An Army of Normal Folks - The Kids Who Might Have Saved The Civil Rights Movement

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

For Shop Talk, when An Army of Normal Teenage Protestors inspired the adults to get back into the game. The little known story of The Children's Crusade! Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

everybody welcome to shop talk number 73 welcome in the shop you decided to do a week this time it's a it's a week it's a week bell it's rainy outside are you sad today just kind of yeah it's just kind of a chill day how are you i'm doing well actually a cool story okay actually a couple of cool stories i don't know why i'm going here you should stop asking me that question then i got to come with like random things to say out the top of my head well you have two of them Okay, so there was like a, do you remember this was a tornado at like end of March this year, early April? Okay. And it completely destroyed a bunch of places in Mississippi, including this bull bottom farms, that's like cool pumpkin patch.

So anyway, they completely rebuilt it. And I helped them one of the days. And so they're now fully built back up and took the kids there on Saturday. That's awesome. Yeah, I don't know if that's a good enough story worth keeping in here. Well, I wouldn't be. And then we had a shirt. talk we're hanging out we had a church pickleball with like a hundred people on

saturday night church pickleball yeah pickleball and potluck with a hundred people actually that sounds fun it is fun i you know i'd like to play pickleball with you though i play tennis forever yeah never once played pickleball but everybody says it is a blast it's it's it's tennis but ping pong or something you just kind of think it's for commoners like i'm not dealing with this it's just no i just hadn't that time to mess with it because i've been roped into doing this podcast and coaching middle college and coaching high school and running a business and redoing our house and i'm losing my mind so that's it all right shop talk number 33 i think everybody's caught up on us for 73 hmm 73 you said 33 oh 703 yeah shop talk number 73 so the children's crusade

when the youth of birmingham march for justice um it's from the history channel and Alex says this is thought-provoking stuff. So we're going to talk about the Children's Crusade when the youth of Birmingham march for justice on shop talk number 73 right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack.

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Malcolm Gladwell here This season on Revisionous History We're going back to the spring of 1988 To a town in northwest Alabama Where a man committed a crime That would spiral out of control 35 years That's how long

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The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. everybody welcome back to the shop shock top number 73 we have discussed pickleball it's very important today the fastest grown sport in america apparently i need to play i want to play you know but i just had that time because of this podcast so the children's crusade when the youth of birmingham marched for From the History Channel, toward the end of April, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and fellow leaders in the Civil Rights Movement, faced a grim reality in Birmingham. With diminished support and fewer volunteers, their campaigned to end segregationist policies were teetering on failure. That's interesting. I didn't even know that.

I didn't either. But when an Orthodox plan to recruit black children to March, was implemented, the movement reversed itself, reinvigorating the fight for racial equality in what become named as the Children's Crusade. King had traveled to Birmingham in the spring of 1963, along with Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Reverend Ralph Abernathy, hoping to shore up resistance against segregation in the state. Their pair partnered with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a local civil rights organization, led by Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent minister and activist.

But the Alabama movement was fresh off a failed attempt to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. Overall, fewer people were attending meetings, sit-ins, and marches. After King was arrested and confined to a jail cell where he wrote his famous work, letter from a Birmingham jail, he knew, along with other activists, that a new strategy was essential if the campaign were to succeed. The number of adults who were willing to volunteer to get arrested had steadily dwindled those last two weeks of April, and it looked like the movement was about to fall apart. It says Glenn Eskew, a history professor at Georgia State University, and the author of the 1997 book, But for Birmingham, the local and national movement and the civil rights struggle. You know, I guess that makes sense.

I mean, who wants to volunteer to go get arrested, which is basically. what they were asking folks to do yeah and then have no income and you're screwed and possibly also in Alabama these folks probably also getting to beat to death James Bevel a member of the SCLC came up with an idea to include school age children in protest to help desegregate Birmingham the strategy involved recruiting popular teenagers from black high schools such as the quarterbacks and cheerleaders who could influence their classmates to attend meetings with them at black churches in Birmingham to learn more about the nonviolent movement.

There was also an economic reason to have children participate since adults risked being fired from their jobs for missing work and protesting. Janice Kelsey was 15 when she attended her first meeting for the Children's Crusade. I knew what segregation was and separation, but I didn't understand the extent or the level of the inequities in that separation, recalls Kelsey, a Birmingham native who wrote about her experience in the movement in 2017 memoir. I woke up with my mind on freedom. Belleville posed questions the students who discovered that hamming down books and football helmets were not what white students used. Nor was there just one typewriter in the entire school, like black students had.

But rooms with typewriters at the white schools, said Kelsey. Things like that became personal to me. and I decided I wanted to do something about it. King, along with other activists and members in the black community, were adamantly opposed to involving children in marches because of the threats to violence from white mobs, as well as from policemen led by Bull Connor, Eugene Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, notorious for his racist policies.

Beville, undeterred, told the children to gather at 16th Street Baptist Church on May 2nd, 1963. More than a thousand students skip school to participate in the protest. The youth, ranging ages 7 to 18, held picket signs and marched in groups of 10 to 50, singing freedom songs. We were told what to expect, says Kelsey. We even saw some film strips of people who had sat at lunch counters and were spit on and pushed and all that. We were told that if you decide to participate, that this is a nonviolent movement, so you can't fight back.

