Claim:
A rumor circulating online accurately described an event in the Civil Rights Movement protests on May 4, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, in which fire hoses being used on demonstrators mysteriously went dry.
Rating:
A claim making the rounds online in November 2025 purported that fire hoses mysteriously turned off or ran dry during the high-profile Civil Rights Movement protests in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, in which city officials used police dogs and fire hoses to drive back protesters.
Users on social media, primarily on Facebook (archived, archived, archived), shared the story along with a purported photograph of the moment allegedly dubbed “The Night the Firehoses Ran Dry,” depicting a group of children walking through a flooded street past firefighters holding hoses pouring water at low pressure.
The rumor circulated following months of protests against the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Posts sharing the claim also included an alleged sequence of events:
The Night the Firehoses Ran Dry
Birmingham, Alabama – May 4, 1963 (the day after the dogs refused)
Bull Connor, furious that the dogs had failed, ordered every firehose in the city turned on the children full force.
At 1:14 p.m. the valves were opened wide.
Water shot out for exactly seven feet, then fell straight to the ground like rain.
No pressure.
No spray.
Just soft streams that soaked shoes but never knocked anyone down.
Firemen twisted valves harder.
Nothing.
The hoses stayed gentle.
The children walked forward, singing, and the water parted around them like a curtain.
When the last child passed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the hoses suddenly roared back to full power, almost ripping the nozzles from the firemen’s hands.
The city water department tore up streets for weeks looking for the “valve malfunction.”
They never found one.
Every May 4 at 1:14 p.m., the fire hydrants along Kelly Ingram Park leak a few drops, even when capped tight.
Old men who were children that day still come, put their palms under the drip, and say the water still tastes like freedom.
There is no evidence that “The Night the Firehoses Ran Dry” was an actual event that occurred on May 4, 1963. Rather, it appeared to be made up. The image that circulated alongside it, generated with artificial intelligence (AI), appeared designed to trick readers into thinking the story was authentic by couching it within actual historical context of a key point in the Civil Rights movement dubbed the “Children’s Crusade.” As a result, we’ve rated the claim false.
Snopes reached out to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and Kids in Birmingham 1963, a nonprofit organization focused on collecting “dozens and dozens of first-person accounts of what happened in Birmingham during 1963 and in the months that followed,” for further confirmation that the story and image do not represent a real event. We will update this article if we receive a response.
On May 2, 1963, “more than one thousand students skipped classes and gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham, Alabama” in support of the Civil Rights movement — specifically an effort to desegregate Birmingham — according to the NMAAHC.
According to a page on the museum’s website, the initial protest resulted in hundreds of arrests and “hundreds more young people” amassing the following day near Kelly Ingram Park on May 3, 1963, when “white commissioner, Bull Connor, directed the local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstration.”
The New York Times ran a report the following day that featured photographs from the events in Birmingham, including a police dog lunging at a young protester and a fireman dousing protesters with a fire hose under the headline, “Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham.”
The date social media posts gave for the purported turning off of said fire hoses, May 4, 1963, would place it on the third day of the Children’s Crusade, but there is no evidence the episode it happened. In fact, a front page headline of The New York Times on May 5, 1963, proclaimed, “U.S. Seeking a Truce in Birmingham; Hoses Again Drive Off Demonstrators.”
The same article stated, “Demonstrations by Negroes seeking the lowering of racial barriers continued with fierce intensity. Firemen again used fire hoses, turning them on groups of Negro spectators who disregarded police orders to disperse.”
According to the NMAAHC website, the conflict between Birmingham law enforcement and young protesters resulted in “images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, being clubbed by police officers, and being attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, and triggered outrage throughout the world.”
(The New York Times)
A May 10, 1963, news report by CBS News, viewable on the Library of Congress website, offered substantial film footage of the fire hoses in action as well as an interview with Martin Luther King Jr., one of the organizers of the ongoing campaign to fight segregation in Birmingham at the time.
A retrospective report on the events of 1963 in Birmingham, published by Alabama News Center in 2023, said, “Firemen earlier had reported that the water hose pressure was 50 to 100 pounds per inch. They turned the hoses on full blast and aimed directly at the youngsters, several of whom were skinned up as they skidded down the gutters under the intense water pressure.”
Alabama News Center reported a comment from protester Carolyn Maull McKinstry, who stated she was 15 in 1963. “The water hoses hurt a lot…. The water tore a big hole in my sweater and swiped part of my hair off on that side,” McKinstry said. “I just remember the sting and the pain on my face. It was very painful, and you couldn’t escape. There were a few points where we were trying to stand up and hold onto a wall. It was just a terrific pain from the force.”
“Despite the violence, children continued to march and protest in an organizing action now known as the Children’s Crusade,” the NMAAHC website said of the May 1963 demonstrations. “The crusade ended after intervention from the U.S. Department of Justice. The event moved President John F. Kennedy to express support for federal civil rights legislation and the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
While there is no evidence that a mysterious benefactor assisted the demonstrators by turning down the water pressure of the fire hoses being used to disperse protesters, as the rumor suggested, there was backlash to the use of force at the time.
In 2015, Alabama news website AL.com reported that “a New York fire fighters union issued a resolution in July 1963, saying the liberty of the black people in Birmingham was denied and it was wrong the way the Birmingham fire fighters were ‘misused.’ The resolution, issued by the Uniformed Fire Officers Association of New York, Local 854, called Birmingham’s conduct ‘shameful’ and ‘deplorable,’ and has brought ‘discredit to the honorable status of professional fire fighters.”’
However, the resolution went mostly unknown to Birmingham locals until 2014, when activists “were invited to New York City to commemorate the 51st anniversary of that march in Kelly Ingram Park” and presented a copy of the document.
One of the invited activists said, “It made me feel like what we did was worth the risk we took because Eugene Connor had led us to believe that everything we did, everyone in the world, was against it.” (As Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety at the time, Eugene “Bull” Connor was the public face of the force used against the protesters.)
Regarding the image that circulated with the story, AI-detection platform Hive Moderation declared a 99.9% chance that someone created it using AI.
(Hive Moderation)
While such platforms are not always accurate, keen-eyed readers can note illegible gibberish displayed on the signs in the backgrounds of the purported photo, one surefire indicator of AI-generated slop. In addition, there are a host of distorted faces among the alleged children, particularly the figures in the background.
Lastly, a reverse-image Google search of the purported photographs showed no results earlier than November 2025. Had the photo been authentic, it undoubtedly would have been widely reported at the time and included in subsequent reporting about the protests in Birmingham.
This particular story resembled “glurge,” which Snopes has previously defined as “sentimental or heart-rending story that undermines its own inspirational message by distorting — or ignoring — the facts.”
In this instance, the individual or individuals who created the glurge borrowed real elements of the Children’s Crusade and the general unrest of the Civil Rights Movement to concoct a heartwarming, but entirely false, take on a tumultuous moment in American history.
