Children's Crusade for Education

Birmingham's Black schoolchildren played an important role in pushing the city toward the end of legal segregation when thousands left their segregated schools under SCLC field coordinators to join downtown marches. The Children's Crusade drew worldwide attention as images of children attacked by police dogs and fire hoses and looking out from jail cells during the 1963 demonstrations shocked and angered people around the world. That moral outrage pressured federal officials to intervene, helped force President John F. Kennedy to call for stronger civil rights laws, and aided the Black community in breaking Birmingham's unequal segregation laws. Their role in the Birmingham Movement in the spring of 1963 also advanced the cause of equal education later that year, and in July a federal appeals court ordered Birmingham's school board to end its separate system for each race beginning in September 1963. Black families then began enrolling their children in all-White schools in the fall of 1963, and Gov. George Wallace responded by sending Alabama State Troopers to block integration at the public schools where Black parents had enrolled their children.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States