HOUSTON – At 78 years old, Alexander Brown can still point to the exact line where his name appears in history.
He runs his finger down a copy printed Birmingham jail docket from 1963.
“Here we are, Alexander Lionel Brown, 1963, April 9th,” he reads aloud. He turns a few pages to another name — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brown wasn’t just alive during the Civil Rights Movement. He was part of it.
Brown’s activism began as a teenager in Alabama. After participating in a school protest, he was called to assist the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Selma.
“I convinced grandma that it was important, and she gave me permission to be a part of it,” Brown recalled.
When organizers asked him to go to Selma, he didn’t hesitate.
Facing Fire Hoses in Birmingham
In 1963, Brown marched in Birmingham demonstrations that drew national attention.
During one protest, he says police turned high-powered water hoses on demonstrators.
“In one of the marches, we were almost trampled, running because they put the hoses on us,” Brown said. “Those hoses would bear the bark off of oak trees.”
He was later arrested and jailed in Birmingham at the same time Dr. King was being held there.
“That’s during the time that Martin Luther King wrote the letter from the Birmingham jail,” Brown said.
The letter, written by Martin Luther King Jr. while imprisoned, would become one of the most significant documents of the movement. Brown did not know at the time that history was unfolding just floors away.
Despite the arrests, Brown remembers the moment as energizing.
“We were going to jail and putting on our suits and ties and shining our shoes to make sure that we presented ourselves well in this effort,” he said.
Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Two years later, in 1965, Brown stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for what would become known as Bloody Sunday.
He arrived late that day and found himself near the back of the line. Leaders including future Congressman John Lewis were at the front.
“When we looked around, we were on the bridge, and there were mounted police coming toward us,” Brown said. “On the other end of the bridge, police with batons were coming to us. And they tear-gassed us on the bridge.”
State troopers charged the marchers. Chaos erupted. Protesters were beaten and forced back.
Brown says he couldn’t see everything happening at the front because of the crowd.
“You couldn’t really see it because people were everywhere,” he said. “When we finally got off the bridge, we were running back to Brown Chapel Church in Selma.”
Asked whether he was afraid, Brown pauses.
“When I look back, I think you should have been scared,” he said. “But I wasn’t. I was just so pumped up because we were fighting for our freedom.”
They were fighting, he said, to remove “white” and “colored” signs from bathrooms and water fountains and for the right to sit at lunch counters and vote without barriers.
Television cameras captured the violence that day, galvanizing national support for voting rights legislation.
At the time, Brown says, he didn’t realize he was living through a moment that would be taught in history books.
“I really believe that the God I serve orders our steps,” he said. “All the stuff that I went through, nobody but Him could have brought me safely through that.”
Decades later, Brown’s 1963 arrest was officially pardoned in 2009.
“The offense was in 1963, and here we are in 2009 being remembered to be pardoned for our participation,” he said. “It was a reminder of how good my God had been to me.”
Today, Brown says he has no regrets.
“If I had to do it all over again, I would. It wouldn’t change nothing.”
He says his faith carried him through the violence, the arrests and the uncertainty, and still sustains him today.
“I’m not going to let anything or anybody take my joy,” Brown said. “And my joy has come from my relationship with God all these years.”
More than six decades later, the teenager who once convinced his grandmother to let him march is now a living witness to a movement that reshaped America and a reminder that history is often written by ordinary people who decide to step forward.