Ann Jimerson, left, and Amos Townsend, right, were 12 years old when the KKK bombed a church in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Today Jimerson and Townsend visit schools together each fall. Jimerson shows students a photo of a stained-glass rosette from the church, pictured above, which she donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Townsend holds the book children read in school before their visit, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963. Photo by Jason Sauler Photography

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When Freeman Hrabowski was 12 years old, in 1963, he was so inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that he not only marched in the Children’s Crusade for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, for three days, but he went to jail for five.

When Hrabowski reached the steps of city hall, ardent segregationist and Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor spat in his face, picked him up and threw him into the police wagon.

A math whiz, Hrabowski grew up to become president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. His childhood experiences “taught me that tomorrow can be better than today — only if I am prepared to be part of the solution,” he said in an interview with the Beacon.

Amos Townsend was also 12 years old and living in Birmingham on the day of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls. His family was attending a service at Saint Joseph Baptist Church, a dozen blocks away.

Townsend instantly felt “a sense of loss over no longer having a place that could be considered a sanctuary. Not even churches were safe spaces anymore for a kid just trying to go to Sunday school,” he said.

Both Townsend and Hrabowski are members of a group called Kids in Birmingham 1963, a meeting place for people who grew up in that city in the tumultuous 60s.

Established a decade ago, Kids in Birmingham 1963 is a nonprofit that provides an online and in-person platform for people to connect and tell their stories.

At one Kids in Birmingham 1963 event recalling the day of the church bombing, Townsend was moved to tears.

“I had never had that release before,” said Townsend, who now lives in Burtonsville, Maryland. “I had so suppressed those memories that they all came back to me 40-plus years later.”

Coming together decades later

Kids in Birmingham 1963 was founded by Washington, D.C. resident Ann Jimerson, who was deeply affected by her Alabama childhood, too.

She was also 12 years old and living in Birmingham when she learned that the Ku Klux Klan church bombing had killed four African American girls, ages 14 and 11, who were in a basement restroom.

Founded in 1873, the 16^th Street Baptist Church was the oldest Black Baptist church in Birmingham. In 1963, civil rights activists held six meetings and 12 workshops in the church to train people for voting rights sit-ins, boycotts and marches — events that made the church a target for white supremacists opposed to the movement.

Her father, a Baptist minister at a nearby church, scooped some of the stained-glass pieces off the ground and brought them home in a box.

“He and Mom let us peer into that box and carefully handle the sharp, dusty pieces,” Jimerson recalled in an interview with the Beacon.

The shards had a prominent place on a hutch in her family’s home until Jimerson in 2013 donated them to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Last year marked the 60^th anniversary of the “Year of Birmingham,” the year that King wrote his historic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on April 16.

It was also the year that thousands of Birmingham youngsters, ages six to teens, held a public demonstration in May called the Children’s Crusade. Young students left school and marched for three days. Some, like Hrabowski, were jailed. Historians say 1963 was a turning point in the American Civil Rights Movement.

From Virginia to Alabama

Before moving to Birmingham, Jimerson lived in Hopewell, Virginia, where her father was a chaplain at a federal penitentiary nearby. Though three years had passed since the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, which found public school racial segregation unconstitutional, Virginia schools remained segregated.

“Segregation in Hopewell was still so complete that I didn’t have much idea that any African Americans lived in Hopewell,” Jimerson said. “I was an innocent participant in [white residents’] massive resistance” to Brown.

When her father considered a new job in Alabama, Ann, nine years old, urged him to take the job to help bring people together.

So the family moved to Birmingham, where her father worked as executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, which Dr. King said was the only group that “brought the two races together to solve shared problems.”

During the Jimersons’ nightly devotionals, Ann’s parents would talk about racial injustices and the unrest sweeping the country. The atmosphere in Birmingham was tense, she remembers. Her parents warned her and her four siblings not to discuss their father’s work or civil rights issues with their peers or teachers. Still, her family received anonymous, threatening telephone calls.

Kids in Birmingham 1963

Jimerson talks about her childhood in Birmingham with others who were there. Kids in Birmingham 1963 has monthly Zoom meetings with around 20 to 30 participants.

Jimerson formed Kids in Birmingham 1963 as not only a support group but a living history project, too. The group’s 65 “storytellers,” who live all across the country, have posted their memories on the organization’s website.

In addition, they received grants from the Alabama Humanities Alliance to work with local teachers on lesson plans for teaching Birmingham’s civil rights story, an effort they call the Coalition for True History. They have completed one grant and are now using the second.

“We wanted to do more than reminisce,” Jimerson explained. “We wanted to find effective ways to give back to Birmingham, with two areas of focus: education and reconciliation.”

 “Most Birmingham students don’t know that history,” Jimerson said. She and Townsend also give talks at local schools, including the Summit School in Edgewater, Maryland.

Hrabowski worries that people today underappreciate the struggles of the 1960s.

“Talking about the Civil Rights Movement today is as far removed as talking about the Civil War,” he said.

Recording unrecorded history

Since 2015, Jimerson has also co-chaired Desegregation of Virginia Education (DOVE), an organization that collects and preserves records documenting the state’s refusal to desegregate public schools. Its volunteers gather correspondence, reports, photographs, personal papers, school board minutes, diaries, scrapbooks, yearbooks and records from groups both for and against integration.

So far the group’s volunteers have recorded almost 200 oral histories of people who experienced school desegregation in the state.

“I love listening to people’s stories,” Jimerson said. “It’s an opportunity to capture history that has been lost. In some cases, the oral histories are the only histories of how school desegregation unfolded.”

During her career, Jimerson worked in social marketing and public health for 30 years. After she retired, she turned to civil rights efforts.

“I love playing a part in helping people make connections and seeing the difference it makes for young people to connect with us older folk — and for us older ones to connect with today’s youth. I love this work more than anything I’ve done. It feeds my soul.”

For more information, visit kidsinbirmingham1963.org and bit.ly/DOVEhistory.