Here's The Birmingham News story from Sunday, April 21, 2002:
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REPORTERS SHARE MEMORIES OF COVERING CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
STAN BAILEY News staff writer
MONTGOMERY -- Memories, undimmed by time. Still painful, still clear after four decades. They shared them Saturday, like echoes from the past.
For one, the bloody remains of a child, retrieved from the rubble of a church bombed in Birmingham in 1963.
For another, the view from the bell-tower of a Montgomery church. Terrified "freedom riders" huddled inside while an angry mob outside threw fire-bombs.
For still another, Bloody Sunday in Selma. A woman, unconscious on the Edmund Pettus bridge.
At a reunion symposium sponsored by Troy State University, the United Press International wire service newsmen who chronicled the civil rights struggles of Alabama's stormy 1960s retold their stories. The event was at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum.
Patrick Harden, who worked for UPI in 14 bureaus in six countries, said he was in Montgomery's First Baptist Church on Ripley Street on May 21, 1961, with Martin Luther King Jr. and the freedom riders as King called for federal help.
"I had never been so scared in my life as I was at that moment," Harden said. "I thought we were going to be burned."
John Lynch, who joined UPI in 1962, said he remembers seeing a black woman in a white dress who had been knocked down on the Pettus bridge. An officer accused her of "faking," and "dropped a tear gas container right in her face," Lynch said.
Bob Gordon, who joined UPI in Atlanta in 1961, was one of the first reporters on the scene when Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. Gordon said he has tried without success to blot out the memories of that morning, when he reviewed the remains of one of four girls.