On Thursday morning, May 2, 1963, nine-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks woke up with freedom on her mind. But, before she could be free, there was something important she had to do. “I want to go to jail,” Audrey had told her mother.

Since Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks thought that was a good idea, they helped her get ready. Her father had even bought her a new game she’d been eyeing. Audrey imagined that it would entertain her if she got bored during her week on a cell block.

That morning, her mother took her to Center Street Elementary so she could tell her third-grade teacher why she’d be absent. Mrs. Wills cried. Audrey knew she was proud of her.

She also hugged all her grandparents goodbye.

One of her grandmothers assured her, “You’ll be fine.”

Then Audrey’s parents drove her to the church to get arrested.

Unlike Audrey, Wash didn’t know that black kids were about to offer themselves up for arrest. He passed that spring doing what he’d done for the past six or seven years – hanging out in the woods with friends. He wasn’t even going to school very often, much less to mass meetings. When he found out about the marches, he thought the students were crazy.

“It was hard to come to grips with,” he said. “We knew [the police] to be torturers, murderers . . . , and the idea of voluntarily submitting yourself to be taken away with them was just to us – we couldn't . . . ”

—We’ve Got a Job,
Cynthia Levinson
What can connecting the stories of Audrey and Wash help readers understand about the children of Birmingham, Alabama?

All children were too afraid of the police to do anything about racism.
The older children knew more about the march than the young children did.
Some children knew about the march, but others did not.
All children knew about the march.