When the Children Filled the Jails

On May 2, 1963, over a thousand young people poured out of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, singing freedom songs as they marched toward downtown. Some were high schoolers. Some were barely eight years old. They had been trained in nonviolence by James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and they knew exactly what awaited them. Birmingham's Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered their arrest. By day's end, more than six hundred children filled the city jails. The next day, even more came. Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on them, and the images flashed across television screens nationwide. Adults who had hesitated for years watched these young people absorb the blows they themselves had feared, and something broke open in the conscience of a nation. Within weeks, Birmingham's segregation ordinances began to fall.

Many adults had told those children they were too young, that this was not their fight. The children marched anyway.

The apostle Paul wrote to young Timothy, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity." God has never waited for His people to reach a certain age before calling them to courage. Sometimes it is the youngest among us who remind the rest of the body what faithfulness actually costs — and what it looks like to answer the call when others will not.