Photo by Erin Nelson
Gloria Washington Lewis-Randall sits with her son Al Washington at her home March 21. Lewis-Randall was 16-years-old when she participated in the Birmingham Children’s March in 1963 and has remained active in telling her story to keep the history of the civil rights movement alive in society.
May in downtown Birmingham always means generally warm weather, gearing up for city center events and the end of the school year. In 2022, a continual reawakening from the impact of the ongoing pandemic. But for Gloria Washington Lewis-Randall, May is always a reminder.
In May 1963, she was a student at Birmingham’s Parker High School and was marching right into the middle of a big historical moment. As a part of what was to be called the Children’s Crusade, teenaged Gloria Washington was a foot soldier in the Birmingham civil rights movement, and before the end of May, she will have faced down fire hoses and menacing police, and spent several days in jail. She was one of more than 1,000 school-age children arrested during the Birmingham marches for peacefully protesting segregation.
Fifty-nine years was a long time ago. But Lewis-Randall, who lives in Birmingham’s West End community, makes sure people don’t forget.
“I enjoy telling my stories,” she said. “Anything I can do to help someone else understand a little better where I’m coming from.”
In an era where teaching about the racial history of America is being challenged on political grounds, many are concerned that knowledge of fraught and uncomfortable subjects like the civil rights movement is under threat.
“Sadly, more and more, this history is being challenged and even erased in our culture and, right now, in our schools, through tactics like curriculum restrictions and outright book bans. Truths about black history we once considered hard but self-evident are now being erased before our eyes,” said Somil Trivedi, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union on the ACLU podcast At Liberty.
“Over 30 state legislatures across the country have introduced bills to limit the discussion of racial history in a wave prompted by the emergence of critical race theory as a subject of political fear-mongering,” Trivedi said.
But survivors of the Birmingham movement, like Lewis-Randall, are still telling their truths.
“I don’t want to forget,” she said. “These stories — after we’re gone, they just need to be recorded and remembered.”
Over the years, Lewis-Randall has appeared in all kinds of public forums to share her story, often sharing the spotlight with other surviving civil rights activists from Birmingham. She has written poetry, spoken at churches and libraries, been featured in documentary films, interviewed by the local media, and more national outlets like The New York Times.
Recently, Lewis-Randall took part in an upcoming album, with music about Birmingham made by various artists alternating with her voice talking about issues that matter to her.
The album, which will be announced soon, was curated by Tim Martin, a local activist with the group Bham Stands, who met Lewis-Randall when he brought foot soldiers together with poets for an earlier project.
“Gloria … she’s just a caring, genuine individual, so we’ve stayed in touch,” Martin said. “I’ve always appreciated her heart. She’s always praying and loving, and all of that.”
Martin said that the Birmingham-centric album features Lewis-Randall on every other track, “either detailing part of her story or on gun violence today, racism today. It might be today, or it might be related to the past.”
He said Lewis-Randall still inspires him today. “She doesn’t back off, and it’s always rooted in love, for sure,” he said.
On Feb. 19, Lewis-Randall took part in the annual “Black Pride Ride Caravan of Hope,” sponsored by the nonprofit Brenda’s Brown Bosom Buddies, which raises awareness and provides support around patients diagnosed with breast cancer. “I talked to them about knowing your history and being familiar with it,” she said.
Before some of her activities were curtailed by the pandemic, Lewis-Randall spent more than eight years as a regular annual speaker at the Children’s Defense Fund event held at Alex Haley Farms in Tennessee, which includes a showing of “Mighty Times: The Children’s March,” a 2004 documentary which features Lewis-Randall among other surviving foot soldiers.
“I come on and I talk for about an hour each session. I have like 3-4 sessions a day, and I enjoy that because I get to meet so many young people who are just super-intelligent. They know a lot of things.”
In 2018, Lewis-Randall appeared in an episode of Wyatt Cenac’s “Problem Areas.” The HBO show, hosted by comedian Cenac, addressed a number of contemporary issues, including a segment about “police apologies.” In it, Lewis-Randall touched on her part in the events that eventually led Birmingham police Chief A.C. Roper to apologize to the community.
“In the ‘60s when I was a teenager, I participated in civil rights marches,” she told Cenac. “Since then I have continued on that road to activism.” In the episode, she talked about being turned upside down by the force of a water cannon under the command of then Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull” Connor. “I am deaf in my left ear today because [of] the water hose,” she said.
Gloria’s story
A retired school teacher and social worker, Lewis-Randall has told many times about how she became a foot soldier in the Birmingham movement, as documented in “Birmingham Foot Soldiers: Voices from the Civil Rights Movement” (full disclosure: the author of that book is the writer of this article).
As 15-year-old Gloria Washington, she lived in Birmingham’s Smithfield neighborhood when the 1963 demonstrations occurred.
“Dr. Martin Luther King was speaking at a lot of churches, preferably Sixteenth Street Baptist Church,” she recalled in Birmingham Foot Soldiers. “He was spellbinding. I would listen to the things he would say, and I recognized all of the questions that I used to ask my mother — “Ma, why I got to sit in the back of this bus? Or why can’t I go to the zoo and ride a train? Or why can’t I go to East Lake Park this evening — you know on Sunday evenings when you’re riding after church? And she’d always say, ‘That’s just the way it is.’”
In contrast, she said, they could watch television and see that whites in the same community could enjoy lives free from the fear of harassment and the restrictions that African-Americans in Birmingham faced daily. Like many of her peers, Lewis-Randall was tired of being told that she could not have equal rights.
