Washington Booker was born in Marengo County, Alabama, in 1949. He was five years old and living in Birmingham when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional, but it would take years for many states to comply with the Court's ruling. In Birmingham, one of the most segregated cities in the South, the promise of equality was still a long way off.

Booker's home life buffered some of the effects of poverty and segregation. He and his family lived in a rooming house with black baseball players from the Black Barons, Birmingham's Negro League team; Booker was a batboy for the team. Like most black children in Birmingham, Booker witnessed segregation in all facets of life: Blacks were not allowed to join white sports teams, they could not attend the same schools as whites or eat at the same restaurants, nor were they allowed to sit with whites in any public facility. Birmingham police officers often enforced segregation with violence against African Americans. During the Civil Rights movement, nonviolent activists were beaten, arrested, and sometimes murdered.

In 1963, Booker was a student at Ullman High School. On May 2, he joined civil rights leaders and hundreds of students in a march to Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the staging area for the demonstrations. There they joined students from schools in other parts of the city, organized protest groups, and spent the next four days demonstrating against discrimination in Birmingham.

Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor tried to stop the demonstrations with police dogs and fire hoses. Despite police brutality, the marches continued. By May 6, aprroximately 2,000 children, including Booker, were arrested and jailed in what came to be known as the Children's Crusade.

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.

After high school, Booker joined the Army, served in combat in Vietnam, and eventually returned to Birmingham. In the late 1960s, frustrated by police brutality against African Americans and by the slow pace of change, Booker joined the Black Panther Party, a black militant group that advocated black power and rejected the nonviolent strategies of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.