How I spent my Summer Vacation 1960: My Walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
In the summer of 1960 I was 12 years old. I got to spend two weeks with my maternal Grandfather outside of Birmingham Alabama. He lived on a farm, had cows and chickens, raise vegetables in his garden and we fished for sun perch in a pond, it was what every child should do in the summer. I had heard of civil rights but didn't really understand what all the hub bub was about. In my home town of Muskogee Oklahoma we had Jim Crow but none of the active Racial violence that you saw in the Deep South.
My Grandfather took me to Selma to visit relatives. The sun was shining brightly and my grandfather stopped his pickup on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Me and my cousin wanted to throw rocks into the water below the bridge. The sidewalk concrete was hot and burned my bare feet. We walk on across and got back into the bed of my grandfather's red pickup. He stopped at a grocery store to buy us a soda pop (Grapette). As we left the store a elderly Black Gentleman was walking in the wrong side of the automatic doors, several white teenage boys jumped on the pad that opened the out door striking the old gentleman knocking him to the ground. They were laughing and calling him a dumb N-word. I was shocked! Later my cousin and I were exploring the neighborhood around my relative's home. We saw a young black kid, our age, walking in front of us, suddenly a white man sitting on the stoop of his front porch got up, opened his front door and turn his German Sheperd loose on the boy. I was afraid.
So when Bloody Sunday happened, I understood the Civil Rights Movement.