Bevel's strategy was deliberate and controversial. Adults risked losing their jobs if they were arrested; students did not. On May 2, 1963, over a thousand students left the 16th Street Baptist Church and marched into the park and toward downtown Birmingham. Connor ordered mass arrests - so many that the jails overflowed. The next day, with the jails full, Connor turned to fire hoses and police dogs. The pressure from the hoses was strong enough to strip bark from trees. Photographs of snarling German shepherds lunging at young Black protesters were published worldwide. The confrontations continued for days. By May 10, Birmingham's business leaders had agreed to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, and other public facilities. The demonstrations in Kelly Ingram Park helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The park had a quieter beginning. Originally named West Park, the four-acre green space is bounded by 16th and 17th Streets and 5th and 6th Avenues North. In 1932 it was renamed for Osmond Kelly Ingram, a Birmingham firefighter-turned-sailor who became the first American enlisted man killed in World War I. For decades it served as an ordinary neighborhood park, shaded by trees, surrounded by the institutions of Birmingham's Black community. The 16th Street Baptist Church stood just across the street. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute would later be built adjoining the park to the west. The park's location - at the edge of the commercial district, steps from the church that served as an organizing hub - made it the natural staging ground when the movement came to Birmingham.

In 1992 the park was completely renovated and rededicated as 'A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation,' timed to coincide with the opening of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Today the park is an outdoor gallery of civil rights sculpture. A statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stands at the center. Three installations by artist James Drake flank a circular 'Freedom Walk,' placing visitors inside portrayals of the 1963 confrontations - the dogs, the hoses, the courage. A limestone sculpture by Raymond Kaskey depicts three ministers - John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith, and A. D. King - kneeling in prayer. A statue of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth by sculptor John Rhoden faces the park from in front of the Civil Rights Institute.

On September 15, 1963, four months after the fire hoses, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church across the street from the park, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, the youngest at eleven years old. Fifty years later, in September 2013, Birmingham-born sculptor Elizabeth MacQueen unveiled the Four Spirits sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park. It depicts the four girls in the moments before the explosion: McNair stands tiptoed on a bench releasing six doves into the air; Collins kneels beside her, fastening a dress sash; Wesley sits with a book open in her lap to a refrain from Yeats's poem 'The Stolen Child'; Robertson stands smiling, motioning the others toward their church sermon. At the base is inscribed the name of the sermon they never heard: 'A Love that Forgives.'