Little Boy Blue

Little Boy Blue. March Route to Retail. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. replaced his initial reluctance to using "children as foot soldiers' with approval. Thousands of newly recruited child foot soldiers successfully marched toward the retail district, with hundreds arrested for the Movement. Their sacrifice produced the results that “Project C” leaders Bevel, Wyatt, King and Shuttlesworth desired: jails packed with African Americans who simply had taken a non-violent stand for equal rights and human dignity. Pictures in the national news and newsreels of Black children under attack and in jail cells were much more compelling than any number of words about the Movement. , Paired marker , May 7, 1963 , Police arrest hundreds of young children during the marches to the downtown retail area. This child looks out from behind a fence around the jail yard after his arrest in one of the 1963 marches. With jails already packed with adult and child protestors, police run out of space to hold more. Police put many of the arrested children at the Alabama Fairgrounds and place some in open-air stockyards normally used to contain animals. Rain falls on some children as they wait for parents to come get them. Many Birmingham foot soldiers, now grown, still remember their acts of bravery during this time., "My mother told me not to march, but I had to march for freedom." , Barbara Basemore , 1963 child foot soldier, Lesson B9: How would you feel if you were one of the children arrested during the 1963 civil rights demonstrations?