The Children's Crusade was a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham, Alabama, May 2–5, 1963, during the American Civil Rights Movement's Birmingham campaign. Initiated and organized by Rev. James Bevel, the purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. Many children left their schools and were arrested, set free, and then arrested again the next day. The marches were stopped by the head of police "Bull Connor" who brought fire hoses to ward off the children and set police dogs after the children.
Malcolm X was opposed to the event because he thought it would expose the children to violence. He said, "Real men don't put their children on the firing line."
A pivotal civil rights campaign was fought in Birmingham, the most segregated city in the US. Fire hoses and dogs were used to prevent the students from meeting the mayor. The students remained nonviolent. This event prompted President John F. Kennedy to publicly fully support racial equality, and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Children's Crusade is the name given to a disastrous Crusade by European Christians to expel Muslims from the Holy Land said to have taken place in 1212. The traditional narrative is probably conflated from some factual and mythical notions of the period including visions by a French or German boy, an intention to peacefully convert Muslims in the Holy Land to Christianity, bands of children marching to Italy, and children being sold into slavery.
A study published in 1977 casts doubt on the existence of these events, and many historians came to believe that they were not (or not primarily) children but multiple bands of "wandering poor" in Germany and France, some of whom tried to reach the Holy Land and others who never intended to do so. Early versions of events, of which there are many variations told over the centuries, are largely apocryphal.
Accounts
Traditional accounts
The variants of the long-standing story of the Children's Crusade have similar themes. A boy began preaching in either France or Germany claiming that he had been visited by Jesus and told to lead a Crusade to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity. Through a series of supposed portents and miracles he gained a considerable following, including possibly as many as 30,000children. He led his followers south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, allowing him and his followers to march to Jerusalem, but this did not happen. They were sold to two merchants (Hugh the Iron and William of Posqueres) who gave free passage on boats to as many of the children as were willing, but they were actually either taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery by the cruel merchants, or died in a shipwreck on San Pietro Island off Sardinia during a gale. Some may have failed to reach the sea, dying or giving up from starvation and exhaustion. They were betrayed by some of the adults in their group.
Jones worked as a teacher and dressmaker, but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. From 1897, at about 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902 she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.
Mother Jones magazine, established in 1970, is named for her.
In 1963, Alabama police used water cannons to combat protestors during the civil rights Children’s Crusade protest ... In the years since the civil unrest, tear gas has been investigated by Congress ...
From Atlanta, I roar along the I-20 to Birmingham, Alabama – a city central to the South’s civil rights movement. After a day exploring, I meet three veterans of the 1963 children’s crusade – protests that helped trigger the end of U.S.
... the Crusade, a defining moment in the civil rights movement ... The Children’s Crusade became a turning point in the struggle for civil rights, showing the courage and determination of young people.
Yet their campaign, called the Children’s Crusade, was instrumental in inspiring mass support across the US for both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
She was especially inspired by the 1,000-plus Black children who walked out of school in Birmingham on May 2, 1963, to protest Jim Crow segregation in what would be known as the Children’s Crusade.
In many ways, the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s originated as a children’s crusade, a designation later explicitly used by civil-rights leaders when children—some as young as 6 or ...
When the activists — grandmothers and grandees of the movement now, girls then — marched in the May 1963Children’s Crusade, they provoked a response by Birmingham authorities who used police dogs and fire hoses.
... who were frontline soldiers and transforming catalysts in the movement for civil rights and equal justice. The Children’s Crusade happened at a critical time in the civil rights struggle in Birmingham.
Sixty years earlier, on May 3rd, 1963, thousands of young people risked their lives in Birmingham, Alabama, on the second day of what became known as The Children’s Crusade.
We revisit the history of the Children’s Crusade with two guests. civil rights activist JaniceKelsey, who joined the Children’s Crusade as a 16-year-old in 1963, and author Paul Kix.
When Harry Belafonte died on April 25, many people were quick to honor him not only as a luminous, barrier-breaking singer and actor but as an outspoken lifelong crusader for civil and human rights.
Kearney Hub
17 Feb 2024
Kearney Hub
17 Feb 2024