“I knew what segregation was and separation, but I didn't understand the extent or the level of the inequities in that separation,” recalls Kelsey, a Birmingham native who wrote about her experience in the movement in her 2017 memoir, I Woke Up with my Mind on Freedom.īevel posed questions to the students who discovered that hand-me-down books and football helmets were not what white students used. Janice Kelsey was 15 when she attended her first meeting for the Children’s Crusade. There was also an economic reason to have children participate since adults risked being fired from their jobs for missing work and protesting. The strategy involved recruiting popular teenagers from Black high schools, such as the quarterbacks and cheerleaders, who could influence their classmates to attend meetings with them at Black churches in Birmingham to learn about the non-violent movement. James Bevel, a member of SCLC, came up with an idea to include school-age children in protests to help desegregate Birmingham. “The number of adults who were willing to volunteer, to get arrested, had steadily dwindled those last two weeks of April and it looked like the movement was about to fall apart,” says Glenn Eskew, a history professor at Georgia State University and author of the 1997 book, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. After King was arrested and confined to a jail cell, where he wrote his famous work, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he knew, along with other activists, that a new strategy was essential if the campaign were to succeed. Overall, fewer people were attending meetings, sit-ins and marches. The pair partnered with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a local civil rights organization led by Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent minister and activist.īut the Alabama movement was fresh off a failed attempt to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. Ralph Abernathy, hoping to shore up resistance against segregation in the state. King had traveled to Birmingham in the spring of 1963, along with Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Rev.

But when an unorthodox plan to recruit Black children to march was implemented, the movement reversed itself, reinvigorating the fight for racial equality, in what became known as the Children’s Crusade. With diminished support and fewer volunteers, their campaign to end segregationist policies was teetering on failure. and fellow leaders in the civil rights movement faced a grim reality in Birmingham, Alabama.

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