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More than 125,000 readers throughout Greater Baltimore
United by Birmingham childhoods
Coming together decades later Kids in Birmingham 1963 was founded by Washington, D.C. resident Ann Jimerson, who was deeply affected by her Alabama childhood, too. She was also 12 years old and living in Birmingham when she learned that the Ku Klux Klan church bombing had killed four
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE COUNTY
By Glenda C. Booth When Freeman Hrabowski was 12 years old, in 1963, he was so inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that he not only marched in the Children’s Crusade for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, for three days, but he went to jail for five. When Hrabowski reached the steps of city hall, ardent segregationist and Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor spat in his face, picked him up and threw him into the police wagon. A math whiz, Hrabowski grew up to become president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. His childhood experiences “taught me that tomorrow can be better than today — only if I am prepared to be part of the solution,” he said in an interview with the Beacon. Amos Townsend was also 12 years old and living in Birmingham on the day of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls. His family was attending a service at Saint Joseph Baptist Church a dozen blocks away. Townsend instantly felt “a sense of loss over no longer having a place that could be considered a sanctuar y. Not even churches were safe spaces anymore for a kid just trying to go to Sunday school,” he said. Both Townsend and Hrabowski are members of a group called Kids in Birmingham 1963, a meeting place for people who grew up in that city in the tumultuous 60s. Established a decade ago, the nonprofit provides an online and in-person platform for people to connect and tell their stories. At one event recalling the day of the church bombing, Townsend was moved to tears. “I had never had that release before,” said Townsend, who now lives in Burtonsville, Maryland. “I had so suppressed those memories that they all came back to me 40-plus years later.”
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Freeman Hrabowski, longtime president of UMBC, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. He was sent to jail at age 12 for marching there in the 1963 Children’s Crusade protesting segregation. Today, Hrabowski and others are members of the group Kids in Birmingham 1963, which works to educate today’s children about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
African American girls, ages 14 and 11, who were in a basement restroom. Founded in 1873, the 16th Street Baptist Church was the oldest Black Baptist church in Birmingham. In 1963, civil rights activists held six meetings and 12 workshops in the church to train people for voting rights sit-ins, boycotts and marches — events that made the church a target for white supremacists opposed to the movement. Jimerson’s father, a Baptist minister at a nearby church, scooped some of the stained-glass pieces off the ground and brought them home in a box.
“He and Mom let us peer into that box and carefully handle the sharp, dusty pieces,” Jimerson recalled in an interview with the Beacon. The shards had a prominent place on a hutch in her family’s home until Jimerson in 2013 donated them to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Last year marked the 60th anniversary of the “Year of Birmingham,” the year that King wrote his historic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on April 16. See HISTORY, page 20
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Baltimore author caps a lifetime of writing with a biography of an American heroine page 19
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