Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: A city so consumed by racial injustice that black and white people cannot legally play checkers together.

It is hard to imagine such a world, but for writer Diane McWhorter, then a sixth-grader growing up in Birmingham, laws like this were routine and accepted.

"I wish I could tell you that all this was shocking and exceptional. But my attitudes were wholly average for my time and place. I was a nice girl growing up in a polite setting, being groomed for a fine college and a future as a productive citizen. The oppression of African-Americans around me did not strike me as having anything to do with my life," McWhorter writes in her latest book, "A Dream of Freedom."

As a child growing up in the South, McWhorter, like many of her white peers, was naive to the plight of blacks.

It wasn't until she saw the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" with her class that she understood the "injustices that African- Americans had to deal with."

In fact, her class' field trip coincided with the city's first civil rights demonstration, and white parents reacted by not allowing their children to go to the downtown cinema.

McWhorter's newfound understanding from the film did not come without a price. "I still remember feeling guilty that I was betraying my own people by clapping and by sympathizing, by being on the side of a black person," she told Y-Press by phone from her home in New York City.

"That was kind of how the white children felt at that time. You loved your family. You loved your community. You wanted to be loyal to them. But then how can you justify the way they're behaving."

Staying in place

McWhorter says that the racist attitudes and lifestyle she was accustomed to as a child were often romanticized by perpetrators as "our way of life."

"People who don't live in the South (don't) understand that white people and black people were around each other all the time . . . Society was based on the notion that everybody had their 'place.' "

McWhorter says that newspapers in her hometown often omitted content about the movement that would disrupt the wholesome image of the South: "The local newspapers just left everything controversial out 'cause they didn't want people to know what was going on," she said.

Crystal Wadsworth, 16, moved to Birmingham from Syracuse, N.Y., four years ago and now attends Parker High School, a public school near downtown. She says she was shocked when she learned about the amount of hatred that existed in Birmingham at one time. "When I got down here and I got more into in-depth studies about (the civil rights movement), it really brought me to tears. It just hurt me so bad that people actually went to the extent to hurt another person, to judge them just because of their race."

McWhorter wrote "A Dream of Freedom" to introduce the horrors of racism to older children. She won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for an earlier book, "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama," which covers much of the same ground.

"I wrote this book for older kids, kids in middle school. I thought they were just ready to hear the real stuff, the bad stuff. . . . I wanted people to really understand that it wasn't just a few bad eggs who were being mean to African-Americans. It was elected officials. It was people who were paid to uphold the law," she said. "It's just spectacular that this went on in this country, and that the president of the United States had to call out the Army to fight its own citizens in order to defend another class of citizens."

Today, Birmingham is a much different place. The accomplishments of the civil rights movement can be seen all around the city. African-Americans are now elected officials and hold leadership positions instead of the subservient janitorial and housekeeping positions that they once held. Plays about the civil rights movement are held annually in schools. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is dedicated to keeping the memory of the movement and its contributors alive.

Moving forward

Erica Allen, 17, is a lifeguard at a pool in Birmingham that was once inaccessible to African-Americans. She believes things are getting better every day and doesn't ever see racial tension reaching such high levels of hatred again. "Blacks are so high in the work (force) that they really can't bring them back down to where we were back then," she said.

Reginald "Reggie" Watkins, 15, sees the changes in Birmingham as well. "It's changed a lot, and some of the people have changed as well. Like you will find black kids with white children . . . You don't see people hanging from trees or dogs biting people."

Birmingham has made large strides toward a discrimination-free community, but there still are problems. Erica says some traces of racism can be found in day-to-day life, especially with people with less education and income.

"There's still some prejudiced white people out there. They give you the cold shoulder when you come into their places. They probably wouldn't serve you as fast as they would serve a white person," she said.

Calvin Crump, 17, agreed: "Racism is still everywhere. But it's not as bad as it was. You don't see the Ku Klux Klan marching down the street. You don't have anyone attacking someone just because they're black."

Though the public schools have been integrated, some are still segregated by choice. Crystal is one of only two white students at Parker High School, which had been one of the city's premiere black schools before integration and is now overwhelmingly black again.

Crystal says race is not an issue at her school, but it is still on the minds of Birmingham residents. "A lot of people still don't look past the skin color. I mean, honestly, I've had a few people call me like a cracker or a snowball or a cotton ball, and I just laugh," she said.

However, she believes progress is being made. "I recently had my school backpack on -- it has the school logo and school name on it -- and this woman came up behind me, she was African-American, and she was like, 'Oh, you go to Parker?' And I said, 'Yes.' And she was like, "I graduated from Parker!'

"I think it's getting better. When I first started going to Parker and I told people I went to Parker, they looked at me like I was crazy."

McWhorter says Birmingham is always dealing with race because of the city's pivotal role in the civil rights movement. "It was somehow chosen in our democracy, in our country, to play out this racial conflict. Race is always on the table there. They're always having to deal with it."

Poverty, race linked

According to McWhorter, racism lingers because poverty is still a problem in this country. "Even President Bush, in his address, admitted that race and poverty are linked in our country because of slavery and the generations of discrimination that African-Americans have suffered. There's no way to separate those issues, and the country still needs to deal with them."

Erica points to the nation's response to Hurricane Katrina as evidence that work still needs to be done to combat racism in the South. "I think if richer people -- most of the time the white people -- (were involved), I know they wouldn't have been treated like the black people were. It would've been much different, and more people would've come to help."

Though this country has not yet achieved equality for all of its people, McWhorter says the dreams and achievements of the civil rights movement have not been lost on Birmingham.

"Dr. King said that he thought that racial relations would be much better in the South ultimately, once the revolution happened, than it would in the North. And I think Birmingham is an example of that. There's a huge black middle-class community there," she said.

ASSISTANT EDITOR: Albert Chen, 16.

REPORTERS: Keenen Brannon, 11; Jeff Hou, 12.