From his workshops, where hundreds of Birmingham’s children were pressing themselves forward for the D-Day march, Bevel brought to King a simple formula: any child old enough to belong to a church should be eligible to march to jail. Nearly all the young volunteers were Baptists, like King and himself, and Baptist doctrine required only a conscious acceptance of the Christian faith as a condition of both church membership and personal salvation. By common practice, churches allowed the youngest school-age children to become members. That settled it right there, Bevel insisted. How could he and
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