On Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in one of the cruelest crimes during the civil rights era. I heard about it on a tiny green transistor radio that we usually used to listen to the LA Dodgers games and popular music. I was twelve years old, six weeks from my thirteenth birthday. I did not understand. How could little girls be killed at a church?
Their names were Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley and they were about the same age as me. Every year I feel choked up about this, in the same way I feel choked up about my grandfather's death when I think of him.
I feel like something was stolen from me on that day, much as I did when I lost my grampa. Maybe it was some part of my innocence that was ripped away--it was something that was not recoverable, something of which I can tell you very little because it was so long ago. But the absent place in me aches when I remember. And I think remembering them is one of my duties as a girl of their time, someone who heard, who witnessed from afar what one part of our culture was willing to do to another.
I understand 800 ministers of different races attended the funeral of three of the girls and that Martin Luther King, Jr. conducted the service.
Somehow that comforts me to think of that but it also continues to break my heart. 8000 people attended and some people teach that it was the deaths of these four girls and the injury of twenty others and the death soon after of John F. Kennedy that dislodged the mired conscience of our nation and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Being a self-involved kid at the time I can't say that I knew that, I only knew how affected I was from the news of their deaths. I didn't see the pictures until I was in college.
I did know what it meant to actually not be safe in the world coming from a childhood that contained a lot of sorrow, violence and poverty. That day took away yet another place where I had once thought I was safe. Little girls could be hurt or killed at church. Oh my God!
Some sorrows just cannot be forgotten, and I believe that the remembering of those sorrows is not something to "put behind us," but one of the things we can do that makes us stronger.
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Comments
Your essay is very moving. Thanks.
For example, pain is weakness leaving the body was real popular with the USMC.
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Thanks for your comment. Kids growing up in the 60's thought similarly about the Holocaust, but I don't think that thinking has stopped the impulse for violence toward whatever we think of as "other" do you?
I don't know if you know or remember the Steely Dan song IGY (International Geophysical Year) a nostalgic retrospective tune that hearkened to the unbounded optimism of the early 60s...a largely hidden social satire song.
In any event, the murder of these four beautiful girls changed the course in that time. And why was there such a cost to combat hatred? Why is there still racial hatred today? In part, because children eat what their parents feed them. How many more children yet to be born will grow up without such hatred if we have Obama as president and he is successful in being a much better uniter than the one who professed to be and failed or the one who is a hot tempered maverick?
I digress, this is a beautiful post and tribute, to your heart and to the time.
Barry
I think that we are still living in a time when such hatred is hidden in code, when a Vice Presidential candidate quotes a racist in her acceptance speech and the memory and price paid by these girls and others such as Medgar Evers and Emmitt Till are continually dishonored by our failure to live our lives consistent with the aspirations and inspiration of these heroes and innocents who paid with their lives for the changes that followed their deaths.
I appreciate your sharing your experience during that time. I am sure it was similar to many kids in California. I was in a similarly distributed class in Escondido in 5th grade.
I think what is hard in life is meant to make us of more durable character and it is our privilege to bear it. Nothing is a burden but the nature of the tale we tell about things. It is we who make it awful or glorious. The sorrows we experience are the wings of love in the present tense as it leaves us its memory as evidence of what will be no more. A new kind of love can be born in its wake.
And now we can all remember.