Audrey Hendricks was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1953. Her childhood spanned the busiest years of the Civil Rights movement. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The following year, Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott, which both mobilized the black community and activated white resistance. In 1957, school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas required the intervention of federal troops.

By the early 1960s, Hendricks' family was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement. Lola Hendricks, Audrey's mother, worked with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She helped organize the mass meetings, nonviolent protests, and economic boycotts that defined the struggle for racial equality.

Despite early civil rights victories, Birmingham remained one of the most segregated cities in the South. Because many southern school boards refused to comply with the Supreme Court, Hendricks attended segregated schools long after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Birmingham's detailed segregation ordinances made it illegal for African Americans to use public parks or to sit together with whites in any public facility. Random voter registration tests and racial violence prevented most African Americans from voting. In 1961, Hendricks' parents were among the civil rights activists who won a lawsuit to integrate Birmingham's 67 parks. Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor retaliated by closing the parks.

In the spring of 1963, just before her tenth birthday, Hendricks and other students left school and joined civil rights leaders in a march to Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the staging area for the demonstrations. Together with students from schools in other parts of the city, they were organized into protest groups and spent the next four days demonstrating against discrimination in Birmingham.

Connor tried to stop the demonstrations with police dogs and powerful fire hoses. But the marches continued. By May 6, approximately 2,000 children were arrested and jailed in what came to be known as the Children's Crusade. Hendricks was the youngest known demonstrator to be incarcerated during the Civil Rights movement.

National news coverage stunned the public with images of the violence in the streets of Birmingham. President John F. Kennedy was forced to take action. For the first time, he declared civil rights a "moral issue" and began drafting federal legislation that would protect the rights of African American citizens. The ensuing Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation and discrimination in all public facilities.

In 1969, fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, Hendricks attended her first desegregated school.