Ann Beard Grundy
Ann Beard Grundy was born only a few months after her father, Rev. Luke Beard, accepted the post as pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, moving his growing family to Birmingham in 1945. Until their father’s sudden death in 1960, Ann and her eight brothers and sisters lived in the parsonage, right next to the church and steps away from Birmingham’s thriving Black business district. In their busy home the Beards hosted nationally-known musicians, performers, church leaders, and civil rights activists, who had few options for accommodations, and the family welcomed parishioners and neighbors in need. Ann attended Birmingham’s A.H. Parker High School before joining the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC’s) Southern Student Project, designed to bring gifted Black high school students from the segregated South to Northern schools. Through that project, she graduated from Liberty Central High in upstate New York. Ann went on to Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, the first integrated, co-educational college in the South, where she studied piano. After graduation in 1968, she took her first job in North Carolina, then learned of a job opening in Louisville, Kentucky, where she entered a graduate program at the University of Louisville and worked for state government. In 1974, she and Chester Grundy were married in an Africa-themed ceremony they held in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park. Soon after, they moved to Lexington when her husband was offered a position at the University of Kentucky. In Lexington, Ann taught at a school for special students, and she and Chester raised their two daughters, Tulani Grundy Meadows, now an attorney in Omaha, Nebraska; and Saida Grundy, Associate Professor of Sociology and African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. Ann and Chester Grundy still live in Lexington, where they continue to bring the best of Black culture to town, organizing events like the Black Movie Classic and the Spotlight Jazz Series. In October 2025, Ann Beard Grundy recorded an expansive oral history interview for Kids in Birmingham 1963 and the Bending the Arc Project, giving permission to both groups to publish thematic segments of that video recording.
In this segment of an expansive oral history she gave in October 2025, Ann speaks of the Black radio stations that broadcast some of her father’s sermons and of the celebrity DJs, who were “like little gods in our lives.” Peering from an upstairs window of the parsonage, Ann could see two Black radio stations, including WENN, where renowned DJ Paul “Tall Paul” White would later give a shoutout to Ann’s brother Luke Beard, who had been his classmate at Parker High.
In this segment of an expansive oral history she gave in October 2025, Ann Beard Grundy speaks of the time, when she was 4 years old, that Bull Connor threw her father in jail for refusing to cancel a planned meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Because their mother protected her children from learning where their father was during this absence, it wasn’t until Ann was an adult that she heard from her older brother about what really happened and read about the court case on this incident, Taylor v. City of Birmingham.
