A DANGEROUS BUSINESS: CHILDREN ON THE FRONT LINES

Alabama Heritage, Fall 2003 by Sznajderman, Michael

THE CONTROVERSIAL DECISION TO INCLUDE CHILDREN IN BIRMINGHAM'S CIVIL RIGHTS PROTESTS MET WITH ALARM FROM SOME, ELATION FROM OTHERS. BUT IN THE END, IT BROKE THE BACK OF SEGREGATION IN THE CITY.

BEFORE WALKING OUT OF SEGREGATED Center Street Elementary School on the hot spring morning of May 2, 1963, Audrey Hendricks approached Miss Wills, her third-grade teacher. When the child respectfully declared that she would not be remaining in class that day, Miss Wills stared at her and then burst into tears. Audrey was the only child in her class who had decided to take part in what had been dubbed by organizers as "D-Day." Miss Wills was filled with pride for Audrey, and for what the nine-year-old was about to do. She dismissed the child from class with a nod and a smile.

Standing alone on the school's dusty front lawn, Audrey paused, listening to the quiet. Then she broke into a run, quickly covering the two blocks that separated the school from her family's modest Titusville home. Her parents were waiting. Without any discussion, Audrey climbed into the back of her parent's Chevrolet and the three drove eastward, toward downtown Birmingham.

Audrey's mother, Lola Hendricks, would not take part in the protests, but only because she was too important behind the scenes. Lola and her husband Joe were among the earliest supporters of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who for a decade had been a vocal opponent of segregation in the city. Now, after years of frustration, the national spotlight was suddenly on Birmingham and its intransigent white leadership. Shuttlesworth and the Hendricks were relishing the moment.

Across town, Alan Drennen considered the civil rights protests taking place downtown with a mixture of anger, admiration, and dread. just a month earlier, Alan and a group of fellow white moderates were elected to Birmingham's newly created city council. But the council and the city's new mayor, had yet to take their seats. Instead, they remained tangled in a legal battle with supporters of the city's outgoing, three-member city commission. Indeed, the most prominent and most notorious member of the commission, Eugene "Bull" Connor, remained firmly in control of the city's police and fire departments. For weeks, police had been rounding up a steadily growing stream of civil rights protestors, with little violence. But that was about to change.

LOLA HENDRICKS WAS BORN ON Birmingham's Southside in 1932. Her mother was a cook; her father delivered coal. She remembers vividly the blatant banners of segregated Birmingham: the labels on water fountains, the whites-only parks and swimming pools, the dividing line on city buses. For much of her childhood, she had only the rarest interaction with whites.

One of those moments came when Lola was nine, on a segregated city bus. She was riding with her mother, and as the bus approached downtown, the seats filled up, leaving standing room only. Finally, the driver put the bus in park and came down the aisle. he halted in front of Lola and her mother, who were seated at the front of the colored section. "Y'all need to get to the back of the bus," he instructed. Lola's mother obediently stood up and told her daughter to do the same. Later that day, Lola asked her mother why they had to surrender their seats. "She told me, 'That is the way the law is. They don't want whites and blacks to be together.'" As she grew older, Lola noticed other times when her parents submitted to the instructions of whites. "I never could accept that," she said.

While Lola's family struggled to make ends meet, Alan was growing up comfortably on the slopes of Redmont Park. As a young boy in the early 1930s, Alan shared the experience of many prosperous white children in the city: he had a black playmate, the offspring of a neighbor's domestic worker. But he also vividly remembers his grandparents admonishing him about the interracial relationship. "It affected my life," Alan said in a recent interview.

By 1960, Alan was a successful insurance broker. But he was disturbed about Birmingham's lack of progress. A decade earlier, Birmingham and Atlanta were of nearly equal size. But Atlanta's reputation as a forward-looking city had led to phenomenal growth, while Birmingham was stagnating. Aside from the fourteen-story municipal building, not a single new downtown skyscraper had risen in Birmingham in thirty years. There was no doubt in Alan's mind that the city's leadership and the city's troubling record of racial violence were holding it back.

In 1962, Alan joined his brother-in-law, Roy Kracke, and lawyer David Vann in the successful petition drive to change the city's form of government from a three-member commission to a mayor and nine-member council. Alan also began holding informal gatherings of blacks and whites in his home to discuss the city's future. When council elections were set for the spring of 1963, Alan became a candidate.

As a council hopeful, Alan did not advocate dismantling Birmingham's segregation laws; no white candidate did. But Alan did take the relatively radical position of supporting the hiring of black policemen. During the campaign, he and other moderate candidates were the subject of smear sheets and maligned as "race-mixers," communists, and puppets of the "Negro bloc." At home, Alan and his family endured a series of profanity-laced, threatening phone calls. But on April 2, city voters chose a more progressive course, rejecting Connor's mayoral bid in favor of Albert Boutwell and a group of moderate council hopefuls.