What the Children Were Willing to Lose

On May 2, 1963, hundreds of Black children filed out of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, singing hymns and walking straight toward waiting police wagons. James Bevel, a young strategist with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had trained them in nonviolent resistance. They knew exactly what awaited them: arrest, fire hoses, snarling dogs. They marched anyway. Over the following days, more than two thousand young people were arrested.…