Remembering the Children’s Crusade

By Marian Wright Edelman

“Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but I have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’ll just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doing this only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also because I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come before you die.”

This teenage boy overheard talking to his father by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of hundreds of children and youths in Birmingham, Alabama who decided 60 years ago this week that they were determined to do whatever it took to stand up for freedom for their parents, elders, and themselves. They were assaulted by fire hoses and police dogs, went to jail by the hundreds, and finally broke the back of Jim Crow in the city known as “Bombingham.”

On this 60th anniversary of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade it is again time to remember, honor, and follow the example of the children who were frontline soldiers and transforming catalysts in the movement for civil rights and equal justice.

The Children’s Crusade happened at a critical time in the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. In April 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), together with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and its fearless leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had started a desegregation campaign in the city.

There were mass meetings, lunch counter sit-ins, nonviolent marches, and boycotts of Birmingham’s segregated stores during the busy Easter shopping season. Dr. King was one of several hundred people arrested in the first weeks of the campaign when he was jailed for violating an anti-protest injunction on Good Friday, April 12.

Four days later he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But as the days went on with little response from city leaders, a new tactic was raised: including more children and youths.

On this 60th anniversary of the Birmingham

Young people didn’t face some of the risks adults might, including losing breadwinning jobs, and college students had already proven to be extremely effective activists in cities across the South. But once it became clear that many of the children volunteering for meetings and training sessions in Birmingham were high school students or even younger, concerns were raised about whether allowing them to protest was too dangerous.

Dr. King later described the decision this way: “Even though we realized that involving teenagers and high school students would bring down upon us a heavy fire of criticism, we felt that we needed this dramatic new dimension. Our people were demonstrating daily and going to jail in numbers, but we were still beating our heads against the brick wall of the city officials’ stubborn resolve to maintain the status quo.

“Our fight, if won, would benefit people of all ages. But most of all we were inspired with a desire to give to our young a true sense of their own stake in freedom and justice. We believed they would have the courage to respond to our call.” Their response, he said, “exceeded our fondest dreams.” sight and no one I can appeal to. The willful shirking of rules and shortage of oversight tie into the second major problem—a complete lack of transparency. submissions@spokesman-recorder.com submissions@spokesman-recorder.com submissions@spokesman-recorder.com.

For the children, May 2 was “D-Day.” Black disc jockeys were key allies in encouraging and deploying their listeners, and class presidents, star athletes, and prom queens from local schools led the way as hundreds of children skipped class, gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and marched into downtown Birmingham in groups of 50, organized into lines two by two and singing freedom songs. More than a thousand students marched the first day, and hundreds were arrested. Segregationist police commissioner Bull Connor’s overwhelmed force started using school buses to take the children to jail. But that first wave of children was only the beginning.

When hundreds more returned the next day, Bull Connor directed the police and fire department to begin using force on the child marchers. The decision surprised even those used to his meanness and brutality, but it was not enough to stop the marchers. The searing heartbreaking pictures of children being battered by powerful fire hoses and attacked by police dogs appeared on front pages around the country and world and helped turn the tide of public opinion in support of the fight for justice.

Marches and protests continued in Birmingham with children leading the way. As more were arrested and attacked others kept coming to take their place, leaving jails so overflowing that some child prisoners were held at the city’s fairground and in an open-air stockade where they were pelted by rain.

On May 8 a temporary truce was called. On May 10 an agreement was reached that released the jailed children and others on bond and paved the way for desegregation of Birmingham’s public facilities.

Hateful segregationists in the city did not give in quietly.

Three times now, the Commissioner of Corrections has decided against moving my case further along the path to parole. Worse, the continuances between reviews keep getting longer and longer. One could be forgiven for assuming I have done something wrong, some dire disobedience warranting further incarceration. Honestly, I haven’t. Quite the opposite. Unlike an inmate serving a determinate sentence, I have not only had to do my time, but also work hard at demonstrable rehabilitation. The reasons for my parole denials remain obscured because the commissioner can blithely ignore rules without accountability—the first of three major problems with the lifer review process.

Minnesota statutes required the commissioner to create rules governing the review process for the release of inmates serving a life sentence. These rules stipulate the commissioner must explain in writing the reasons for his or her decision, whether parole or continuance.

Neither of the two commissioners I have gone before has ever clearly stated why they chose not to grant me parole in the letters they sent me after my review, summarizing the event. Not only have I been left in the dark as to how I fell short of presenting a sufficient case for release and what concerns I need to address, but the lack of a written record shields the commissioner’s decision from scrutiny. There’s no way to investigate whether the decision might be arbitrary, erroneous, or flat out illegal.

