How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall

NEW YORK — You’re forgiven if you’ve begun to believe progress toward racial equality in America is slip-sliding backward.

In 2021, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy flew inside the U.S. Capitol as insurrectionists attempted to derail Joe Biden’s election as president.

Two years later, the Florida State Board of Education insisted on altering that state’s social studies curriculum to include the assertion that “slaves developed skills” that were to their “personal benefit.”

And a U.S. senator from Alabama for weeks went around defending white nationalists — by definition, racists who want the United States to cast Black Americans back to the days of segregation and Jim Crow.

You’re also forgiven if you’re unaware of an event this month conducted within a working Midtown Manhattan firehouse. And what happened this month might just make you change your mind.

This story begins and ends with Gloria Washington Louis-Randall, Gwendolyn Sanders Gamble and Gwendolyn Cook Webb, three African-American women from Alabama.

They’re quite elderly now. But 60 years before, they were teenagers participating in the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Ala. It was there that firehoses became implements of racial hatred and pain when Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor turned their high-powered water on the children.

Randall, 76, was just 15 years old that May in 1963.

“Let me tell you about a fire hose,” she said. “I am deaf today in my left ear because of that fire hose. Actually, it was a fire cannon…This was a cannon. When it hit it flipped you, and I didn’t weigh but 90 pounds. When it hit you, it knocked you down and turned you over …. It would rip your skin — bruise you and make you walk with a limp and that’s why it took so many children so long to speak about it because we had been traumatized. I think everybody has PTSD. They’d have to have it because this was a war, a battle.”

Randall recalled how she felt obligated to protest knowing that her parents, because of where they worked.

“My daddy couldn’t march — he was a coal miner. He would lose his job,” Randall recounted. “My mother was a teacher, and she would lose her job; but I was just a student about to go to the Tuskegee Institute and nothing was going to happen to me — so with these thoughts you got to know they were not happy about it.”

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But Randall recounted that her coming to the aid of a fellow female protestor in custody who was going to be raped resulted in her “being left in jail so long the movement could not get me out because they didn’t have any more money.”

Webb was also just 14 when she marched as part of the Children’s March.

Webb recalled that the high-pressure water from the fire hoses “made the skin come off your bones with a lot of children that were malnourished. Thank God we are here to tell the story…. I know what I am about to say is grammatically incorrect. But we used to sing, 'we ain't going to let nobody turn us around.”

They didn’t know it at the time, but the suffering they endured that day placed them on the starting point of what King described as the “arc of the moral universe” — one that is inherently long, and in this case, indeed bent toward justice.

The weeklong non-violent campaign, initiated by local civil rights leaders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a response to 60 bombings in Birmingham that targeted Black homes and businesses, filled the Birmingham jails and drew almost 5,000 children.

Wave after wave of Black children, who sang as they marched, submitted themselves to the brutality with a resolve so strong that, by the next month, civil rights leaders were able to negotiate the integration of Birmingham and force the resignation of “Bull” Connor from office.

“After a week the jails had been filled several times over and the police force realized they could not stop the movement. The people were not afraid of them anymore and all of their power was dependent on the community’s fear,” recounts the Oscar-winning documentary, Mighty Times: The Children’s March.

Meanwhile, TV news images of the brutality of that unprovoked attack shocked the world, much as the video of George Floyd’s police murder did more than a half-century later.

Among those whose attention it captured: New York City’s Uniformed Fire Officers Association, then a fairly conservative white male union, and the Vulcan Society, the FDNY’s Black fraternal association.

“This shameful and deplorable conduct by the City of Birmingham... has brought discredit to the honorable status of professional firefighters,” the Uniformed Fire Officers Association said in a resolution it adopted in 1963, at the urging of the Vulcan Society. “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.”

The children assaulted by fire hoses caught someone else’s attention, too: President John F. Kennedy. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy delivered a national TV address and a call-to-action for Congress to pass what would be called the Civil Right Act of 1964. He referenced the events in Birmingham.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” Kennedy said. “They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from economic and social oppression.” Kennedy called out the racial educational, economic, and health disparities that continue to define our nation 60 years after his assassination.

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In that address, Kennedy said that racism in America was not a regional affliction restricted to the South, but a pervasive national challenge that would require bold federal action.

Change wasn’t instantaneous. Far from it. And it proved notoriously uneven.

But change would come.

All three women survived, and then, they thrived.

Webb, for one, is now the Rev. Gwendolyn Cook Webb. She would go on to become only the second Black woman to join the Birmingham Police Department, marry a police officer and serve on the mayor’s executive protection detail.

And they blazed a trail so bold that as they sat in that New York firehouse to commemorate the 60th anniversary of New York firefighters standing up for Black children hundreds of miles away, they were joined not only by current officers of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association and Vulcan Society, but two Black women who have become leaders of today: New York State Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Council President Adrienne Adams.

New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, the first woman to hold this position, also attended.

In her remarks at the firehouse, James — the first Black female New York state attorney general — praised Randall, Gamble and Webb as “sheroes of the civil rights movement,” who as “children knew at such a young age that such injustice could not stand and rose up against it.”

Randall, for her part, said the work must continue. Sixty years ago, “1963 was a time of nothing but hate and racism. It’s trying to come back in 2023, but I am asking that you don’t let that happen. Don’t go back.”

Randall singled out the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action a “slap in the face” to aspiring and capable students of color whose parents did not go “to Harvard or Princeton and because they donated money.” She told reporters that while racists “don’t wear the little hoods anymore — they carry briefcases, and they wear shirts and ties — the struggle continues.”

Randall’s words rung throughout the firehall. But the three women weren’t content just to talk. Song was in order. They led the assembly in an equally impromptu and rousing rendition of the freedom song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

It was a scene, sound and reality 60 years in the making — one that offers hope for an even brighter future no matter what darkness lurks in the moment.