Gloria Washington Lewis-Randall has lived in Birmingham all her life and knows the city like the back of her hand. But there’s one stretch of road Lewis-Randall says she knows too well to return to, and its less than 15 minutes away from her front door.

60 years ago today, a teenaged Lewis-Randall along with current Negro Southern League Museum President Melvin Humes and thousands of other Birmingham child foot soldiers, marched out of class and into the fight for civil rights in what is now known as the Children’s Crusade.

Lewis-Randall and 15-year-old Gwendolyn Gamble were among the more than 1,000 children arrested that day.

Another foot soldier, 15-year-old Terry Collins, managed to evade arrest but not before he was sprayed with a fire hose by Eugene “Bull” Connor, then Birmingham’s public safety commissioner.

Just a few years later Collins sat in Connor’s old chair as the first black employee in the Birmingham mayor’s office.