Birmingham’s 1963 Palm Sunday civil rights march commemorated with poetry, music

By: Michael Sznajderman

Sixty years ago, on Palm Sunday, three Black pastors led a march from Birmingham’s St. Paul United Methodist Church toward City Hall to protest the Jim Crow segregation laws and support racial equality and human rights. Police arrested 26 people and used police dogs to disperse Black onlookers.

On April 1, an interracial group of citizens gathered at St. Paul to recreate the historic march, which was part of the organized campaign in 1963 to dismantle Birmingham’s unjust system of racial separation.

Last Saturday’s event included “Poetry in the Park,” starting from the Three Kneeling Ministers sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park, where some of the most violent clashes with police took place during the 1963 campaign. The sculpture commemorates when the local ministers leading the march, John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith Jr., and A.D. King, brother of Martin Luther King Jr., knelt to pray on the sidewalk in front of segregationist Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. More than 1,000 people marched that day.

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