BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — Kelly Ingram Park sits on the fringe of downtown Birmingham, flanked by a high-rise and a museum, a one-block square of magnolias and pines and wooden benches that, these commonplace trappings aside, is like no other municipal green in America.
It is a place where children go to stare down sculptures of snarling police dogs, a place where older visitors who know the park's history go to remember and, more recently, to reflect on the distance traveled between what happened here 45 years ago and what will happen in Washington in less than three weeks.
"It all connects," Henry Biggs, a 55-year-old native of Birmingham was saying the other day as he stood at the edge of the park. "This point to that point, it all connects."
Named for a World War I hero, this 4-acre park was at the center of clashes in the spring of 1963 between police and protesters determined to roll back the city's Jim Crow laws -- a struggle that brought infamy to this Southern steel town and ignited the civil rights movement.
In 1991, in anticipation of the opening of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute across the street, the park was made over as a memorial to "revolution and reconciliation." Arrayed along a circular walkway were interactive monuments designed to demonstrate what the protesters, many of them teenagers, endured at the hands of police forces led by Eugene "Bull" Connor.
They might look from a distance like common play structures, but there is nothing playful about them. One depicts two young students, a girl in pigtails, a boy in T-shirt and jeans, standing defiantly in a cell, over the legend: "We ain't afraid of your jail."
At another, two decommissioned water cannons can be pivoted to point toward sculptures of two frightened protesters, bracing for a blast. Farther along the walk, packs of life-sized dogs, sculpted in crude scrap iron, seem to leap into the walkway from both sides -- an imposing phalanx of fangs that causes some children to squeal as they pass through and others to skitter away.
"I came here a few years ago with my son, and he was quite fascinated by those dogs," said Biggs, a music teacher who now lives in Pittsburgh. "When I told him the story, about how the police would turn dogs loose on students about his own age, he couldn't believe something like that could happen. He was quite shocked. It brought tears to my eyes."
