A Short Story: The Birmingham Children's March Part Two

 As The title states, this is part two of the story I posted last week.  I hope you enjoy and maybe learned something you didn't know about before.  

While I was researching for this story I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c113fq3vhQ&feature=emb_title,  which would be a fun thing to watch if you are interested.  

I hope you enjoy this simple story about a very important event in history.  

Steps pounded on the pavement, everyone’s steps, and Gwendylon looked around in awe.  This was the first time she had seen her school’s entire student body out like this.  It looked a lot bigger this way, with everyone out marching.  

“We can do anything with this many people,” she muttered under her breath.  Of course, she was wrong. 

Gwendolyn gasped as she was filled with panic.  Where were her sisters?  How could she have not thought of them before?  Her awe and amazement of the large group had changed in an instant.  Now she wished they were all gone, all but her and her two sisters so she could reach for their hands. 

She began craning her neck, standing on her tiptoes, and pushing by people who cramped on all sides of her.  

“Gwen— Gwendolyn!”  she whipped her head to the side hoping to see a small hand reaching into the air or even the top of her sister’s kinky hair. She heard the call but couldn’t find the source until someone was behind her tapping her shoulder.  

“Janice, oh my goodness, have you seen— they’re gone— I can’t—“  Her friend shook her head as if to tell Gwendylon to stop rambling.  She grabbed her arm and pointed to the edge of the cluttered street.  

They squeezed their way through the crowd to get to the sidewalk.  Dot and Deborah were bouncing on their toes trying to see; they didn’t notice Gwendolyn until she was running towards them.  These few moments of panic made tears well up in her eyes but she didn’t want to cry, she wanted the courage to return and she wanted to march.  Her entire school had just escaped the building, the administrators had tried to stop them but some had jumped out of the windows.  They had gotten out anyway possible.  She couldn’t let this bring her down.  

Standing up again, she squeezed her sister’s hands, maybe a little too much when Dot yelped a little sound of pain.  

The heavy part of the crowd had thinned, with Janice still at her side, they stepped back onto the street.  They marched together, and slowly Gwendyln recovered from her scare and regained her courage.  

Gradually a humming sound started behind them, a voice that grew in confidence as the seconds ticked on.  

“Ain't going to let nobody turn me ‘round,” Gwendylon looked behind at the boy who had begun singing, she smiled when she recognized the song and even slowed her pace a little to hear him better.  

“Turn me 'round, turn me 'round.”  He began to sing louder,

“Ain't going to let nobody turn me 'round.” A couple of people around him began singing, Deborah began to hum the tune, Gwendolyn almost wanted them to stop since she enjoyed listening to the boy’s voice alone.

“I'm going to keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up the king's highway.”  She couldn’t help herself anymore and began to sing along with everyone else.

The verse spread through much of the group, Gwendolyn couldn’t tell how far it went, but the boy who they were now walking next to was beaming as he belted the verse over and over.   

He stopped singing a moment later, took a long breath, looked around him, and noticed Gwendolyn and her sisters for the first time.  He beamed at them, his head held high, and introduced himself.  

“I am Charles Avery, you can just call me Charles,” He was a tall boy but also looked obviously younger than Gwendolyn and he came about a hair taller than her.  His coarse black hair was grown out to a short afro.  His clothes were simple but worn like everyone in her school.  He beamed at them as he shook each of their hands respectfully, He had one of those faces that never seem to stop smiling, Gwendylon thought, even in the worst situations his smile lines can still be seen.    

But the singing didn’t stop.  Hundreds, maybe even thousands of children, had shown up to protest segregation.  Gwendylon remembered this and a surge of courage flowed through her.  She encouraged her sisters, Janice, and Charles with those words too.  It was almost like she could see the courage rise in them too.  

The assembly place was at the 16th Street Baptist church.  The children would leave school, march there and then march downtown.  

“How are there this many people?”  Gwendolyn muttered in awe as they stepped over a little hill so she could see further in front of them.  It was like being at a football game when you're surprised that many people would show up for the same objective.  

She was smiling now, loosening her grip on her sister’s hand and smiling into the slight breeze that blew their way.  Slowly, she was forgetting all the scenarios she had prepared herself for, the ones where violence was inflicted by others.  She was having a good time.  

But she shouldn’t have forgotten, if she still had those possible scenarios wavering in the back of her head, she might not have been as surprised when the line of policemen came into view.  

He stopped walking, they all stopped, when a scream rang through the crowd.  It wasn’t a scream as much as a yelp.  And even though they had been singing, they all heard.  They kept walking a moment later, it was a choice to continue no matter what came from ahead, from the direction of the scream.  Gwendolyn knew they wouldn’t let them walk peacefully.  She had prepared herself for this. 

White policemen were pulling people off the streets and throwing them into paddy wagons until the cars seemed to be bursting from the seams with brown-skinned children.  

Squeezing the hands of her sisters even harder, she leaned down and motioned for them to both lean close.  

“Whatever happens,” she looked at their faces and paused to emphasize her point,  “don’t let go of my hand.”  She shook their hands, used their hands to raise her sister’s chins, stood straight again, raised her own chin, and kept walking.

  

Hundreds of children were taken to jail the first day, carried away in paddy wagons or school busses.  Gwendylon never let go of her sister's hands, she let them be pushed and shoved by white policemen.  

They sat together now, in a group of other girls Gwendylon knew from school, on the hard concrete of the jail floor.  The greatest part of it all?  She was happy to be here.  Happy and overwhelmingly thankful that she didn’t have any brothers.  The boys were piled together in different cells and she knew she would be worried for them.  She would be feeling the same thoughts her mother was now, but she forced herself not to think of her mother now.  They were safe for now and she knew this march was doing something, she knew that something this big wouldn’t be kept under the radar.  Eventually people would see on a large scale what happens to black people almost every day.  

“Oh!”  Janice was slumped over another girl's shoulder, she had looked exhausted a moment ago but she perked up as she sat upright and pulled the first layer of her skirt up a little.  “I almost forgot about this,” she giggled and pulled an apple out of a pocket she had sewn to the inside of her skirt.  “I brought this.”  She took a bite out of the red apple and then passed it to the girl she was next to. When it got around to Gwendylon, she was surprised how clean it was and how it had barely a bruise.  

Looking around her small group and at all the other groups surrounding them, she wanted to laugh.  They had been carted and pushed around, they had been threatened and bruised.  But the truth is they weren’t bruised, they all had a tinge of a smile on their lips.  They had been tested and tried and it certainly wouldn’t be the last time.  They were still here, smiling into the camera, believing that by marching they may not change the world completely but she knew they would make a small difference, and maybe even a big one.  

The Birmingham Children's March began on May 2 second and ended on May 5.  Towards the end of the march, Dogs were released on the children who marched and high power water hoses were used against them.  But the children didn’t stop, just realized that there was strength in numbers and didn’t back down.  

News channels started coming out, photographing these scenes and broadcasting them on live tv for people all over America to see.  The march and violence ended after the intervention of the U.S.Department of Justice.  

The March was one of the triggers for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”  

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Thank you for reading!