The backdrop was an over-cast Sunday afternoon last
month. The place was the BirminghamCivil Rights Institute. Eric and I had
been talking about going for months. We
finally made the trip. It was sobering
and set our minds to thinking about a lot of things: progress, regress, silence, noise, action,
inaction.
We arrived about ten minutes before the Institute opened, so
we walked into adjacent Kelly Ingram Park. Almost
immediately a man approached us and began talking to us about the history of
the park, about 16th Street Baptist Church and about the
Institute. He wanted us to know the true
history of district, the history that we might not hear about in the
Institute. We walked the Freedom Walk with
him around the park to the sculptures: a
demonstrator thrown back by the attack of a policeman and his dog, vicious
metal hounds rising from steel to tear at desegregation, replicas of high power
water hoses that attempted to force back those fighting for equality, three
ministers kneeling together in limestone prayer. And beyond that, a business district clearly
still struggling economically, holding on because of the historical
significance of what happened along those streets almost fifty years ago.
Our guide, a man who grew up in the neighborhood during the
Civil Rights Movement but currently homeless and living in a shelter with
his thirteen-year-old daughter, led us out of the park and into the Civil
Rights District to show us the Carver Theatre (historic Black African American
theatre), the Civil Rights Activist Committee Headquarters, the Eddie Kendrick
Memorial Park (Mr. Kendrick of the famous Temptations singing group) and
eventually the 16th Street Baptist Church. We heard stories of the Reverend Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., of the Children’s March, of Bull Connor with his tactics, and
of the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four
young girls. The daily boycotts,
demonstrations, struggles.
The Civil Rights Movement was something that I learned about
early in my public education in Alabama, so it is something that has been a part
of my consciousness since I was a youngster.
It wasn’t until I was older, maybe a senior in high school and then a
student in college that I really began to see the extent and the frightening brutality
of racial hatred in my home state. I
discovered that the 1961Freedom Riders whose bus was firebombed in near-by
Anniston, AL, were beaten by Klan members after they managed to escape being
burned to death only because providentially the mob was unable to hold the
doors of the bus closed. It was then
that I also read about how in 1963, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety
Theophilis Eugene Conner, known to all as Bull Connor, turned high-powered
water hoses and dogs on crowds of men, women and children to dissuade them from
their peaceful demonstrations. That Birmingham
was known as Bombingham and that a section of town was so war-torn with
violence during the 50s and 60s it was referred to as Dynamite Hill. That justice for the deaths of Addie Mae
Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, the four little
girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Church bombing, took decades to
be dealt (Chambliss was convicted in 1977, Blanton in 2001, and most recently, Cherry
in 2002).
Later I would learn of even more localized hatred in the
form of incidents here in Etowah County (in some cases, just blocks from where
we live and work), the 1906 lynching from the railroad bridge of Bunk
Richardson (a black man wrongfully associated with the rape and murder of a
white woman), the 1960 firebombing of Temple Beth Israel by Jerry Hunt (who
also shot two fleeing congregants, Alan Cohn and Alvin Lowi), the 1963 shooting
death in Attalla of Baltimore postman William Lewis Moore who was walking from Maryland
to Jackson, MS to deliver a letter of desegregation to Governor Ross Barnett. These
things. Here. In our community, and not so long ago.
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| 16th Street Baptist Church |
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| 16th Street Baptist Church |
