While the World Watched (14 page)

Chapter 14

Servant, Heal Thyself

* * *

I have seen us come so far, but we have so much farther to go.

Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth,
at his eightieth birthday celebration with Civil Rights leaders, 2002
[55]

Life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

Martin Luther King Jr.,
funeral service for Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesle
y
[56]

In the days that followed September 15, 1963, sadness consumed me. The smile left my face. Joy faded from my heart. I felt depressed all the time, plagued by a general hopelessness. Even though it seemed a logical conclusion, I never connected my newfound sadness and depression with my friends’ violent deaths. At the time, I had no knowledge of the grief process, clinical depression, or survivor’s guilt syndrome. Those were not the days of trauma teams and school grief counseling—especially not for black people.

The dark cloud tormented me day and night. I had trouble sleeping, yet that is all I wanted to do. When I did fall asleep at night, it hurt to wake up in the mornings. The excitement I had once felt about school and learning simply went away. Deep down I was afraid for my safety—terrified of getting my head blown off, like Cynthia had, in a Klan explosion.

With the passage of time, as well as a somewhat closed-off memory, I managed to live a perfunctory life. I have little recollection of the days that followed September 15, 1963. I guess everyone settled into the regular tasks of autumn. Children went to their schools. Adults went to their jobs. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church underwent renovations, and most of our members met weekly for worship at the nearby L. R. Hall Auditorium. Some people felt too afraid to come back and left our congregation for good. Either they stopped going to church altogether or they joined other churches in the city. Church records placed membership numbers over eight hundred before the bombing; after the bombing, that number shrank by 50 percent.

Tension and fear continued to stalk our city. We knew the rules had changed. Our neighborhoods had been bombed before, but no one had ever been killed. Until now. The message gnawed away at the corners of our hearts: “You can kill black people. It’s okay, because even if someone is arrested, no one goes to jail for it.” Black life was cheap.

Ten days after the church bombing, on September 25 at 2:31 a.m., another bomb exploded in a nearby black neighborhood. The blast brought a number of police officers to the area to search for the bomb site. Fortunately, they failed to find it. Thirteen minutes after the first bomb exploded, another bomb went off at the same spot. A shrapnel bomb, they called it—several sticks of dynamite in a rusty five-gallon paint can crammed full of nails, bolts, and sharp pieces of metal.

Birmingham residents had once believed Klan bombs were meant only to intimidate people, not kill people. The shrapnel bomb changed all that.
[57]

I noticed with fresh awareness the real powerlessness of the black community. Some people became unusually quiet and accommodating, not daring to rock the boat. Others became the opposite—outspoken and militant against the inhumane treatment of the city’s (and nation’s) black citizens.

That autumn and winter, I just wanted to be alone. I often found a lonely corner in my house, sat down, and wrapped my arms tightly around my body. Then, in an effort to bring myself some comfort, I rocked back and forth, hugging myself, trying to make the deep pain go away.

I don’t remember having a preoccupation with death and dying before the bombing. I’d always been a carefree kid—I loved to skate and play marbles. Very few girls I knew played marbles, let alone had a special marble collection like I did. But after the church bombing, nothing seemed the same anymore, including the way I viewed myself, others, and the world.

But hope wasn’t completely lost. The black people in Birmingham still had two “saviors” who continued to share our dreams for a more promising future: President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our hope was kept alive through their championing efforts. As a community, we placed our trust in their ability to somehow keep Klan bombs from killing our loved ones and destroying our homes and churches.

Back in 1960, I had felt a surge of hope when John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. I watched him on TV as he addressed the nation and Jackie Kennedy as she gave a White House tour. I laughed when I saw little Caroline run on the beach in a tiny swimsuit and when John John paraded around his father’s Oval Office in his sailor suit. I just wished Mama Lessie had lived to see these things.

I was filled with eager anticipation when a pregnant Jackie left for the hospital to deliver her third child. And I remember crying when, on August 10, 1963, three-day-old Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died. I watched the Kennedys grieve over their dead child just as anybody else would.

Even though the Kennedys reigned like a king and queen in our country, I saw something in them that appeared normal and everyday. They seemed like a down-to-earth family who, in spite of wealth and fame, really cared about people. They weren’t preoccupied, as part of our nation seemed to be, with race and skin color.

John F. Kennedy gave me tremendous hope for a different future for black people in Alabama. I remember something my father said after hearing Kennedy’s speech on TV following the children’s march: “I think he [Kennedy] is a good man.” We saw that our president wanted to do the right thing for black people, and it gave us faith. Sometimes people don’t know what justice and freedom look like. It took the president’s going on national television to give people a vision for a better future.

I greatly admired the president when he gave his televised Civil Rights speech on the night of June 11, 1963, and aligned himself solidly with the Civil Rights movement. Even then I knew it was a courageous—and dangerous—thing for him to do.

