Memories of barking police dogs and long nights in jail came alive Friday at Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park as civil rights foot soldiers discussed their fight for equality in the 1960s and beyond.
Gloria Washington Lewis of Smithfield discussed how at 15 she and other teenagers marched to Birmingham's City Hall in May 1963 to protest segregation. Their goal was to fill the jail and send a message to national leaders to change the laws.
She and others knelt at City Hall to pray, but police picked her up, threw her into a paddy wagon full of males and carted her off to a crowded jail, where she stayed at least two weeks.
Lewis said she wasn't scared to march, an activity her coal miner father encouraged.
"We were too outraged to be afraid," she said.
Lewis and other "soldiers" were in the park Friday, a primary meeting place for many of the marches, as part of a four-day reunion to honor those who participated in the civil rights struggle. The reunion continues today with more meetings in the park and various presentations throughout the city. It ends Sunday.
Honorees include everyone from prominent leaders, like the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, to cooks, church guards and marchers.
Organizers with the Civil Rights Activist Committee, which is helping to sponsor the event, estimate thousands of children and adults were jailed in the 1960s during protest marches. An event program has a partial list of adults jailed in 1963 in Birmingham, but there is no listing for anyone under 17 because there was no access to such records because of the participant's age.
Those jailed with Lewis knew who she was, but others outside the movement may never have heard about her.
"It's just that my little name was so little that they forgot me," she said. "See these scars never end. Gloria never forgot."
The activist committee and UAB sociology students are working on a project to spread stories about unknown foot soldiers. Students on Friday interviewed foot soldiers in the park and will do so again today. The plan is to archive the video recordings and possibly keep them at a Birmingham library.
Marilyn Simpson Johnson of Wilmington, N.C., talked about how in the 1960s she marched in Wilmington to protest restaurants and shops that didn't serve blacks. She demonstrated with others in front of a theater that forced blacks to sit in the "buzzard roost." She was later jailed.
Afterward, she moved to California to help other causes in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she helped high school dropouts in Virginia find jobs. And in the 1990s, she helped Alabama residents fight domestic violence.
"I have never stopped being a civil rights foot soldier and don't expect to until I close my eyes," she said. "It's a philosophy of life."
Lovell Perry of Birmingham remembered how he was housed in a jail cell with the Rev. Martin Luther King's brother, A.D. King, following a march from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to a downtown lunch counter. Perry's brothers and cousins were there, too.
"To go in jail and all your kin folks are there is really something," he said.
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