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| Police in Birmingham, Ala., take a group of black schoolchildren to jail on May 4, 1963, after their arrest for protesting against segregation. (Bill Hudson/AP) |
The
school gates were locked. But that didn’t keep hundreds of students from
crawling up and over the fences, defying their parents, teachers and school
principals to march against segregation.
It
was May 1963 in Alabama, and Birmingham’s brutal public safety commissioner,
Eugene “Bull” Connor, was waiting. His police moved in, herding the children
into squad cars, paddy wagons and school buses for the trip to jail.
When
the students kept coming, Connor turned fire hoses on them, knocking
the children to the ground and spinning them down the street. To fight the
high-powered blasts, some children joined hands trying to keep their balance in
a human chain. But the torrents were too fierce; hit by the rocket-bursts of
water the kids whirled one way, then the other, dragging down their comrades.
The
1963 children’s crusade changed history. Now 55 years later, the students of
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., are rising up — staging
protests and walkouts in the aftermath of the Feb. 14 slaughter of 17 people at
their school.
Even
as they’ve been attacked as
“crisis actors” and disparaged on social media, the students
have put elected officials on notice: They want
America’s gun laws changed. On Saturday, they will lead a march in
Washington that could draw hundreds of thousands of
protesters to the nation’s capital. Sister marches will be held in cities
across the country.
“This
past Valentine’s Day, all the people in my school and my community lost
someone,” 16-year-old
Alfonso Calderon said Thursday at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a
school in Southeast Washington that has lost students to gun violence. “Nothing
in my entire life has affected me that much — ever. Not only am I a different
person, but I was robbed of my innocence.”
History shows that kids, with their innocence, honesty and moral urgency, can shame adults into discovering their conscience. It worked in Birmingham. During the children’s crusade, young people swarmed in to redirect the arc of history.
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