March 2024 | Howard County Beacon

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The Howard County

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VOL.14, NO.3

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P E O P L E

O V E R

More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County

United by Birmingham childhoods

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Ann Jimerson, left, and Amos Townsend, right, were 12 years old when the KKK bombed a church in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Today, they visit schools together each fall. Jimerson shows students a photo of a stained-glass rosette from the church, pictured above, which she donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Townsend holds the book children read in school before their visit, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963.

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.”

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.

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She was also 12 years old and living in Birmingham when she learned that the Ku Klux Klan church bombing had killed four 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

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A Chorus Line at Toby’s Dinner Theatre reminds us why the musical was so popular back in the 1970s page 19

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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 group is a nonprofit that provides an online and inperson platform for people to connect and tell their stories. At one of its events recalling the day of the church bombing, Townsend was moved to tears. “I had never had that release before,”

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