Abstract
This is part of a monthly editorial series discussing current issues affecting children and their caregivers with thoughtful consideration of the history of pediatric medicine. If you are interested in contributing, please reach out to the editor of this journal.
“Kelly Ingram Park has become almost daily now for more than a month the scene of an increasingly dangerous battle,” James Spotswood wrote for the Birmingham News on May 8, 1963.
“Police and firemen fight to maintain law and order. Young Negros run through the park yelling for ‘freedom.’ Then comes the inevitable clash. Police with night sticks, firemen manning hoses, force them back. The youths retaliate with missiles. . . . Firemen manned hoses on the eastern edge of the park, shoving the demonstrators back with lashing streams of water. The boys and girls ran, stumbling and falling when the rock-hard streams of water struck them at close range. On the edge of the fingering streams they laughed and played in the spray. Then from behind this pleasant scene jagged missiles raced through the trees and slapped down among the firemen and officers.” 1
This is how one journalist covered the Children's Crusade of May 2-10, 1963.
Was that really what happened? Photographs by Charles Moore showed unarmed Black children marching in the park, sitting on the sidewalk, cowering against walls of buildings, battered with fire hoses, snarling dogs, and guns. The pictures told a different story, of peaceful resistance met with cruelty and brutality. 2 The New York Times said “There was no resistance to arrest by the laughing, singing groups of youngsters, although some of the smaller participants dropped their signs and ran when the police approached.” 3
Interviewed later, the kids—as young as 6—said they had been warned about the police. They knew they might go to jail. They knew about the dogs. They weren’t expecting the hoses. 2 Moore's photos are terrible, and terrifying: you can feel the devastating force of the water on their vulnerable bodies.
The hoses, dogs and arrests were the work of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. Connor was a radio sports announcer before he was elected Police Commissioner in 1937 (he left public office between 1953 and 1957 after an arrest for being alone in a hotel room with his secretary). 4 According to one 1963 article praising Connor, “Despite the world-wide notoriety Connor has received as a violent racist, the police and fire departments that he has run for so long have a top-notch reputation.” 5
Connor fought hard and built those departments to defend segregation. When a 1960 New York Times article said he was elected on a “race hate platform,” Connor filed a libel suit against the newspaper (he lost). That article, titled “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham,” described a city where all citizens were afraid to talk freely, and lived in fear. It said that all protesters in Birmingham—of any color—could be charged with “vagrancy” and arrested without bail. They would simply disappear for 3 days, no phone call, unable to tell anyone what had happened to them. 6
With the Children's Crusade, Connor finally took his unrestrained authority too far. By May 8, Governor George Wallace, “tired of the lawlessness in Birmingham,” brought in Alabama Highway Patrolmen to support Connor, armed with “tear gas, sawed off shotguns, carbines and submachine guns.” 7 Moore's photos, featured in Life magazine and shared around the world, were shocking and infuriating. Change happened—because enough people went into the streets in nonviolent protest, risking arrest and injury, and the world paid attention.
In June 1963, John F. Kennedy said, “If an American, because his skin is dark . . . cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? . . . We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people.” Eight days later, Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 8
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. I went to high school downtown, not far from Kelly Ingram Park, where a public memorial lets you walk through a line of snarling iron dogs and imagine what it felt like to be a part of the Crusade in 1963. No one should walk through those statues and think it would be nice to stand on the side of Bull Connor, fighting the noncompliant vulnerable with fire hoses. Everyone should understand that was the wrong side of history.
Pediatricians and pediatric neurologists should also understand that adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, first studied systematically in 1998, have life-long effects on mental health, health-harming behaviors, and physical health. We have few tools to address ACE-specific health issues once these experiences occur. 9 Most ACEs are studied on a household level, but increasingly community violence is considered an important factor as well.10,11 It isn’t difficult to anticipate that the daily, constant fear of government violence—fear of being removed from the home; fear of losing parents, relatives, teachers, friends; fear that a government agent could kill anyone on a whim, claim self-defense, and face no repercussions 12 —will have a lasting effect on the health of our patients.
What was once allowed by the government, in this country, was not what was ethical or right. We know that what is allowed by our government right now is not ethical or right.
We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people.
