Children's Crusade

Out of desperation, they decided to use high school students in demonstrations there in what became known as “the Children’s Crusade,” recognizing that Eugene Bull Connor, the notorious segregationist commissioner of public safety in that city, would employ violence against them.

Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965 both had the right ingredients for confrontation: specifically, law enforcement leaders known to be overtly racist, belligerent, and likely to behave violently in public—as Bull Connor did in Birmingham when he called out police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on youth protesters during what was called the “Children’s Crusade.”

It’s true that much of the political push for awareness on climate change comes from a call for the future — a children’s crusade led by Greta Thunberg.

The outcry was compounded by the fact that many of the protesters were school-age, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenant James Bevel had organized thousands of students to march in the “Children’s Crusade” against Jim Crow.

Her Camp Hope effort fails, in a climax that reels from slapstick to horror, but the vision of a sustainable world may be redeemed by a fortitude not unlike Willa’s, a kind of Children’s Crusade.