Take Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, a public park named for a hometown hero, the first U.S. sailor killed in World War I. But after the events of the 1960s, this patch of land is no more common than those acres set aside in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to honor our Civil War dead.

This is holy ground, consecrated by what happened here. It was an assembly point for SCLC's massive protests in 1963, designed to bring an end to Jim Crow laws in what was called America's most segregated city. It's where the infamous Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor unleashed brutal force against demonstrators, even young children, in an unsuccessful attempt to end the protests.

On this sunny but unseasonably cool day, one struggles to remember the grainy, black-and-white news footage of demonstrators being mowed down by high-powered fire hoses or set upon by dogs in the park. Now it's a memorial to the movement, with sculptures and statues set among the magnolias and dogwoods, gurgling fountains, and a manicured lawn. Nearby stands the stately Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed in a Ku Klux Klan bombing in September 1963.

Dozens of movement veterans, some leaning on canes, hobbled by age and infirmity, converged on this old battleground today to discuss their memories of that revolutionary time and their scars, both seen and unseen.

"At the age of 12, I was put in jail for two weeks for saying 'yes' and 'no' to a policeman instead of 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir,' said Mary Hardy Lykes. "I'm 65 years old now, and sometimes I just sit up at night and cry about this."

Gwen Gamble recalled her childhood coming to a halt, too, as she was jailed at 14 for a nonviolent lunch counter protest at a downtown five-and-dime store: "All of the adults were threatened with losing their jobs for getting involved" in the movement.

Joe Hendricks struggles to remember the exact dates of many events he witnessed, but otherwise his memory of that time is vivid. "The biggest thing was repealing the public accommodations laws," he said. "For years, in the state of Alabama, it was against the law for blacks and whites to congregate in one place. One white man was arrested for attending a black church one Sunday."

Sisters Zellean and Doris Maddox, now in their 60s, both shared memories of growing up black in Birmingham, including the fact that they got used to dodging the Molotov cocktails thrown into their home simply because they were black.

After sharing her story with an AARP interviewer, Doris was assured that it would become a permanent part of the Library of Congress's archive.

But she said she wasn't worried about that: "I'm not trying to get recognition." After all, she doesn't think she did anything extraordinary.