. King wrote his powerful Letter from the Birmingham Jail that was the subject of our last two Weekly Reflections. Although this letter would become a classic of American and Church history, it had little impact on the situation in Birmingham. For a time it looked as if the campaign would fizzle out along with hopes for changing the unjust segregation laws. Movement leaders made the difficult decision to train and allow children and youth to participate in nonviolent direct action and subject themselves to arrest. They referred to May 2 as D Day when those young people took to the streets in nonviolent protest. The first picture posted above shows a group of young children and teenagers being arrested. The response of the children and youth was so overwhelming that the jails could not hold all those being arrested. The local fair grounds were converted into a makeshift jail to hold more young people being arrested. Even that was not enough to hold them all, so the local authorities made the fateful decision to disperse the protesters by attacking them with high powered fire hoses and police dogs. Two of the pictures posted above are images of those attacks. As the national press sent out these kind of images around the country, the conscience of the nation was aroused and Birmingham authorities were pressured to negotiate. By May 10, the public accommodations in Birmingham began to desegregate. What became known as The Children’s March or The Children’s Crusade accomplished what Dr. King’s letter did not. The videos posted below provide more information about this momentous part of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
As we commemorate the powerful witness of the children and youth of Birmingham sixty years ago, it is important to lift up the witness of children and youth in our time.
Young people from around the country are the primary leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. The teenagers of Parkland, FL developed and continue to lead the March For Our Lives movement against the epidemic of gun violence following a mass killing at their high school. Just recently, students in Nashville, TN led a school walkout after a mass killing in their community. Students around the country followed their lead in their own communities. The lesson of Birmingham from May 1963 is still with us today. Young people are leaders in the ongoing struggle for racial and social justice. The rest of us can support them, join them or get out of the way.
