“And a little child shall lead them.” – Isaiah 11:6
In April 1962, the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King Jr. had led so brilliantly was losing steam.
At the movement’s “Ground Zero” — Birmingham, Ala. — fewer marchers were demonstrating, and some local black leaders were beginning to think King was more trouble than he was worth.
Meanwhile, the national media was getting bored with civil rights, while the white-owned local media was deliberately ignoring civil rights stories.
Even the police under Birmingham’s notoriously racist and brutal police chief “Bull” Connor had exhibited restraint, sensing that King was losing control of his own movement.
King sensed the same, so in desperation he decided to play one last card.
This week in 1962, King unleashed on the city of Birmingham a street demonstration by thousands of black school children, too many for the police to stop, but enough to gain back the media’s attention.
May 2 being a school day, the children — some as young as 6 years old — were thrilled to be playing hooky.
When they poured out of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church to be unleashed on the unsuspecting city, they were so excited to be a part of the movement that one little girl was heard saying to another, “Hurry up, Lucille. If you stay behind you won’t get arrested with our group!”
By the end of the day, more than 600 of them had been jailed, and news crews from the three major television networks were heading back to Birmingham. The civil rights movement was back in business.
And then some. The next day, when thousands more children marched from the 16th Street church, Bull Connor and his troops were waiting with water hoses. At first the water pressure was low, but as more children poured out of the church, more water poured out of the hoses, and soon camera crews were filming little children being knocked over by high pressure hoses, while also being attacked by police dogs. By the end of this second day, some 2,000 children were in jail or fenced in, and the black community was outraged. Riots broke out in Birmingham, most of which were captured by network film crews and broadcast nationwide.
Which outraged the country, ultimately resulting in an agreement among local politicians, businessmen and civil rights leaders in which desegregation first would take place in Birmingham’s department stores and water fountains, and later its lunch counters and schools.
This agreement, and others like it, would suffer many setbacks in the days ahead, but the “Children’s Miracle March,” as it became known, had literally as well as figuratively given new blood to the quest for racial equality.
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