April was a cruel month for black people in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. So was May, and the months that followed, culminating in the explosion of a bomb in an church that September that killed four girls. Fifty years ago today, on May 2, 1963, teen-agers and children, some as young as six, marched in Birmingham to protest segregation. Many were arrested for parading without a permit, but the marchers came back the next day. They were viciously knocked down in the streets by torrents of water from fire hoses wielded by white policemen, were hit with batons or set upon by police dogs. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been arrested in the city on April 12th—he was held for a week, during which he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”— referred to them as “the disinherited children of God.” The marches became known as the Children’s Crusade.

Memories of that tumultuous time came back this past weekend, during a three-day symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Birmingham campaign sponsored by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Birmingham, 1963, was known as Bombingham: there had been some fifty dynamite attacks on black homes since the end of the Second World War. Birmingham had another label: the most segregated city in the South. Black people could spend their money in downtown stores but were not being hired or served.

One of the Children’s Crusaders was Janice Wesley Kelsey, who was in the eleventh grade when she was arrested along with hundreds of other students. She spent four days in jail.

“It wasn’t so bad,” she told me. “There was a cold, concrete floor and an iron bed. That was unpleasant. But I had friends there, and I was fighting for a cause.”

Growing up, she said, “I didn’t know that the white students had new books and we did not. Or the white schools had new footballs and we did not.”

Kelsey recalled attending workshops that James Bevel, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, held for hundreds of students in schools and churches, pointing out inequalities, teaching about protests against injustice, and about non-violence as the means to a just end.

“We didn’t hate white people,” she said softly. “We didn’t even know any. We hated the system. That’s what we were protesting about.”

Throughout the three days of the seminar, young students brought to the symposium learned about the four girls who were blown apart by sixteen sticks of dynamite in the church where they were attending Sunday school. They were Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all fourteen years old, and Denise McNair, who was only eleven. The parents of one of the children were able to identify their daughter in the morgue only by her foot and a ring on one of her fingers.

But the participants also recalled how, by the time April, 1963, rolled around, many blacks in Birmingham had had enough. They were tired of the assaults on their dignity and their freedom, and ready to demand justice. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and others invited in organizations like the S.C.L.C., then led by King, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was known for providing the “shock troops” of the movement.

Click here for the full story.