Her parents struggled to explain why they had to use a different bathroom, or why the entrances to stores and restaurants were different for people who looked like them. Webb-Christburg peppered her parents with questions, but she always listened and was well behaved.
That would change on Jan. 2, 1965.
Webb-Christburg and her best friend, Rachel West, were playing in front of Brown Chapel AME Church. There were more cars than usual — fancier cars than she was used to seeing in her neighborhood. She and Rachel walked closer and saw a man “dressed in a nice white starched shirt, black tie, black slacks.”
A crowd gathered around the stranger, and another man walked up to the two girls, asking them if they knew who this was. They did not.
It was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
He saw the two girls and walked over to them. He asked where they lived (they pointed to the projects nearby), how old they were and where they went to school. One of the men in the crowd told them to run along — grown folks were about to meet.
King disagreed. “Let them come in,” he said, taking them by the hand and leading them into the church. He sat them down in the back.
“He said, ‘What do you little girls want?’” Webb-Christburg recalled. “We looked at each other. He said, ‘Now, children, when I ask you little girls what you want, I want you to say, freedom.’ And then he said, ‘Now, when do you little girls want it?’ We looked at each other again, not knowing how to answer that question. He said, ‘When I ask you, When do you want it? I want you to say, now.’”
It was a moment that changed her life. She ran to tell her parents. But they weren’t receptive.
“My daddy told me, ‘You just better stay from around that mess,’” she remembered. They were worried about her safety — and theirs — and about losing their jobs.
She did the exact opposite: sneaking out, skipping school, spending hours at the church for mass meetings.
“In my mind as a child, I was fighting for them,” she said, smiling.
Spending time with King, Williams, Lewis and other activists — Jonathan Daniels, Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb — awakened something in her. “I was already inquisitive. But I gained some courage because I was around courageous people,” she said.
When March 7 came, her parents begged her not to march. And even when she gathered at Brown Chapel AME Church, which served as a meeting place and offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that helped plan the march, adults discouraged her from going. She cried and they relented.
The march had been planned by Lewis and Williams in response to the fatal killing of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. The group planned to march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, 54 miles in all.
As they walked the 15-minute route to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, she began to see dozens of white people and a wall of law enforcement.
“Some of them start just yelling the n-word out, trying to distract the marchers. Some would even come up and spit on some of the marchers,” she said. “I could see the policemen with the billy clubs, tear gas masks. You see the horses, the dogs — my heart started beating very fast, and I just knew something was going to happen.”
What came next shocked the country and forced action in Washington, D.C., leading to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.