Connor, City Commissioner of Public Safety, ordered that German Shepherd dogs and high-pressure fire hoses be used to stop them. The national and international media covered the story, and photographs of the force used against schoolchildren generated public outrage against the city and its officials. Dispute with President John F. Kennedy and the March on Washington During what was later called the Birmingham Children's Crusade, President John F. Kennedy asked King to stop using children in the campaign. King asked Bevel to refrain from recruiting students, and Bevel instead said that he would organize the children to march to Washington D.C. to meet with Kennedy about segregation, and King agreed. Bevel went to the children and asked them to prepare to take to the highways for a march on Washington, with the goal of questioning the President about his plans to end legal segregation in America. Hearing of this plan, and in response to the city's violent treatment of the students, the Kennedy administration asked SCLC's leaders what they wanted in a comprehensive civil rights bill. Kennedy's staff, who already were drafted one, came to an agreement on its contents with SCLC's leadership. Bevel then called off plans for the children's march. On August 28, 1963, SCLC participated in what became known as the March on Washington, an event organized by labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who had planned an earlier 1941 March. Bevel and Nash did not attend, and instead watched Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech on television. Three months after the March on Washington, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson ascended to the Oval Office. Alabama Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement (1965) In September 1963, a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four young girls attending Sunday School and damaged the church. It was later proven that a Ku Klux Klan chapter was responsible. Bevel proposed organizing the Alabama Voting Rights Project, and co-wrote the project proposal with his wife Diane Nash. They moved to Alabama to implement the project along with Birmingham student activist James Orange. At the turn of the 20th century, southern state legislatures had passed new constitutions and laws that effectively disenfranchised most blacks. Practices such as requiring payment of poll taxes and literacy tests administered in a discriminatory way by white officials maintained the exclusion of