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…)
Bull Connor threw our father in jail
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.
Integrationist, Obstructionist, Communist Minister: Reverend Edward V. Ramage, D.D.
By Katherine Ramage, Ph.D.
Told here is a nuanced account of the little-known actions and convictions of my father, Rev. Dr. Edward V. Ramage, who took a leadership role in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s. It examines primary source material from the time – “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” “A Call for Unity,” and the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” – as well as the dates and sequence of events and key political circumstances to elucidate the all-important context for interpreting the actions and perspectives of a local white minister, Rev. E.V. Ramage, and a brilliant national strategist and outsider, Rev. M.L. King. (more…)
An Early Lesson in Segregation
In April 1947, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. My parents learned at my six-weeks checkup that I had a heart murmur – atrial septal defect, a hole in the upper chambers of the heart that failed to close when I was born. Fortunately, the University Hospital, now known as UAB Hospital, had excellent pediatric cardiologists.
Because of frequent doctor’s visits, I became familiar with the hospital. The entry, the lobby, the elevators are still clear in my mind. At one visit, when I was about seven or eight years of age, I remember when the elevator went down instead of up. I had never been down before! “An adventure,” I thought. I was a curious child. (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…)