“I wanted to make a difference. I could not understand why my parents were dead-bound on me going to college, achieving and being all I can be — and I’m a second-class citizen, probably a third-class, you know? I was being called racial slurs and spit on if I went to town, and it just bothered me,” she said. “It really caused me great pain. I still have those scars.”
She was determined to work for change.
“What encouraged me to march, in addition to me listening to Dr. King … There was a fiery young minister named James Bevel, and he was closer to our age … We could readily relate to him,” she said.
Bevel is widely recognized as the primary voice behind the decision to send children into the fray, to do something many of their parents could not do without fear of losing their jobs.
Prominent among the marches in which Lewis-Randall participated was the one that took place on what civil rights organizers called D-Day – May 2, 1963, the first day of the Children’s Crusade.
She was among a throng of students who had skipped school, waiting near their radios to hear a signal — a certain song to be played by the popular activist disc jockey, “Tall” Paul White. When she heard the song, Lewis-Randall was at home, watching her coal miner father washing his blue Cadillac.
“He said, ‘Well, it’s getting close to that time. You listening to the radio?’ I said, ‘Yes I am, sir.’ He said, ‘Well, OK. I tell you what – go back in there and put on another pair of pants, so when the water hoses and things hit you again, you won’t be able to feel as much,’” she noted. “He was just looking out for me.”
Her father, she said, “was very encouraging,” but he knew he could lose his job if he was arrested in a demonstration. “He could not afford not to be able to take care of me and my mom,” she said.
Her mother, on the other hand, did not know her daughter’s plans and did not approve, she said.
Washington and other kids from various Birmingham neighborhoods started walking toward the gathering point, which was the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. “We came from every direction. I mean you were meeting people on every corner,” she recalled.
At the church, organizers warmed up the crowd for the daunting task of facing resistance from the Birmingham police and fire departments. It was “like a pep rally,” she said. “That’s when you were given your instructions.”
That day, when she left the church, Lewis-Randall said, she got a look at Bull Connor’s white tank, the armored vehicle he would sometimes bring to intimidate demonstrators. “That put fear in my heart,” she recalled.
Bevel’s march strategy that day involved having the students approach Birmingham City Hall from a route he hoped would be unexpected. “So my route was straight up 16th Street all the way up to 11th Avenue where that Jewish cemetery is, then we’d turn right, go to 19th Street, and then we were passing by police blockades, heading to City Hall,” she said. “Once you got to City Hall, you fell on your knees. Police would pick you up and throw you in a paddy wagon or bus or whatever, and take you to jail.”
Like many of the marchers, Lewis-Randall was carrying a sign. “My sign said, ‘We shall overcome,’” she remembers. She made it to City Hall, held up her sign for a moment, fell to her knees, then felt herself lifted up by two police officers and put into a paddy wagon with a group of boys, many of whom she knew from school.
The boys were taken to the city jail, she said. Girls, including Lewis-Randall, were taken to juvenile detention – at first.
“But they were full. So, then I had to go to the Fairgrounds,” she said. Children taken to the Alabama State Fairgrounds were often held in makeshift cells, similar to animal pens. “But I was only there a few days,” Lewis-Randall said. “I was there, maybe, about five days.”
“You even had some mothers, some parents, come out to the fence to see if they could see their children,” she recalled.
Lewis-Randall and others arrested during the demonstrations recounted how one or more police officers were involved in the sexual assault of a young girl who had been arrested for demonstrating. Lewis-Randall described the girl — she knew her as Janice — as attractive, and traumatized. She begged the other girls to protect her, and when an officer came toward her during the night, several of the incarcerated teenagers, including Lewis-Randall, managed to take the officer’s baton and fight him off, she said.
“He didn’t hurt her at all because she was moved after that,” she said.
After that incident, Lewis-Randall also was moved — to the Jefferson County Jail.
While there, she said she was made to clean the floor with a toothbrush. When she complained of having rheumatic fever, she said the matron “told me to stay in the sweat box until my heart got better.”
Lewis-Randall said she got lost in the system, waiting for the movement organizers and supporters to come up with bail money for the children. And her move from the fairgrounds to the county jail made it difficult for her mother to find her, she said. “My mom tried for weeks to get me out. But they kept telling her, ‘We don’t have children in the county jail.”
Lewis-Randall credits her release, almost a month later, to her mother’s boss from the then-well known department store Tillman and Levinson. After Mrs. Washington was unable to secure her daughter’s freedom, her employer, who was white, went to the jail and requested that the child be turned over to him.
Lewis-Randall recalls her time in the county jail as nothing short of “horrendous … It was terrible. It was belittling.”
The experience left her “ leery of people. I used to have a very, very trusting spirit towards anyone,” she said. “But because of the humiliation and the pain and the hurt and the scars, I wouldn’t allow people to get close to me at all. I didn’t trust anyone. It wasn’t just toward whites. I didn’t trust anybody.”
Later in life, she found a purpose in her social work career, she said. And she has come to view the Birmingham movement as blessed. “God took ordinary people and just made them do extraordinary things,” she said.
More to come
What’s next? For Lewis-Randall, what’s next is more of the same – telling her stories whenever and wherever she can. As she sees it the need for human rights — for freedom — is no less pressing today than it was nearly 60 years ago. Voter suppression is on the rise, for instance, she said.
“You can see the same things occurring. Only difference is instead of them wearing hoods and sheets, they carry briefcases and wear suits and ties, you know. But they still harbor that same bitterness and that same hatred. And I don’t want anybody’s epitaph to read that they were killed by hate,” she said. “The struggle continues."
