David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

thousands. “Some people still had their rollers in their hair, and their scarves over their head,” Lawlor remembered. “We linked arms and sang, ‘We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday.’
    “We got down to the bottom of the hill,” she went on. “The atmosphere was electric. The Brits were standing with their helmets and their guns—all ready. Their batons were out. We turned and went down the Grosvenor Road, singing and shouting. I think the Brits were in awe. They couldn’t believe that these women with prams were coming down to take them on. I remember seeing one Brit standing there scratching his head, going, ‘What do we do with all these women? Do we go into riot situation here?’ Then we turned onto Slate Street, where the school was— my school. And the Brits were there. They come flying out [of the school], and there was hand-to-hand fighting. We got the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us, threw us up against the walls. Oh, aye. They beat us, like. And if you fell, you had to get up very quickly, because you didn’t want to get trampled. They came out with brutality. I remember standing up on top of a car and having a look at what was going on in the front. Then I saw a man with shaving cream on his face, and putting his braces on—and all of a sudden the soldiers stopped beating us.”
    The man putting his braces on was the commanding officer of the Slate Street checkpoint. He might have been the only voice of sanity on the British side that day, the only one who understood the full dimensions of the catastrophe unfolding. A heavily armed group of soldiers was beating up a group of pram-pushing women, coming to feed the children of the Lower Falls. 9 He told his men to stop.
    “You have to understand, the march was still coming down the road, and the people at the back hadn’t a clue what was going on at the front,” Lawlor went on. “They kept coming. Women were crying. People started coming out of their houses—pulling people in because there were so many injured. Once all the people started coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control. Everyone came out on the streets—hundreds and hundreds of people. It was like a domino effect. One street they’d come out, next thing you know, doors are opening on another street, another street, and another street. The Brits gave up. They had their hands up. The women forced—and we forced and we forced—until we got in, and we got in and we broke the curfew. I’ve often thought about it. God, it was like—Everybody was jubilant. It was like— We did it.
    “I remember coming home and suddenly felt very shaky and upset and nervous about the whole episode, do you know? I remember speaking to my father about it afterward. I said, ‘Daddy, your words came true. They turned on us.’ And he said, ‘True. British Army—that’s what they do.’ He was right. They turned on us. And that was the start of it.”
    1  An impressive number of famous people have come from Brownsville over the years: two heavyweight boxing champions (Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe); the composer Aaron Copland; the Three Stooges (played by Moe and Shemp Howard [later replaced by his brother Curly] and Larry Fine); the television host Larry King—not to mention a long list of professional basketball, football, and baseball stars. The operative words, though, are “ come from Brownsville.” Nobody who can help it stays in Brownsville.
    2  Here are the U.S. imprisonment rates by race and education level.
WHITE MEN
1945–49
1960–64
1975–79
High school dropouts
4.2
8.0
15.3
High school only
0.7
2.5
4.1
Some college
0.7
0.8
1.2
BLACK MEN
1945–49
1960–64
1975–79
High school dropouts
14.7
41.6
69.0
High school only
10.2
12.4
18.0
Some college
4.9
5.5
7.6
    The key statistics are the ones in boldface. Sixty-nine percent of all black male high school dropouts born between 1975 and 1979 have spent time behind bars. That’s Brownsville in a nutshell.
    3  In Belfast, the Twelfth march wends its way through the city and ends up in the “Field,” a large staging area where the crowd gathers for public speeches. Here is a sample of one speech given in 1995. Keep in mind that this is after the Downing Street Declaration that officially began the peace process in Northern Ireland:
    We have read the history books, from 200 years ago. The Roman Catholics forming into groups known as the Defenders, to get rid of the so called heretic dogs, better