While the World Watched (7 page)

Lord, can we really bear this cross?

It was one thing to turn our heads when a building had been smashed. But now four girls had died.

This event proved a pivotal point in my life and in my church, and in the nation as well.

On the day after the church bombing, a young, white Birmingham attorney, Charles Morgan Jr., publicly blamed the pillars of the city for the girls’ deaths. “Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” Mr. Morgan said.

He blamed politicians who catered to racist votes, newspaper editors who fueled the racial tension, and church and business leaders who refused to take responsibility for the pervasive racial hatred in the city. “We all did it,” he said. “Every one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and for the one last month, last year, a decade ago. We all did it.”

Then he added, “Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.”

The speech destroyed his budding law practice, led to death threats against his family, and got him run out of town.
[11]

* * *

Scripture tells us that life is but a vapor (see James 4:14,
NKJV
). The morning of the bombing my friends and I had looked forward to a Sunday afternoon Cavalettes club meeting. Just that morning I had spoken with them face-to-face. But now they were gone. With a sudden explosion, like an invisible breath or vapor, four young girls simply vanished. I was overwhelmed with disbelief. This feeling would last a long time. I tried hard to process what happened at church on my own, attempting to put everything together, to make sense of it all. But it would get worse for me before it got better.

Chapter 6

Four Little Coffins

* * *

The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And so this afternoon in a real sense [the four girls who died] have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
funeral service for Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesle
y
[12]

The murdered girls’ families began making funeral preparations for their young daughters first thing that Monday morning. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church gave each dead girl’s family some funds to bury their daughter.

Carole’s family held her funeral on Tuesday, September 17, 1963, at St. John AME Church, separate from the service for the other girls. By the time Carole’s mother found out about the joint service, she had already made the funeral arrangements for Carole. She also felt this was personal—she had lost her daughter, and she wanted to grieve in a less public way.

The next day, Wednesday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy for Addie, Denise, and Cynthia at a joint funeral. The service was held at nearby Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, since our church was closed for repairs. More than eight thousand mourners, including eight hundred clergy of both races, attended the service. The old church seated only about a thousand people, so most of the crowd stood outside, facing the front door. No city officials, however, braved the crowds to come.

I didn’t attend the funerals either. I just couldn’t face the row of small coffins. It was sometime later that I heard Dr. King’s speech:

This afternoon, we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came. These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.
[13]

The media didn’t cover others whose lives were irrevocably altered that day. Sarah Collins, Addie’s sister who survived the restroom blast, ended up losing her right eye and retained just 30 percent of the vision in her left eye. After two months in the hospital, she came home with a glass eye inserted in her right eye socket. She called it her “drugstore eye.” Drugstore eyes (like cosmetics in those days) were made for white people, not black people. The glass eyes came in shades of green, blue, and light brown, not dark brown or black for African-Americans. Sarah’s family, with seven children, had little money to buy Sarah a custom-made eye.

Little Sarah made an incredible journey throughout life with mismatched eyes—one of the many challenges she would face in the years ahead. But none of her injuries compared with the wounds to her spirit. The only living witness to what happened in the restroom at 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, Sarah chose to live in silence and seclusion for many years.

Dr. King’s funeral message served as a sobering call for justice. But woven throughout was his trademark ray of hope:

And so my friends, they did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. The holy Scripture says, “A little child shall lead them.” The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience.
[14]

Dr. King was right, but that redemptive work wouldn’t start happening right away. In the time immediately after the church bombing, no one spoke of the tragedy or the girls who died. Not the afternoon of the bombing. Not that night. Not the next day or the next month or the next year. After the funerals, no one mentioned again the four dead girls—my friends. Not my parents, not my teachers, not my pastor, not my Sunday school teachers, not my church members, not my friends. No one. It was like the word
cancer
. No one wanted to say it out loud or acknowledge it. And with the restroom “death chamber” sealed off and walled up, offering no visible reminder of the bombing, it was almost as if it never happened.

Chapter 7

The Aftermath

* * *

The wanton, brutal crime [the church bombing] sickened Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and gave new impetus to the drive for civil-rights legislation. As nothing else had done—or perhaps could do—it epitomized the ugliness of racial conflict.

