Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

I can remember that in 1963 during the civil rights era, before the March on Washington that summer, in Birmingham, Alabama, there was a children’s crusade. Children were organized to face the high-power firehoses and the police, Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham. Of course, there were some who disagreed with allowing the children to participate at that level; even Malcolm X thought it was not appropriate to expose children to that amount of danger, but the children wanted to participate. And the images of children facing police dogs and firehoses circulated all over the world and that helped to create a global consciousness of the brutality of racism. It was an extraordinary step. And this is something that’s often forgotten, the role that children actually played in breaking the stronghold of silence regarding racism.