Many gathered Wednesday night at the Lowndes Interpretive Center to listen to the inspiring stories of three civil rights activists that took part in the movement as children.

The three presenters were Joanne Blackmon Bland, Sheyann Webb-Christburg and Charles Mauldin. Each of them shared their experiences and how the time impacted their lives and others.

Dr. Lisa Bratton, professor at Tuskegee University and moderator of the event, introduced each of the presenters.

“There’s no better way to really understand and experience history than to hear it from people that were actually there,” Bratton said.

Bland was involved in many of the protests and marches including Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday and the first leg of the Selma to Montgomery March.

She got involved because of her grandmother who would go to the different meetings pertaining the movement.

On Bloody Sunday, Bland experienced what many other marches did as well — a horrific scene of law enforcement beating protestors.

“I had no idea there would be violence [on Bloody Sunday],” Bland said. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been there if I had known.”

Bland said when she crossed the bridge and saw all of the law enforcement on the other side she knew she wasn’t going to Montgomery that day.

“I couldn’t hear or see what was happening down front, but I knew what was supposed to happen,” Bland said. “Suddenly, I heard what I thought was gun shots and screaming. [The police] had came in from both sides, the front and the back. There was nowhere to go, and they were just beating people — old, young, black, white, male, female — it didn’t matter.”

What Bland had originally thought were gunshots turned out to be the tear gas that was released on the marchers.

“The last thing that I remember seeing was this horse and this lady and I don’t know what happened,” Bland said.

“As I sit here 50 years later, I can still hear the sound that head made when it hit that pavement. The next thing I remember is being on the other side of the bridge … in the back of a car and my head was in my sister’s lap.”

She said she felt something on her face and realized that it was her sister’s blood dripping on her.

“My 14 year old sister had been beat on that bridge,” Bland said.

Webb-Christburg, who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “smallest freedom fighter,” also looked back on her time during the Civil Rights Movement and interacting with King.

“I thank God for the opportunity to first and foremost to have met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at such an early age who had a most profound impact on my life as a child,” Webb-Christburg said. “And not even knowing that meeting him, would help guide and direct my path in terms of the decisions that which I made as that little girl.”

Mauldin spoke about his experience in being a child in the movement and the student leader of the Dallas County Youth League.

He talked about the courage that everyone in the movement had to have to make their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to Montgomery.

A driving factor for Mauldin was the fear put on to the African American community during that time.

“Individual courage was a death sentence,” Mauldin said. “There was a real fear. … We didn’t have a history to know how fearful we should have been.”

Mauldin said credit goes to everyone involved in the movement and that no one person was more important than another.

“The people that actually do the work, often times get left out,” Mauldin said.

For more, see the Selma Times-Journal commemorative edition called “Selma: 1965-2015,” available March 1.