SATURDAY EVENING POST
(June 6, 1964)
[15]

I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. We must not become bitter, nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

Martin Luther King Jr.,
funeral service for Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesle
y
[16]

As a little girl, I remember hearing stories about my grandmother, Mama Lessie, sitting at the front window of her home holding a loaded Smith & Wesson. My preacher grandfather traveled a lot in those days. Mama Lessie had five little girls to protect, one of them my mother. During long dark nights, alone with her daughters, she watched at the window, her gun loaded and aimed, until her husband came home. Perhaps she, too, sang,

All along this Christian journey,

I want Jesus to walk with me.

I want Jesus to walk with me.

Mama Lessie told her five daughters never to open the door to a stranger, especially a white man. She cautioned them about their dealings with white people because she had seen firsthand some of the things white men had done to Clanton’s black folk. One day her daughter Dorothy, about seven years old at the time, went to answer a knock on their front door. She looked out the door’s small window, and without opening the door, she ran back to Mama Lessie.

“Mama!” she cried. “There’s some white man at the door!”

Mama Lessie walked to the door and looked out the window. Then she quickly opened the door and invited the man inside.

“Dorothy!” she said and then laughed. “That’s your uncle Johnny! He’s Daddy’s brother!”

Dorothy had never met Uncle Johnny before that day. His straight black hair and white skin scared her.

In later years, when Mama Lessie told me this story, I wondered,
If he was an uncle, why did Johnny have white skin?
Eventually I discovered that my maternal grandfather had a white daddy.

After my friends’ deaths, I better understood why Mama Lessie had guarded her young brood so carefully. I didn’t feel safe anymore. Violence, bombs, and death permeated our lives in those Civil Rights days in Birmingham.

I have never needed it, but I still have Mama Lessie’s old Smith & Wesson.

* * *

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing opened wide the eyes of the United States to racial injustice. Governor Wallace’s hard face and tightly knit brows, plastered on the front of
Time
magazine some twelve days later, covered the nation’s coffee tables and city newsstands.

When I saw the photograph, I wondered,
Is this the state of things to come?
I remember thinking that Governor Wallace would always be a permanent fixture holding black people back—a roadblock to the progress my people yearned to achieve. Wallace controlled where Alabama’s black people lived, where their children went to school, what public facilities they could and could not visit, and where—or if—they would receive hospital and medical care.
Just how much influence will this man have on our black population?
I wondered. The segregation here wasn’t merely established by cultural habits or choices. It was dictated by Alabama’s laws about interaction between whites and blacks. To disregard these laws often meant severe punishment.

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s Eulogy Speech after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing

May I . . . say a word to you, the members of the bereaved families? It is almost impossible to say anything that can console you at this difficult hour and remove the deep clouds of disappointment which are floating in your mental skies. But I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days. . . .

And so today, you do not walk alone. You gave to this world wonderful children. They didn’t live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives. Their lives were distressingly small in quantity, but glowingly large in quality. And no greater tribute can be paid to you as parents, and no greater epitaph can come to them as children, than where they died and what they were doing when they died. They did not die in the dives and dens of Birmingham, nor did they die discussing and listening to filthy jokes. They died between the sacred walls of the church of God, and they were discussing the eternal meaning of love. This stands out as a beautiful, beautiful thing for all generations. Shakespeare had Horatio to say some beautiful words as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet. And today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare: Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day. And may the flight of angels take thee to thy eternal rest. God bless you.
[17]
 

Since no whites in Alabama, or the rest of the South for that matter, spoke out about the injustices done to black Americans, I assumed that Wallace represented the thoughts and opinions of all white people. Earlier, I might have thought he reflected just white men, because from what I saw, the South’s white women didn’t appear as violent or as vocal as the men. White women didn’t wear Klan robes or aggressively protest integration like their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons did. Some white women even seemed compassionate and caring toward little black girls and their families. But in 1957, at age nine, I was stunned to see on television and in the newspapers the hate-filled faces of Arkansas’s white women—mostly mothers—angrily protesting the “Little Rock Nine.” They were adamant that these black students should be banned from the all-white Little Rock Central High School.

By the time I was a teenager, I felt I had no reason to trust a white person. I thought they were all like Governor Wallace.

