Birmingham Sunday

The four girls killed during the 16th Street Baptist
Church bombing. Clockwise from top left:
 Addie Mae Collins (aged 14),
Cynthia Wesley (aged 14),
Carole Robertson (aged 14)
 and Denise McNair (aged 11)

It was a Sunday in 1963, 50 years ago today. Like many other Sundays in communities across the nation, people left their homes to go to church. Birmingham Alabama was no different in that respect, except for the fact that the city was a center of civil rights activities, and the 16th street Baptist Church was a gathering place, not only for worship, but to organize.

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were dressed in their "Youth Sunday" best, ready to lead the 11:00 adult service at the church, which since its construction in 1911 had served as the center of life for Birmingham's African American community. Only a few minutes before the explosion, they had been together in the basement women's room, excitedly talking about their first days at school. The bombing came without warning.

The same way that the Newtown shootings or the murder of Trayvon Martin have affected so many of us, the bombing of the church in Birmingham, and the death of four little girls, rocked the nation and the world.

Haven to the South's most violent Ku Klux Klan chapter, Birmingham was probably the most segregated city in the country. Dozens of unsolved bombings and police killings had terrorized the black community since World War II.

On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

What ensued was not only the grief of the families and the outrage of the nation, but a series of injustices, aided and abetted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which took decades to bring to light, and to give some closure to one of the ugliest periods in our history.

Follow me below the fold for more.

Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr were identified as suspects in the bombing.

It would not be until 1977 that the first murderer, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss would be convicted.

There was then another long hiatus in the justice process:

After the Chambliss conviction and Baxley left office, the church bombing case again fell dormant. Two attempts to reopen the case, in 1980 and 1988, did not result in any convictions.

The FBI reopened its investigation in 1996, telling reporters it had received new evidence, although they would not discuss what the new information included.

Investigators eventually focused on two of the other three men mentioned in the 1965 FBI report, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry.

It took until 2001 for Blanton to be convicted, and Cherry was finally convicted in 2002.

Howell Raines wrote an extensive feature for the New York Times Magazine on the Birmingham bombing, the arrests, and the failures to convict. He describes a May 13, 1965, FBI memo sent from the Birmingham field office to J.Edgar Hoover which documented eyewitnesses to the crime.

Six days later, Hoover, in a memo declaring that the chances for conviction were ''remote,'' ordered the agents in Birmingham not to meet with state or Federal prosecutors. A Justice Department task force assigned in 1978 to investigate the F.B.I.'s handling of Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., a paid informant in the Eastview Klavern, concluded that Hoover also prevented the Justice Department from being informed about the breakthrough even though President Kennedy and later President Johnson had pressed for arrests in the bombing case...

Hoover's decision not to allow prosecutors access to that information stalled the F.B.I. investigation for good. Twelve years would pass before Chambliss's indictment, and the push for that indictment, would come from Alabama authorities who had to overcome F.B.I. resistance to secure it. Under Hoover, the bureau not only shelved its investigation, but it offered a cruelly inaccurate excuse to the children's parents. They said they were told the Government knew who committed the crime, but lacked witnesses who would testify in court. Hoover, however, had been assured that two of the three eyewitnesses, including Dale Tarrant, were probably willing to testify. He was also informed that another witness was willing to testify that he had heard Tommy Blanton affirm that he and Bobby Cherry were involved in the bombing.

What was equally hateful, were the actions taken by an Alabama official, Albert Lingo.

Col. Albert J. Lingo, a George Wallace appointee who directed the Alabama Department of Public Safety, had derailed the state investigation in September 1963. Lingo, who got his job after piloting Wallace's plane in Wallace's first successful gubernatorial campaign in 1962, had initially been obsessed with pinning the 16th Street bombing on the Black Muslims, according to investigators who worked for him.

4 Little Girls, 1997 documentary. Spike Lee

Though many film-goers are familiar with Spike Lee's work, if you have never seen this documentary, I would strongly suggest that you do so.

