On May 2, 1963, teenagers and children marched in Birmingham, Ala., against segregation. The police arrested many of them for parading without a permit and sent them to jail. Officers also turned fire hoses on the protesting children. It didn’t deter them. The marches, known as the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, continued for days.

The children-led protests in 1963 were part of the Birmingham Campaign, a series of civil rights protests led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The children’s protest helped turn the nation’s attention to Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South and served as a turning point of the movement.

A month later, President John F. Kennedy called for a bill that would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“Can you imagine?” one of the protesters from 1963 told NPR last week, “here we are in 2018, and we’re still reliving some of this stuff.”

Claire Moses contributed reporting.

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