James stood upstairs at the very front of all the marchers, next to his friend Gertrude. “We were thinking about the seriousness of what we were about to do,” he said.
At one o’clock, a DJ at WENN dropped the needle on the gospel song “All Men Created by God.” This was the cue to start the march. The double doors of Sixteenth Street Baptist swung open.
James immediately saw the trouble they were about to step into.
“When the door was opened, I was shocked at the number of people,” he said. Beyond sawhorse barricades that surrounded the church, policemen sat at attention on motorcycles. Hundreds of black adults crowded the park. “I could see reporters . . . I remember hearing a man saying, ‘They’re coming out! They’re coming out!’ There were lights and people all around.”
Which detail from this excerpt suggests that the speaker’s feelings were shared by other children involved in the march?