The commissioner must also state in writing actions the inmate can take to alter the date of their release or next review. While each of my letters from the commissioner lists a number of directives I must complete, actually doing so had no discernible positive effect. I was simply ordered to do them - even when the directive called for me to do a defunct or nonexistent program. Still, I have gone out of my way to comply. When told to do the “Criminogenic” class after it was shut down, I wrote a book report on Inside the Criminal Mind. When told to do a class on relationships that has never even been offered, I purchased a relationship workbook, filled it out, and turned it in. There has been no lack of effort on my part, I assure you. Yet at each review, my continuance is longer than the prior review’s. There is no over-

Within hours, the Gaston Motel where Dr. King and other SCLC leaders stayed was firebombed, as was Dr. King’s brother Reverend A.D. King’s home.

Four months later, a bomb was placed under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church with a timer deliberately set to go off Sunday morning. The bomb exploded as children were in the church’s basement preparing to lead Youth Sunday services, and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley and 11-year-old Denise McNair were killed, with more than 20 others injured.

Months later, when an interviewer asked Dr. King how

The totality of the life sentence review process isn’t just hidden from the public, it’s hidden from the Lifer as well. Police, prosecutors, judges, and victims’ families all get to weigh in on whether a Lifer should be released, but their input is never shared.

Since completing directives clearly doesn’t equate to moving forward, frustrated, I once asked what the commissioner really wanted from me. I was told to “figure it out.” In other words, if I was told what to do, I might fool them. The sad irony is that this mindset favors those few sociopathic Lifers who are skilled at manipulation - discerning and telling people exactly what they want to hear. The lack of transparency leaves Lifers like me confused and disheartened, asking ourselves what more can we possibly do?

The third problem is that ex- have all concluded I’m at a low risk for future violence and there was no reason not to move me toward release. Instead, I was interrogated about what I meant by “soul-wrenching regret” for my crime and whether my release plan was overconfident because I hoped to get my PhD in social psychology within six years of being released. Rather than focusing on rehabilitation and risk, the review was spent nitpicking minutiae. aggerated fears and elevated emotions are allowed to hijack rational thinking. Reviews always take place mere hours after the commissioner speaks with victims’ families. Is this a good and fair practice? It must be heartbreaking and take an emotional toll. How could someone remain unbiased in the face of such pain? Couldn’t the same purpose be accomplished with a week or a month between the review and meeting with the families?

“At this point, I feel the system itself is broken,” was my friend Quinn’s response. I agree. Unless Minnesotans are prepared to accept a system of “justice for some,” the “lifer” review process must be reformed. Existing rules must be enforced, and accountability established.

Expectations must include a set of clearly stated, flexible criteria that can be individualized for each inmate, and a standard by which to judge whether those criteria have been met, such as “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “a strong likelihood.” Police, prosecutors, and judges should be barred from input - their job ended when the inmate was convicted. Finally, how victims’ families are involved needs to change. Rather than retraumatize them, the review process should empower them by allowing them input into selecting criteria for release. Wouldn’t it be more meaningful if they could require an accountability statement from the inmate or answers to lingering questions about the crime that may have haunted them?

Wouldn’t a sufficient cooling-off period be prudent? Emotionally compromised, it was all too easy in my reviews to gloss over every positive thing I’ve accomplished in 30 long years, including earning my bachelor’s, completing treatment plus a full year of aftercare, and having a bona fide job offer upon release in a trade I learned in prison. All of the risk assessments compiled by the Department of Corrections put my highest risk of reoffending at less than 2 percent, but this fact was disregarded as was the fact my psychological evaluations he felt after that bombing, he first described his despair at thinking if men could be that bestial maybe there really was no hope. But, he said, time eventually “buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over three thousand young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting— ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor’s police dogs, clubs, and fire hoses.”

He added: “I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a White policeman ac- costed a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’

The review needs to become part of a larger transitional process aimed at healing the inmate, the victim’s family, and the community as much as possible. A bill is before the Minnesota legislature right now that, if passed, will redirect the power to parole those serving life sentences from the Commissioner of Corrections to an Indeterminate Sentence Review Board. It seems likely this bill will soon become law.

Would this be a positive first step? Yes. However, even if it passes, it does nothing to address any of the problems I have outlined here. More must be done and now. I ask you to urge lawmakers to repair and improve this broken system, restrict the “grievous loss” of being denied parole to those inmates who refuse to do the necessary work to change, and let “Justice for All” truly become our state’s guiding corrections philosophy.

J.S. Nemo is at Moose Lake, a medium-security facility.

This commentary was made possible through a partnership with Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

“She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times, when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind and has buoyed me.” The same example that buoyed Dr. King should still inspire us today.

Marian Wright Edelman