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.
"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)
I closed this post to comments at 7:52 PM September 15th after getting a raft of SPAM. Thanks for coming by, really, you can still rate the post if you appreciated it. I just can't keep up with the SPAM and don't really want to leave space open to its publication.
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Comments
The Fugitive Slave Act, demanded by Slaveholders in the late 1850s, radicalized Northerners against slavery bc now they could be penalized for harboring runaways. History's filled w unintended consequences. That bombing radicalised Northerners yet again: the Klan and Sheriff Clark couldn't be ignored.
Bless you for this.
Well-deserved EP, congrats. ~R
Doc, I think the entire country had its soul stolen during that period of time, perhaps even many years prior; the powered elite using government against us through the many covert activities performed by our government to this day, the near maniacal behavior of the tea party nuts producing the same atmosphere we saw in the 50s and 60s by the same right-wing nuts today ranting racial slurs.
There's a very uneasy feeling blanketing this country and it all but proves we've truly not come very far at all.
cartouche, thanks. Glad to be of service.
RARobertsJr. Very kind of you. Please don't forget.
One Desert Muse - I am certain that the world is a better place, but as you said, there are those who wish to drag us back to those times where some things mattered more than they should ever have mattered. Thanks for coming by old friend.
Lea, I am sure you are right that this really was the tipping point.
Jon, I am sure that we are getting to one of those points in history right now. The willingness to be publicly hateful and divisive is awesome to witness, and not in a good way.
Thanks femmeforte! If we hang around here long enough, something manages to ring the right bells.
To the very wise Fusun, It's about time I shared something that is "new to you."
jimmymac, XOX
Thanks owl!
JoanH, yes, devastating is the right word. That's how it felt to me at the time. How in a world that included butterflies, dragonflies and fluffy kittens and little girls who love them, could people be so hateful and cruel?
Cindy, I participated in the Poor People's March when it came to Denver in 1968. Even there it was a little scary to befriend people of color because of what the angry folks who were watching might do.
When I was studying history at university more than one professor said that we must remember history so that we learn from our mistakes. If we don't remember that we have been here before, what's to stop us from repeating the same horrific mistakes?
Nobody here said we shouldn't remember good things.
Sarah, thanks to you as well.