European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 8, 1993, Darmstadt, Hesse                                A 15-year-old civil rights demonstrator feels the Wrath of Birmingham a police Force in May 1963.30 years after the firestorm in Birmin Hamby David Langford the associated press n tranquil Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham ala., the statues of a Young boy and girl behind bars stand As a memorial to an army of children that defied police dogs and fire hoses to write the Pivotal chapter in the history of the civil rights movement 30 years ago. A place of revolution and reconciliation Quot reads the inscription at the Entrance to the Park across the Street from the new $8 million Birmingham civil rights Institute. Revolution the childrens crusade showed that nonviolent civil disobedience could be an effective tool in overturning the South a debasing Quot Jim Crow Quot segregation Laws. A it was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement a wrote Joum Alist historian Taylor Branch in his pulitzer prize winning Book parting the Waters America in the King years 1954-63. Reconciliation in once notorious Birmingham which earned the sobriquet a bombing Ham during rampant Kun flux klan terrorism Blacks now dominate the City government and work harmoniously with their White neighbors in the suburbs across red Mountain. Its a far cry from 1963, when Birmingham a segregationist police commissioner Bull Connor turned his police dogs and fire hoses on swarms of marching singing clapping Black schoolchildren some As Young As 6. More than 1,000 of the Young demonstrators were thrown in jail with sometimes As Many As 75 crammed into cells built for eight. To footage and newspaper photos showed children being hit by High pressure fire hoses blasted against sides of buildings pummelled Over hoods of cars rolled Down streets chewed on by dogs. A torrent of Public outrage rejuvenated Martin Luther King  flagging civil rights movement like a thunderstorm on a parched Cotton Field. The publicity helped draw 200,000 people to join in a March on Washington on aug. 28, when King gave his famous a i have a dream speech at the Lincoln memorial. Black leaders got a Long sought audience with president Kennedy and the nations capital reverberated with the hymn of the civil rights movement we shall overcome. Someday. Just Over two weeks after the March on Washington on september 15, a dynamite blast Tore through the basement of Birmingham a sixteenth Street Baptist Church a staging ground for children s marches. Left mangled and dead were four girls Ages u to 14, who had been changing into their choir Robes three of them daughters of schoolteachers. Twenty other children were injured. There was still a lot of marching to be done. Many Kun flux klan bombings beatings and murders would follow. The movement would reach its Zenith with the signing of the voting rights act in 1965. Today outside the civil rights Institute that opened in november stands a Bronze statue of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth typically in a marching stance. A a Birmingham a civil rights Freedom fighter a the inscription says. A with singular courage he fired the imagination and raised the Hopes of an oppressed  a former truck Driver and Cement worker raised in the Backwoods of Alabama a and once convicted of running the family still before he got the Call to preach a Shuttlesworth was the Unsung hero of the Birmingham confrontations. Indeed Long before King and the Southern Christian leadership conference arrived on the scene Shuttlesworth was taking on Bull Connor and others in the segregationist establishment through a group of preachers he organized As the Alabama Christian movement for human rights. He endured beatings and mailings and once barely escaped death when his Bethel Baptist Church was bombed. It was Shuttlesworth who persuaded King and the Sulc to make Birmingham its next target after demonstrations in Albany ga., sputtered. Shuttlesworth now pastor of the greater new Light Baptist Church in Cincinnati is As feisty As Ever at age 71. A if i had not invited the Sulc and King to Birmingham the Sulc would not have Ever become a vibrant Force and King would not have a Holiday in his Honor today a he said in a recent Telephone interview. Chris Hamlin the current pastor of the sixteenth Street Baptist Church was Only 4 when the Church was bombed. He recalls asking a group of fifth graders who were touring the Institute a few weeks ago if they knew who Fred Shuttlesworth was. A every one of them said no Quot Hamlin says. A and i said excuse me and i took the teacher outside and chewed her out. It was a Black teacher. A a that a always the Case. The person who Sparks the play May not get the credit that is  Odessa Woolfolk president of the institutes Board of directors and an assistant to the president of the University of Alabama Birmingham was a history teacher at Ullman High school in 1963. Like most of the other teachers she stayed in the classroom while her students went off to demonstrate a a they a March get arrested and come Back to school victorious feeling they had made a contribution to their country Quot she recalls. As for Shuttlesworth she says a the was the bravest of them  Shuttlesworth a Birmingham of 30 years ago was a Grimy Grubby steel making City of 350, xxx people a 40 percent of them Black a surrounded by dismal Coal mining communities. It was the a a Pittsburgh of the  King called it the most segregated big City in the Page 6 sunday August 8, 1993