Among School Children

From MURRAY KEMPTON

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor stood in the middle of the main street leading to the downtown area directing traffic. The thoroughfare was a sea of police vehicles. The demonstrators were in full swing more than two hours after they had started. In the past the police had been able to put down the demon- strations two hours after they had started.

—The Associated Press from Birming- ham, Alabama, the day 2,000 children came into the streets to demonstrate against segregation.

BULL CONNOR was for eighteen years the face and voice of the harshest police department in any Southern city. But Birmingham's voters rejected him for Mayor last month; he will leave City Hall as soon as his successors are certified.

He was going out engulfed by laughing children. But most of all he was going out sur- prised. Here at the end, Bull Connor had found a feeling common to him and to his enemies. Everyone in Birmingham, whether white or Negro, is suddenly and wildly surprised.

Martin Luther. King had come to Birmingham and gone to gaol in April in the eighth year of the itinerant guerrilla campaign he has led against Southern tradition. There was talk then that he was unwelcome and a disturbance even to Birmingham's Negro community. The Negro 'churches at the outset were only half-filled for his meetings; but by the end of April, one Saturday morning, King could look at a base- ment room full of children sitting on camp chairs.

'Some day,' Martin King told them, 'the South will know its real heroes. The name of James Meredith will live long after the name of Ross Barnett is forgotten.' He is young no longer; he is thickening a little and is tired after a long trip; but he has what he never had before, the eloquence of a man surprised by the knowledge that he speaks for a created tradition to an audience whose voice is suddenly louder than his own.

When he had finished, Andrew Young, his assistant, asked how many of those present had been to gaol. Almost half the room stood up. 'A pretty representative group,' Young said: 'How many of you believe in God and trust him?' The room stood up. Andrew Young asked if twenty-seven persons would volunteer to be arrested that afternoon. What seemed half the room walked forward to stand between Martin King and what was left of his audience.

Andrew Young counted fifty-five volunteers. 'Lately,' Martin King said, 'we always seem to get twice as many as we ask for.' The note, the common Birmingham note, was surprise.

When Andy Young had picked his teams, he had six little boys left over.

'You want to go to gaol?' he smiled at one of them. The little boy looked at the floor and smiled tentatively back.

'You can't go to gaol,' said Andrew Young. 'But you can go to the library. You can't get arrested in the library, but you might learn something.' Six months ago, any Negro child who went to the Birmingham Public Library would have been turned away if he entered and arrested if he insisted on staying. Now these little boys were sitting at a round table in the children's depart- ment, wide-eyed with shyness at first but very soon at home with their big books.

On Monday night, Martin Luther King arose before a full Saint Luke's African Methodist Church and wondered if all the young people arrested over the weekend would come forward. The line filled the church aisle; their elders turned around and saw them still coming, seem- ingly endless; there was a sudden half-ejaculated gasp of proud surprise. Then each of these children of parents so long timid and desperately respectable told how proud he was to have been in gaol and how surprisingly easy it had been.

A visitor to Bull Connor's office in City Hall stops outside to try the Negro fountain; it is dry. So is the white drinking fountain. A group of Negroes sat down in the hall a few weeks ago to protest its segregated facilities; the ad- ministration had no answer except to shut off the fountains and lock the washrooms. Here, with no water, Bull Connor sat, fretting away the little time left to him, insisting that his niggers did not really care and reviling the Kennedys.

What has happened, of course, has nothing to do with the Kennedys, who are as surprised as the rest of us are. The change, the sudden wild card, is the Southern Negro, who is afraid no longer. The Negro who was not afraid has been the extraordinary Negro of the last decade; but now not to be afraid is an ordinary emotion.

In Galileo, Andrea cried out, 'Pity the country that has no heroes.—No; Galileo answered, 'pity the country that needs heroes.' The Southern Negro needs heroes still; but now the happy time is approaching when he will need them no more.

Not very long ago, the non-violent army of Martin Luther King was, in its essence, no more than a hundred young men and women who wandered the South, engaging its gaols, coming out with their endurance undamaged, strangers risking all. They risk still; yet what used to be slow and limited is now rapid and without bounds. Everywhere this cadre goes now, an army springs up to the breach behind it. Essen- tially then, the long war is over. It was won, in defeat, a few years back when the extraordinary Negro enforced his presence upon the official South. He might with patience have been beaten down and outlasted; but now comes the ordinary Negro, the school child whom the extra- ordinary Negro taught that he need only go into the streets because there was nothing to be afraid of any longer.