POWERGRAMS

5 On May 2, 1963, Birmingham police arrested hundreds of black schoolchildren on the first day of the "Children's Crusade," a last-ditch effort by civil rights leaders to bolster a lagging campaign to desegregate Alabama's largest city. The children, many still in elementary school, packed jails in the city and surrounding municipalities. Eugene "Bull" Connor was enraged. The pugnacious police commissioner was determined to gain control of Kelly Ingram Park and keep a new supply of students who would spill out the doors of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church the next day from reaching the downtown business district. With jail cells bulging, Connor wanted to do it without arrests. That Friday, May 3, the fire department debuted a new weapon on the marchers: fire hoses. Firemen loosed monitor guns – which forced water from two hoses through a single nozzle to ratchet up the water pressure – upon the marchers and bystanders. "The fire department advertised these attachments as miracles of long-range firefighting, capable of knocking bricks loose from mortar or stripping bark from trees at a distance of 100 feet," Taylor Branch wrote in the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63." Ten-year-old Ron Buford saw their power firsthand as the high drama played out in and around Kelly Ingram Park on that day and the next several. He watched as firemen blasted marchers who were heading down Sixth Avenue North toward City Hall. "I decided I would run from one tree to the other, playing chicken, so that I wouldn't get hit by the water," said Buford, the director of Legislative Affairs and Compliance at Alabama Power. "And the water was splitting the tree. I was the little guy behind the tree playing chicken, having fun, and had no idea I was on TV." The Emmy-winning PBS documentary "Eyes on the Prize" immortalized his game of chicken by including the short video clip of him crouching behind a tree in its recounting of the Birmingham campaign. More than a half-century after the fact, Buford doesn't remember which day he danced from tree to tree in the park – he thinks it was Saturday, May 4 – but he hasn't forgotten the force of the water. The fire hoses also made a lasting impression on A.G. Gaston. That Friday, May 3, the black millionaire businessman was on the telephone with David Vann, one of the city's white moderates, trying to negotiate a resolution to the crisis gripping Birmingham. Gaston watched the demonstrations from his office building, which overlooked the park. "But lawyer Vann! They've turned the fire hoses on a black girl, and they're rolling that little girl right in the middle of the street now. I can't talk to you," Gaston said, as recounted in "The Race Beat," a Pulitzer Prize-winning history by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff about press coverage of the civil rights movement. News photographers' still and video images of the lashing assault on children, along with images of police dogs lunging at protesters, shocked Birmingham and the nation. Black leaders such as Gaston, who had opposed the Birmingham campaign, instantly supported the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The condemnation from around the nation, on top of an economic boycott of downtown businesses that had hurt merchants, spurred the city's leaders to reach a settlement with King that started desegregation efforts. Buford says he didn't fully understand the importance of what was happening around him in Kelly Ingram Park. He knew about "colored" water fountains and restrooms and places he wasn't allowed to go because of the color of his skin. "I didn't really know what was going on. I was just hanging out. But we were all destined to be involved in trying to change what was not right,'' he said. What was Buford doing in the middle of the park during such turbulent times? His father couldn't afford to get arrested for protesting and lose his job. His mother didn't work but was "a rabble-rouser." "She liked the action. She talked more action than a $2 radio. She was out there in the mix," he said. "I'm a little guy, so she's got to take me." Buford's mother, 94-year-old Willie Mae Buford, recalled that a neighbor had told her, "'Don't be taking that baby down there,' but he had to be with me because I was his mom." Buford, who has been with Alabama Power 33 years, also remembers Klansmen's dynamite exploding at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, killing four little girls. He was in Sunday School a few blocks away in the basement at Macedonia 17th Street Baptist Church. With the noise from all the different classes in the large open space, Buford doesn't remember hearing the explosion. But he vividly recalls the nurse in charge of Sunday school telling the Sunday school superintendent: "'Excuse me, Mr. Superintendent, the people are knocking at the door. They want their children because they are bombing up the street.' As a result of her saying that, it was total chaos," Buford said. Behind young Ron Buford are Tommy Buford Jr., the late Tommy Buford Sr., and the late Willie James Buford.

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