DAVID L LA GFO D
M.oc
I I GIIAM. AL (AP) - In
t nquil �lly Ingram P rk, th
t� of a young boy and girl
behind bars tand as a memorial
to n army of child n that d -
fied police do nd fire h to
write th pivotal chapter in the
history of the civil rights move-
, . ment 30 y rs ago.
"Place of Revolution and Rec­
onciliation," reads the inscrip­
tion at the entrance to the park,
aCl'088 the street from the new
8 million Birmingham Civil
Rights Institute.
R volution: The childrens'
crusade howed that nonviolent
civil disobedience could be an ef­
fective tool in overturning the
South' debasing "Jim Crow"
segregation laws.
"It was a moment of baptism
for the civil rights movement, to
wrote journalist-historian Tay­
lor Branch in his Pulitzer Prize­
winning book, "Parti'ng the
Waters: America in the King
Years, 1954-63."
Reconciliation: In once-noto­
rious Birmingham, which
earned the sobriquet "Bombing­
ham" during rampant Ku Klux
Klan terrorism, Blacks now
dominate the city government
and work harmoniously with
their white neighbors in the sub-
ur a Red Mountain.
. IT'S A FAR cry from 1963,
when Birmingham's segrega­
tionist Police Commissioner
Bull Connor turned his police
dogs and fire hos on swarms of
marching, singing, clapping
Black schoolchildren, some as
young as 6.
More than 1,000 of the young
demonstrators were thrown in
jail, with sometimes as many as
75 crammed into cells built for
eight. .
Tw nty oth r child n w re in­
jured.
Th w till a lot of march-
in to be don , and m ny Ku
Klux Klan bombings and t·
ings and murders would follow,
but th movement would ch
i z nith with the igning of the
Voting Righ Act in 1965.
_TOO Y, OUT IDE THE
Civil Rights Institute which
opened in November, tends a
bronze tatue of the Rev. Fred L.
Shuttl worth, typically in a
marching tance.
"Birmingham' civil right
freedom fighter," the inscription
ays. "With ingular courage he
fired the imagination and raised
the hopes of an oppressed peo­
. pie."
A former truckdriver and ce­
ment worker raised in the back­
wood of Alabama, and once
convicted of running the family
till before he got the call to
preach, Shuttlesworth was the
unsung hero of the Birmingham
confrontations.
Indeed, long before King and
the Southern Christian Leader-
hip Conference arrived on the
scene, Shuttlesworth was tak­
ingon Bull Connor and others in
the segregationist estab­
lishment through a group of
preache he organized the
Al b ma ri tian Mov m nt
for Hu Rights.
He endured beatings andjail­
ings and once barely escaped
death when his Bethel Baptist
Church was bombed. It was
Shuttlesworth who persuaded
King and the SCLC to make Bir­
mingham its next target after
demonstrations in Albany, Ga.,
had sputtered.
Shuttlesworth, now pastor of
the Greater New Light Baptist
Church in Cincinnati, is as feisty
as ever at age 71.
-Young Black children w
'for their freedom. '
Th publicity help d dr w
200,00'0 peopl tojoin ina m rch
on Washington on Au 28, when
King gave his famous "I hav A
Dream" s h at th Lincoln
Memorial.
,th cur­
Sixte nth
350,000 people, 40 pe nt of
them Bl ck, urrounded by dis­
mal coal mining communiti ,
the "Pittsburgh of the South."
King called it the most gre­
gated big city in the South, the
Johann burg of North Amer­
ica.
THE CITY HAD gained in­
famy on Mother' Day, 1961,
when a mob of Klansmen and
members of the National Sta
Rights Party armed with clu
and bicycle chains attacked
busload of Freedom Rider
aboard a Trailways bus as Con­
nor's cop turned their backs.
. Between 1957 and 1963 there
were 50 unsolved bombin in
Black neighborhoods, earning
one neighborhood the nickname
"Dynamite Hill" and inspiring a
headline writer to coin the word
"Bombingham. "
Singer Nat King Cole wa
beaten on stage during a per­
formanee in the city in 1956 and
on Labor Day 1957 a carload of
drunken Klansmen grabbed a
Black man off a street corner,
took him to a country shack and
castrated him with razor blad ,
dousing the wound with turpen­
tine.
The. NAACP had been out­
lawed in th ince 1956
and Connor's 00 were u ed to
break up Black political m t­
ings.
•
screaminq
as the
monitor
guns
pumeled
the
marchers.
The
• •
sIngIng
turned to
In 1962L th city closed 68
parks, 38 playground, ix
swimming pools and four golf
cours to avoid complying with
a federal court order to desegre­
gate public facilities.
Five SNCC work r t th� fun ral of four 'girl murd r d in the 16th Stre B ptl t
Church bombing In Birmingham, 1963. From M morl s of the South rn Civil Right.
Mo� ment (Unlver Ity of North Carolina Pres, 1992), by 0 nny Lyo'n. (photo D nny
Lyon. Court ey of Magnum Photo., Inc.).
The leaders of the Birming­
ham d monstrations would be­
come legend in the civil rights
movement: Andrew Young,
Wyatt. Walker, Ralph D. Aber­
nathy, Joseph Lowery, Bernard
Lee.
LE S-REMEMBERED to­
day is James Bevel ofItta Bena,
Miss. Bevel always wore bib
overalls and a yarmulke on his
shaved head, he said, to confuse
Mississippi sheriffs.
It was B v I who recruited
hundreds of hoolchildr n.to fill
up the jails aft r th number of
adult volunte rs dwindled,
partly becau they had job to
hold down.
On May 2, the- first wav of
the childrens' cru ade began
spilling out of the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church, spirit-
dly ingin "W hall
nd carrying Igt
gr c jon i a � in" n
o I olla "
Gov. Wall ce, under court or­
der to end th violence, offered a
5,000 r w rd for inform tion
Ie ding to th IT t nd convic­
tion of those responsible for the
church bombing earlier. An
anonymou donor mailed in
som Gl n Stamps and $100
Conf rate note to boost the re­
ward. No one came forward to
coll ct.
It would be 14 years before
ju tic was served in the bomb­
ing In Nov mber 1977, after a
cru ading young state attorney
n ral named Bill Baxley re­
op n d th case, "Dynamite
Bob" ha mb l iss, was found
guilty of murder, .
. imilarly, J B. Stoner, a
di • rr rgia attorney and
h c d of he N tiona I State
Right Party, was extradited
from orgia and convicted in
1 fth bombingofShuttl -
worth' B hel Bapti t Church.·
'inc no one.W injured in the
!e st, h nt need to 10
Detroiter attends reunion
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