Birmingham: Trauma and Sorrow

I am a little older than most of this group, Kids in Birmingham 1963. I moved to Birmingham from a suburb of New York City in 1946 at the age of five. My parents had bought a house on Southside and did not have a car. I was soon taking a city bus downtown by myself for various reasons. On the buses, I noticed the disparity between what white people had to do to ride the bus and what Black people had to do. I learned I was white from riding the buses. They had movable signs inserted in bars across the backs of the seats that said White on one side and Colored on the other, and I knew I was to sit in the white section. I had known about the maternal side of my family being enslavers for as long as I can remember, it always troubled me. After graduating from Ramsay High School and attending St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, for one year, my then-husband and I were married in 1960 in the Unitarian Church. He and his family had been attending the church since the late 1950s. We along with other members of the church soon became involved with the African Americans’ brave struggle for their civil rights.

The year 1963 is seared into everyone’s memory. (more…)

A Second Chance to Act

Growing up in Birmingham in the fifties and sixties was idyllic, which is probably very hard to imagine, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 and all of the tumult of the ’60s. But, I was in high school before our church member, James Armstrong, a barber with an independent income that insulated him from white factors, filed his lawsuit to permit his young sons to integrate the Birmingham public schools, in 1963. Their sister was in my homeroom class at the time the courts ordered their admission. However, there were many other events unfolding in our lives and the race issue was not always uppermost in our thoughts. Many times it was the furthest thing from our minds. Life in the black community was full, varied and dynamic.

Although Birmingham was a large city for the South and I’ve always considered myself as having grown up in an urban setting, for we were only a mile from the downtown business district, the atmosphere of our neighborhood was actually quite rural. (more…)

We were saved for a purpose: To tell our story

In March 2025, Floyd Armstrong gave Kids in Birmingham 1963 an oral history interview about growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in “a civil rights family.” As the sons of a barber who was “committed to the struggle,” Floyd and his brother Dwight, as elementary school-age children, marched in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade and were jailed for several days in May 1963. That September, the Armstrong brothers were the first Blacks to integrate an all-white school in the city of Birmingham—Graymont Elementary School. They knew the civil rights leaders personally, including Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the NAACP lawyers who prepared them for the challenges they faced at that school. Just a few days after their historic action, on September 15, 1963, Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls and sparking whites to murder two young African American boys. Floyd is certain, he says, that the violence was meant for his family, but that, “We were saved for a purpose: To tell our story.” (more…)

Rocketed by the experience of growing up in Birmingham

Everyone knows the history, knows that Birmingham was aka [also known as] the most segregated city in the nation, knows that Birmingham was aka Bombingham, and if they don’t know the litany of events in 1963 — well, they ought to.

American history is yoked to civil rights history. It’s what we’re founded on, what we have grandly succeeded at and dismally failed at.

Birmingham is not just in the Heart of Dixie, it is smack at the heart of our Great American Paradox, a constant tug of war between civil rights and civil wrongs.

Birmingham was, as has been said, ground zero of the civil rights movement in 1963; it was also ground zero for my coming of age. (more…)

I saw the Blacks in Alabama standing for something

In 1963 I was 10 years old and believed life in the South was unfair to blacks. I grew up in the West Princeton-Rising neighborhood and was number 8 of 11 children. My father worked for United States Steel (USS) and my mother was a homemaker.

Lomb Avenue divided West Princeton-Rising from West End, which was the white neighborhood. We had to cross that Ave when doing neighborhood shopping. The white kids would name call and throw rocks at us.

Two of my sisters and one brother, attended A. H. Parker high school during the year of 1963. They were given very stern instructions, that morning of the Children’s Crusade, not to leave school for any reason. My brother evidently didn’t hear those instructions because he did participate. Thankfully for him he was not arrested. That evening we all watched the evening news and my siblings were pointing out some of their classmates.

I saw then that the blacks in Alabama were standing for something. It made me see that equality could be made possible for blacks but only if they fought for it.

Veronica Jackson wrote this story expressly for Kids in Birmingham 1963 in December 2020.