Lajuana Bradford was just three years old when civil rights protests erupted in downtown Birmingham in the summer of 1963. Years later, as a high school senior, she realized the effects of those efforts when the city elected its first Black mayor.

“I am here because of Mayor Arrington,” the Regions executive said to a crowd of fellow journalists and business professionals on Thursday. “That told me as a Black individual growing up in this city, that whatever I wanted to do, I could do because he did it.”

Former Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington, along with a group of local civil rights leaders and experts, made a rare public appearance with Black journalists in Birmingham Thursday.

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This year is the first time that Birmingham has been chosen as the site of the annual National Association of Black Journalists conference, which hosts hundreds of reporters across the nation. AL.com columnist Roy S. Johnson, the conference’s co-chair, moderated a packed panel about Alabama’s “hidden” Black icons on Thursday morning at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex.

The city is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Birmingham campaign, a series of movements that involved local leaders, clergy, community members and even children, in the fight for civil and human rights.

Arrington, now 89, returned to Birmingham in 1963 after receiving his doctorate in Oklahoma. He was working at Miles College at the time, where many of his students and staff were involved in local demonstrations. But he didn’t consider himself part of the movement.

“I’d never in my life thought about running for politics,” he said. “I was in effect a bystander. I never marched. I had never participated.”

Instead, Arrington focused on other efforts to expand African American education across the state by forming a consortium of historically Black colleges.

It was his students who pushed Arrington to eventually serve on the Birmingham City Council, where he pushed to improve hiring practices and police accountability. After years of pushback, he became Birmingham’s first African American mayor in 1979 – a position he held for 20 years.

“It’s good to have you in Birmingham,” Arrington told the room of journalists. “It’s a city that’s twice the size that it used to be, and became that as a Black city. It’s a city with a strong tax base. It’s a city where people talk about police reform. So it’s good to have you here.”

Other panelists included Rev. Thomas Wilder of the historic Bethel Baptist Church, T. Marie King, producer of a documentary about the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Bob Dickerson, a protege of the late multimillionaire A.G. Gaston. Greg Morrison, a former Mobile TV news anchor and a member of the Clotilda Descendants Association, also discussed the history of the descendants of the last known slave ship to arrive in Mobile.

“It takes people with a lot of different roles in order to have a movement,” Johnson said.

“When I tell people about 1963 in Birmingham, it really was a pivotal moment, not just with the city but with America.”

Those roles included skillful educators like Odessa Woolfolk, Black business leaders like Gaston, and the leadership of Shuttlesworth, who panelists called one of America’s most “courageous” civil rights leaders.

Shuttlesworth, who died in 2011, was largely responsible for getting Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Birmingham, where he wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and later mentioned the city in his famous March on Washington speech.

Wilder is the current pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, which was bombed by the Klan numerous times under Shuttlesworth’s leadership.

“He told me at one point that he expected to die,” Wilder said, recalling a conversation with Shuttlesworth about the stakes of freedom for Black Alabamians.

“He was bold to a fault,” he added. “But he had a childlike faith that caused him to keep going in spite of it.”

Visiting journalists said they felt inspired by Birmingham’s history, but noted that nationwide, memories of the movement are fading away amid efforts to whitewash and sugarcoat Black history.

Jacqualine Jarju, a reporter from Springfield, Illinois, is the daughter of a civil rights activist, but said she didn’t learn about her own family’s role in the movement until she was older.

“We have held too much in, trying to save our children,” she said.

For Wilder and others, the events of 1963 and beyond tell an important story about triumph and resilience – one that can provide a blueprint for younger generations as they work to solve local issues.

“The joy is what kept them going,” he said. “You look at everything that people have gone through… that was the story.”

“For the joy of us being able to gather in Birmingham – what was once considered the most segregated city in America – for the joy of seeing you here, our forefathers endured slavery, Jim Crow, Bull Connor, being jailed, everything else that they endured, for the joy of seeing us.”