Months before four little girls were killed in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that helped turn the tide of the civil rights movement in 1963, their friends and classmates bravely took to the streets in protest racial segregation.
There, in a brutal confrontation forever seared in the grainy images of black-and-white TV, they were attacked by snarling dogs and high-pressure water hoses unleashed by unrelenting officers under the callous and cruel direction of the city’s Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor.
Among those who watched in horror at the time were members of New York City’s Fire Department, whose union strongly and publicly condemned the attack, a stance that still resonates with the demonstrators.
Sixty years later, alumni of what history dubbed “The Children’s Crusade” joined Attorney General Letitia James, City Council President Adrienne Adams and FDNY Lt. James McCarthy of the city’s Uniformed Fire Officers Association at a Manhattan fire house Monday to commemorate the union’s stand.
“This shameful and deplorable conduct by the City of Birmingham . . . has brought discredit to the honorable status of professional firefighters,” the union declared in a resolution at the time.
“This local union shall protest most vigorously to the City of Birmingham . . . for the debasement of the image of Fire Fighters by misusing them to hurt rather than to help people in danger.”
“We found out about the resolution about five years ago,” Gwendolyn Gamble, who was 14 when she became a civil rights soldier, said on Monday.
“To hear and find out and see for myself that there were other people in this country who condemned what Birmingham denied doing — they still denied doing that to the children — it told me that they must be ashamed of what they did to us. But you know what? Those fire hoses and those dogs made us who we are today.
“And you know what else? If I could turn back the clock.I would do it again, Gamble said. “I believe…
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