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…)

I can still see that moment, 63 years later

One day of 1963 that stands out for me is the moment I heard that 4 girls were blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church. I knew one of them. We attended the Friendship and Action events together – in a group formed to bring together Black and white families in spite of Jim Crow segregation.

I can still see that moment, 63 years later. I was standing in front of our dining room table, staring out the window into our backyard. This was the table I slept under with a pillow on top of me so that if any of the bomb threats my family was receiving actually materialized, I wouldn’t be impaled by the glass from that window.

I live with survivor’s guilt. (more…)

They bombed our home, but we persisted

August 20, 1963, my mother and I went to the movie theater as we always did before I returned to college. Halfway through the film, a neighbor came to tell us that our house had been bombed. My heart was racing. I was filled with anxiety, fear, and anger. As we approached our house, outraged Blacks filled Center Street North. Police tried to control the crowd by firing guns is in the air. Windows had been blown out, drapes shredded, the garage doors destroyed. My dog Tasso had been killed in the bombing. I couldn’t stop crying. I grieved Tasso’s death for a long time. (more…)

Ode to Chuck Clarke

The Clarke family home, located in the center of Birmingham, before it was replaced by the main intersection of freeway arteries in the city, next door to Kids Storyteller Dale Long’s aunt, was always a warm gathering spot for the older Clarke siblings and me and my siblings as a child. I had piano lessons there every Thursday evening. My two Uncles from New York, who remained single and very popular in music for many years, would come home for the holidays each year and always traveled with their horn or mouthpiece. (My father defected from playing in New York to return to Birmingham to raise a family.) Jam sessions were instant.

I grew up with music always in the atmosphere. My father performed jazz as a second job. His day job was as a (“trailblazer,” one of the first few Blacks hired) Claims Examiner for Social Security (he was a math whiz). He routinely plucked out arrangements on our piano. On many approaching weekends I asked, “Where are you playing?”, to see if I would be able to go. (more…)

September 15, 1963: The Day our Driver Changed Course

Alert: This essay contains a racial slur used by some white people at that time to demean Black children as a group.

Our family lived on a wooded hilltop in the white suburb of Mountain Brook, protected from sleepless nights of bombings and police oppression plaguing Black families in the Magic City. My few glimpses of struggles for justice downtown were through safety glass windows of a 1959 Chevrolet station wagon that sported jet fins, a V-8 engine, and could haul up to a dozen kids.

On Mother’s Day 1961 when I was age twelve, Mama drove my siblings and me downtown to the Trailways station to pick up our cousin from Mississippi. There was no place to park out front. A crowd milled around, spilling out of the station. Mama noted how strange there were no officers or police cars anywhere. She double-parked. Leaving the engine running, she instructed my older brother, “Go in, find Stevie, grab his bags and bring him back immediately.” “Robert, climb in the back and open the tailgate window.” While my brother was inside, a half dozen white men toting tire irons, bats, and chains rushed toward the rear of the station, almost tripping over each other as if late for an event. Finally, my brother and Stevie emerged from the front of the station. I took Stevie’s suitcase, and the two of them piled in the middle seat. Mama scratched off before I could close the tailgate window.

The front page of the next day’s newspaper featured a circle of white men taking turns beating an unidentifiable victim on the floor. The article reported the Freedom Riders’ bus arrived at the station shortly after we had left. On the radio, Bull Connor told reporters he gave police officers the day off so they could visit their mothers on Mother’s Day.

In early May 1963, we picked up Stevie at the bus station with no problems. When Mama turned south toward home on a one-way street, police cars and firetrucks packed the avenue to our right. I looked through a gap in the blockade and hollered, “Mama, they’re shooting people down with firehoses.” (more…)