Reviewer Syd Slobodnik, calls it a "Hidden Gem."

Lee begins his film with haunting images of the past and a vocal accompaniment of Joan Baez’s melancholy song “Birmingham Sunday”. Throughout the film he proceeds by interviewing, some 33 years later, many of the four girls relatives and local religious leaders about the events leading up to the Sunday bombing and the enduring pain of those who lost their loved ones on that mid-September day. Civil Rights leaders Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Reverend Jesse Jackson, television newsman Walter Cronkite, actors Ozzie Davis, Bill Cosby, then Governor George Wallace, and others tell their personal perspectives of the horrible times in the south, when lives were threatened by people of hate.

Lee mocks the words of several city officials who called the industrialized city of Birmingham “a great place to raise a family” by showing the Klan rallies of the early 1960s. Another official referred to a predominately African American section of the city that was dubbed ‘dynamite hill”, where racist Southerners frequently tossed bombs. Birmingham was a town where 1/3 of the police force were either Klansmen or Klan affiliated. Former police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Conner was called the “dark spirit of Birmingham” because of his deep racist hatred and treatment of African Americans in the early 1960s that allowed this terrorist behavior to continue without protecting the rights of innocent people of color. Lee shows file footage of newly elected Alabama Governor Wallace’s famous inauguration speech where he proclaims “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.

All this sets the tone and atmosphere for how on September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed during Sunday school. Lee interviews various religious leaders who said this sad event was a motivator for change. Dr. King followed up his funeral services for the girls with social action. One minister notes how these events lead to the famous Selma Right to Vote Movement. And while it took nearly 14 years before the FBI and local officials charged, tried, and convicted Robert Chambliss for planting the bomb which killed the four young girls, former CBS news anchor called this tragedy “an awakening” that American now understood the horrible injustice that occurred. Lee ends his film by warning that 22 churches in the South have been burned or bombed since 1994. In the film’s final heart wrenching interview Lee asks Alpha Robertson, mother of Carol, how she has dealt with the anger. Robertson reveals “the anger still comes out”, but, “I work hard not to feel anger and hatred”. This outstanding film received an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature film in 1997

On WNYW's morning news show, Bobby Rivers interviewed filmmaker Spike Lee for the release of his first documentary, "4 Little Girls."

Over the years there have been many memorials written or sung about that day.

Langston Hughes wrote:

Four little girls
Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back home at all--
     But left instead
     Their blood upon the wall
     With spattered flesh
     And bloodied Sunday dresses
     Scorched by dynamite that
     China made eons ago
     Did not know what China made
     Before China was ever Red at all
     Would ever redden with their blood
     This Birmingham-on-Sunday wall.
Four tiny little girls
Who left their blood upon that wall,
In little graves today await:
     The dynamite that might ignite
     The ancient fuse of Dragon Kings
     Whose tomorrow sings a hymn
     The missionaries never taught
     In Christian Sunday School
     To implement the Golden Rule.
Four little girls
Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
     As yet unfelt among
     Magnolia trees.

Joan Baez sang:

Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right back with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.

Written by Richard Fariña.

This year, a Congressional Gold Medal was posthumously awarded to the girls who lost their lives that Sunday.

President Barack Obama signs a bill designating the Congressional Gold Medal to commemorate the lives of the four young girls who were killed in Birmingham, Alabama at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, in the Oval Office, May 24, 2013

On May 24, President Obama met with family members of the four girls that were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
The family members stood by President Obama as he signed a bill that posthumously designated the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, who also lost their lives 50 years ago, in the bombing on September 15, 1963.

They were joined by Reverend Arthur Price, Jr., Pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and Gordon Douglas Jones, Former U.S. Attorney, who led the team of prosecutors and investigators in the re-opened case against the perpetrators, as well as bill sponsor Representative Terri Sewell, Attorney General Eric Holder and Dr. Regina Benjamin, U.S. Surgeon General.

On this Sunday, let us remember those lives that were lost, and let us also be clear that racial hate crimes continue into the present.  

The battle against hate is far from won.