Through their own involvement in the Children’s March, four people tell the stories of this event and of these times.

AUDREY FAYE HENDRICKS was 9 years old in May 1963, when she told her mother, “I want to go to jail.” Along with over 3,000 other school children, she did–for a week. Read about Audrey in the opening of the Prologue.

Audrey, c. 1965

JAMES STEWART was 15, when he decided he’d “had enough of the segregation, discrimination, hatred, violence, white signs, colored signs, all of it! Now was the time,” he realized, “to confront it all!” (See Birmingham’s Segregation Ordinances.)

James, c. 1965

The first time that ARNETTA STREETER, 16, heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at a mass meeting in Birmingham, she said, “I knew that he was God sent.” She and her friends in a group they called the Peace Ponies signed right up for training in nonviolent protesting. (See the “Ten Commandments of Nonviolence” that the protesters signed. Also see “The Genealogy of Nonviolence.”)

Arnetta, c. 1963

WASH BOOKER, 14, on the other hand, knew the Birmingham police “to be torturers, murderers.” For Wash, “the idea of voluntarily submitting yourself to be taken away with them was…” Well, he couldn’t.

Washington Booker III, c. 1963

They didn’t want much. Just their Constitutional rights. (See the movement’s Points for Progress.)

Learn what they did, what happened to them, and what they accomplished in We’ve Got a Job,  available at Barnes and Noble, an independent bookseller, or Amazon.