* * *

On November 22, 1963, a few days before Thanksgiving, my high school math teacher, a short man named Mr. Ralph Joseph, walked into my classroom with his head lowered.

“It’s official,” he announced. “The president has been shot.”

I couldn’t believe my ears!
John F. Kennedy? Shot?

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Speech

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

Let us be dissatisfied, and men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.
[58]

Later that day, we received confirmation of the sad news: he was dead.

I was deeply saddened by my president’s death. But I guess I wasn’t completely surprised. It seemed that whenever someone understood our plight, took a public stand, and made a promise to help us, he signed his death warrant. It had happened to Medgar Evers the past summer, and the list of Civil Rights martyrs was growing. There were some people who would do whatever it took to silence the voices that spoke out against injustice, even if it meant killing people.

I knew my history, and it scared me. But it didn’t shock me anymore. In my teenage mind, I was starting to see that it had become the “American way” to kill those who rejected the status quo. For all the fine speeches about equality, the actions of a powerful few spoke much louder.

It came to light later that President Kennedy wasn’t surprised by the threat of assassination, either. As the day to fly to Dallas approached, he kept repeating to George Smathers, “God, I hate to go out to Texas. I just hate to go. I have a terrible feeling about going. I wish I could get out of it.”
[59]
But even as he was advised not to make the trip, Kennedy also remarked to his friend Larry Newman, “If this is the way life is, if this is the way it’s going to end, this is the way it’s going to end.”
[60]

John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas proved yet another heavy, heartbreaking tragedy in my young life. Another dashed hope.

Dr. King later said Kennedy’s death was caused “by a morally inclement climate” that arose from “our constant attempt to cure the cancer of racial injustice with the gasoline of graduation; our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim.”
[61]

Those proved terrible, frightening months for our entire country. The United States had just undergone the failed Cuban Bay of Pigs drama, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Questions about Kennedy’s death abounded:
Did the Communists kill Kennedy?
Did assassin Harvey Lee Oswald act alone? Was JFK’s killing the work of a conspiracy? Was the Mafia involved?
Chaos continued to rule in our country when, two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as police led him through the basement of the Dallas jail.

* * *

The president’s murder gave my teachers and parents and pastor the perfect opportunity to talk with us children about death and dying, about bombings and hatred. We needed to talk. We needed someone to help clear the air and bring some understanding to the turmoil happening all around us.

But no one talked. Black folk had been conditioned to look the other way when tragedy struck, especially if the victim was one of their own. Whenever my parents talked about bombings or death or sex or politics, they routinely, without fail, asked us children to leave the room.

Mr. Ralph Joseph, my math teacher, explained to my class how presidential succession took place and told us Lyndon Johnson had become our new president. But he left us on our own to wonder
why
Kennedy was murdered—and on our own to try to find solace in his sudden death.

I don’t remember Thanksgiving Day in 1963. I don’t remember Christmas that year either. I guess we put up a tree in our living room and decorated it, as we always did. Maybe we had Christmas dinner around our family table. I just can’t recall. My heart and mind were numb, and if we celebrated, it was all I could do to go through the motions.

When Mama Lessie was alive, my family would hop in the car on Christmas mornings and drive one hour south to Clanton, where we would celebrate the holidays with my grandparents. They would put a live tree in their front room, and all of us kids would decorate it with paper chains and stars that we’d made at school the week before. My grandmother always cooked turkey and dressing for Christmas dinner. For dessert she made an apple or peach cobbler and sometimes pound cake. We would gather chairs from all over the house and sit around the big dining room table to eat. During the day, Granddaddy would slip out of the house to take money or food to needy people in his church or to check on a sick member.

One Christmas my grandparents bought my brothers a Lionel train set. Mama told us it cost a whole fifty dollars—a lot of money in those days. Granddaddy had helped the boys put it together and play with it. Mama Lessie told me that Granddaddy had always wanted to buy that Lionel train set, but as the father of five daughters, he never got the chance. Now he had grandsons! Christmas had always brought good memories into my childhood—a bright light shining through the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The year of the bombing, Mama Lessie was no longer around, so I know we didn’t go to Clanton. It’s possible Granddaddy drove up to our home on Christmas Day, but I honestly don’t remember. Those carefree Christmases of my childhood seemed like a lifetime ago.

In the years since, I’ve wondered about that Christmas of 1963 for the families of my four slain friends. The holidays are a time for families to get together, open gifts, and eat food that has been lovingly prepared. Did Denise’s family eat Christmas dinner staring at an empty chair at the table? Did Addie’s family set up and decorate a Christmas tree? Did Carole’s family pay off the dead girl’s Christmas gifts in department store layaways? Or did they just decide to leave the gifts there—half-paid and forever unclaimed? And what about the emptiness felt by Cynthia’s parents? Both Denise and Cynthia were only children. How in the world did their families survive the holidays without them?