Books-Birmingham Foot Soldiers

Alabama was a battleground state in the struggle for human rights, and in 1963 Birmingham was the beachhead where Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth and an army of freedom fighters made their nonviolent stand against legalized racial segregation. The foot soldiers in that struggle were often women and Birmingham school children who not only risked expulsion but the same punitive action Bull Connor brought on the adults, snarling police dogs, the brutality of powerful water cannons which blasted them down Birmingham’s streets, jailing in inhumane conditions, and systematic injustice at the hands of local officials and white supremacists who acted largely with impunity. While the tragic culmination of that dramatic summer was the terror bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church and the murder of four little girls, many of the foot soldiers stories leading up to that day had not been told. Birmingham Foot Soldiers features the accounts of people who were there – unsung civil rights heroes who in their youth had marched in the Children’s Crusade, slept on hard iron cots in jail and been packed like animals in makeshift cages at Birmingham’s fairgrounds.