Biography
Audrey Faye Hendricks was nine years old when she was arrested in Birmingham on May 2, 1963, the first day of the Children's Crusade, which makes her the youngest known person jailed in the American civil rights movement. She had walked out of Center Street Elementary alone — the only child from her school — and marched from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” She was arrested for parading without a permit and held in the Juvenile Hall at the Birmingham city jail, sharing a bathroom with fifteen to twenty other girls. “I didn't have any fresh underwear or a change of clothes or a toothbrush,” she said later. She and some five hundred other children were released on Wednesday, May 8. She went back to school the next day and nobody asked her about it: “I was just one of the kids, as everybody else was. It didn't dawn on me that it was a big deal.” Both her parents were in the movement — her mother, Lola Mae Hendricks, worked out of Fred Shuttlesworth's office and with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She became a teacher, and died in Birmingham in 2009.