The demonstrators had several destinations. Some went to City Hall. Others went to lunch counters or downtown shopping district. They marched daily for almost a week. It was well thought out, says Vicki Crawford, the director of Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. It was not just a bunch of people calling up to meet downtown. This was a mobilization and organization following King's six steps of nonviolence to bring about social change.

As the children bravely took to the streets, the Birmingham police were waiting to arrest them, putting them in paddy wagons and school buses. Kelsey said she was arrested on her first day marching and remained in jail for four days. The sight of young people peacefully protesting reinvigorated the Birmingham movement and throngs of people started attending meetings again and joining the demonstrations. King changed his mind as well about the effectiveness of children's Crusades, although the police were mostly restrained the first day. That did not continue. Law enforcement brought out water hoses and police dogs. Television crews and newspapers filmed the young demonstrators getting arrested and hosed down by the Birmingham police, causing

national outrage. More than 2,000 children were reportedly arrested during the days-long protest. They had locked up as many people as they could possibly lock up, and they couldn't control it anymore. And that's what broke the back of segregation, says Eskew. A civil order collapsed because there weren't enough police. When influential white businessmen and city officials saw the business district swarming with demonstrators, in addition to President John F. Kennedy demanding a resolution in sending assistant attorney general Burke Marshall to Birmingham to facilitate negotiations, white city leaders called a meeting with King. An agreement was made to desegregate lunch counters, businesses, and restrooms, and improve hiring opportunities for black people in Birmingham.

I think we serve as a catalyst for change, said Kelsey. Improvements hardly happened overnight in Birmingham. In September, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 6th Street Baptist Church killing four black girls. Yet, the civil rights movement kept up the momentum, and the following year, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights. Rights Act in 1964. There's a story I didn't know, and I bet most hearing didn't, that the civil rights movement almost collapsed but for a bunch of children. And if you don't think an army of normal folks can make change, all you had to do is

hear that story. An army of normal teenage protesters. That's what it was. An army of normal teenage protesters. Because, you know, the other thing is, I bet even racist folks got a lump in their throat when they saw seven and eight, nine-year-old children being water cannon and chased that by dogs and stuff. I mean, as vile as it is for any age of human being to be put under that kind of thing, you know, those kids probably woke up a consciousness that had not been. awakened yet yeah it's a great point it makes only sense that it would so how i discovered this

story uh here i'll show you it on the map i went to the birmingham civil rights museum which if you haven't bet is awesome so i probably learned like five or ten things i had never heard it's on 16th street yeah so it's literally right across from a 16th street baptist church where the bombing yeah literally right across wow and emissions like five or 10 bucks i mean everybody should go if they get a chance and so they literally started that crusade a lot of them at the church and then they walked over to the park and the park is where a lot of them got water host that's it and they have like yeah and they have like really powerful pictures you know of the crusade at the museum so in the civil rights museum you're looking at these pictures this

happening it's literally across the street yeah it's literally out the windows these two famous parks in the silhou right yeah and they have like memorials to all this in the park too okay anybody visiting birmingham alex just gave you something to do this is what's it called the birmingham civil rights museum yeah it's great that's really cool amazing story, cool piece of history, and for our purposes, a reminder that an army of normal folks really is the answer, always has and always will work. And in this case, it was an army of normal teenage protesters that may be saved the civil rights movement.

And encourage the adults. And encourage the adults, actually. And the other thing is this, you know, if you're an adult and you're like, I'm not going out there. And then you watch a 15-year-old get beat and waterhosed. Then you're like, okay, I got to go out there. I can't let this happen to our kids. So that probably motivated a bunch of adults to get reinvigorated in that cause.

Also, safety in numbers is a powerful thing. You gather 2,000 people like this. Yeah, they overwhelmed the police department. Yeah. Actually, there's a really cool story with that. And they never fought back. They just sat there and took it. Yeah.

A cool example. We would do another shop talk on this. have you heard of when Pope John Paul went back to Poland. So Poland is controlled by the Soviet Union at this point. He's the first Polish Pope in history. Every other Pope had been Italian. He goes back there and there's like three million people

in Victory Square and I think it was in Warsaw. And the Soviets could be anything about it. It's just they were overwhelmed. I know that story. Yeah, it's an amazing. And he has this line too. There's like no domain in which God shall not enter. Like he didn't even like directly address the Soviets but you put a line out there like this. And it's just like marshalling

And imagine you're one of these people, three million in the crowd, like, I'm not alone. We can do this together. And just a big old, that's a literal army of normal folks. Yeah. Basically started the disintegration of the Soviet. Yeah. Very cool. All right, everybody.

That's shop talk number 73, the Children's Crusade, when the youth of Birmingham march for justice, and I'm going to give it a subtitle and potentially save the civil rights movement. Army of normal teenagers. making a difference that still stands today. If you like this episode, would you please share it with friends and on social? Come on, who else is bringing you history lessons like this, right?

That's a great one to share. It's a great one to share. It's awesome. That's right. This is an army of normal history people or something. Share it on social. Rate and review it. Write me anytime at Bill at NormalFolkS.

Please give us ideas for Shop Talk. And if you know of anybody doing something extraordinary in your corner of the world to make it a better place. Let us know about them. We're always looking for interesting ideas of people to highlight on an army and normal folks. With that, thanks for joining us on Shop Talk, number 73. Do what you can.

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