50 years since the Birmingham Church Bombing [Archive]

blake 3:17

14th September 2013, 05:40

Angela Davis commemorates 50th anniversary of Alabama church bombing
By Matt O'Brien

[email protected]

POSTED: 09/12/2013 10:00:00 AM PDT

OAKLAND -- She was a college student beginning a year of study in France when she heard about the latest horror in her Alabama hometown: four African-American girls killed in a church bombing, two of them known to her as family friends.

Years before she became an international symbol of a turbulent American era, Angela Yvonne Davis was a homesick 19-year-old searching for a French phone booth. She wanted to check on her parents back in Birmingham.

"As horrendous as it was to imagine that bombing, I really wish I had been able to be there," Davis said this week. "Whenever you lose someone, you want your friends and family around."

Just 18 days after the euphoric March on Washington dared Americans to imagine an end to racism, Ku Klux Klan members on Sept. 15, 1963, planted dynamite under the steps of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, a gathering spot for young activists fighting the city's deeply entrenched racial segregation.
The deadly attack -- 50 years ago this Sunday morning -- aroused worldwide sympathy for the U.S. civil rights movement. It was also one of the sparks that set Davis, who turns 70 in January, on a radical path against racial injustice that made her a polarizing figure.

The youngest victim, Denise McNair, was 11. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were 14. Davis sees them not just as helpless victims but as children who were among many who had confronted segregation, stood up against police brutality earlier that year and formed "the backbone of the movement at that time."

"People criticized Dr. (Martin Luther) King for wanting to utilize children as the troops of that movement," Davis said. "But they wanted to participate. They wanted to stand up. Dr. King also knew that they would make for a great deal of drama to publicize what was going on in Birmingham."

The longtime Oakland resident, feminist scholar, anti-prison activist and UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus is scheduled to commemorate the Birmingham tragedy with a speech at 5 p.m. Sunday at the First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., in Oakland.

blake 3:17

14th September 2013, 05:42

The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing
Appalled by the murder of four little girls, a white Alabaman spoke out against racism—and was forever shunned for it.

In the next few days, you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly divisive periods in American history, and it's not too much of a leap to suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.

"A mad, remorseful worried community asks, 'Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?' The answer should be, 'We all did it.'"
What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:

Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it." Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.

He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it.

A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, "Why?" "Who?" Everyone then "deplores" the "dastardly" act. But you know the "who" of "Who did it" is really rather simple.

There was little in Morgan's early life to suggest that he would have the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always courteous to the "black help." Like so many other local sons and daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his life enmeshed in both.

The "who" is every little individual who talks about the "niggers" and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The "who" is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren't really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.

"Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead." And with those words, Morgan sat down.
He was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom—"Big Jim"—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to 1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn't uncommon, but was also an early and ardent integrationist. "As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be held down alongside them," Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after Alabama went Dixiecrat.

It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.

I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time? That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept the pain of being left out.

Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would Negroes think this?

Full article http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/the-speech-that-shocked-birmingham-the-day-after-the-church-bombing/279565/