Picture Kelly Ingram Park's four green acres as they were in 1963, a staging ground for young protesters. Bounded by 16th and 17th Streets and 5th and 6th Avenues North, this small expanse sits just outside the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church and served as a central staging ground for large-scale demonstrations during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In 1963 Reverend James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference directed an organized protest by students that centered on this park.
It was here, during the first week of May 1963, that Birmingham police and firemen, under orders from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, confronted student demonstrators emerging from the church — almost all of them children and high school students — first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images from those confrontations, broadcast internationally, spurred a public outcry and turned the nation's attention to the struggle for racial equality. Those demonstrations brought city leaders to agree to an end of public segregation.
Picture the students who walked out of those church doors into this open ground, met first by arrests and then by police dogs and firehoses.