After the church bombing, sickened by the tragedy that had sent shock waves across the world, President John F. Kennedy sent five hundred armed soldiers to stabilize the city of Birmingham and calm the racial chaos. An article written exclusively for the
Saturday Evening Post
after the bombing captured the president’s reaction this way: “President Kennedy, echoing the national temper, said he felt a ‘deep sense of outrage and grief.’”
[18]
The president also flooded our neighborhood with FBI agents from Washington. They visited black homes throughout Birmingham. They interviewed all the members who had attended church on that tragic Sunday morning, and they wrote down what each person said.

When two white FBI men came to my house, my mother and father sat close to me on the sofa. I answered the questions as best I could. The men asked if I had seen “anything suspicious” or “anything unusual” at church that morning before the bombing.

“No,” I told them.

They asked, “Can you tell us in your own words what happened?”

I told them everything I remembered. The men seemed disinterested in my answers. Their attitude was cold and matter-of-fact. I told them about the phone call I had received in the office that morning only seconds before the bomb exploded.

“Three minutes,” the man had said to me.

The investigators failed to write that down. I wished later I had asked to read the information they’d jotted on their pads of paper.

They also questioned my two brothers about the bombing.

I felt a certain sense of hope that day as I spoke with the FBI.
These men are going to go find the people responsible for killing my friends
, I thought. I knew capturing the criminals wouldn’t bring back my friends, but it certainly would get the murderers off our streets.

When these killers are caught and locked up
, I reasoned,
I won’t have to worry about them planting another bomb in my church. They can’t bomb the church and they can’t kill me if they’re in prison.

I felt like an adult when I spoke with the FBI. But I wasn’t. I was still a kid, and I was still afraid of dying.

The FBI promised the American people they would find the killers. They would conduct the biggest manhunt since the Dillinger case, they said.

But time passed, and no one in our community heard a word about the case. Whenever we called and asked about the progress being made to catch the bombers, we received the same answer: “The FBI is working on the case.”

Two men, Robert Chambliss and Charles Cage, had been arrested earlier and charged with illegal possession of dynamite. They were fined a mere one hundred dollars each and sentenced to 180 days in jail. The irony was that everyone—including the FBI—knew who the bombers were. When the FBI concluded their interviews, they sent a memorandum to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover stating the results of their investigation. They listed four Ku Klux Klansmen as suspects: Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton Jr.
[19]
Most people in the black community thought Hoover tried to block prosecution of the guilty Klansmen, but according to FBI reports, “his concern was to prevent leaks, not to stifle justice. . . . He couldn’t have blocked the prosecution and didn’t—he simply didn’t think the evidence was there to convict.”
[20]

Sometime in 1968, when I was in college, the FBI officially closed and sealed its investigation, charging no one for the murders. When I learned that the case had been closed and no one had been charged for the deaths of my four friends, I immediately thought about their parents.
What does it feel like to have a daughter violently killed and then, five years later, to have the tragedy practically swept under the rug as if it never happened? How could the white community ignore the cruel injustices and pain suffered by those families?

That year a reporter with
USA Today
interviewed me about the experience.

“I can describe everything that happened,” I told him, “but I cannot tell you the FBI caught the guilty men and brought them to justice. I cannot tell you that officials in Birmingham honored the four girls by naming buildings after them. It seems the girls were just forgotten. Maybe nobody thought my friends’ lives were worth bringing the murderers to justice.”

* * *

If this tragedy had happened today instead of in 1963, Monday morning would have, no doubt, been set aside as an official day of mourning in Birmingham. City officials would send out teams of crisis counselors to the Birmingham schools to talk with the students and help them cope with their confusion, anger, and grief. Parents would schedule appointments for their children with licensed psychologists and closely monitor them for the days, weeks, and months ahead.

But in 1963, in Birmingham’s black community, that didn’t happen. On Monday morning, September 16, my brothers and sister and I woke up, dressed in our rooms as always, and then met together in the kitchen to eat. Daddy made a hearty breakfast, like he did every morning. We ate in silence. We left on time for school and work as if nothing had happened the day before. It was as if my four friends were still alive and well and getting ready for school in their own homes.

I felt numb.
What am I supposed to do now?
Do churches get bombed and children get killed, and then we all go on living life as usual? Is this just another day in the lives of black people in Birmingham?

Days passed, and then weeks, and we simply walked through our same routines—predictable schedules disturbed only briefly that Sunday morning.

No one asked me, “Carolyn, are you okay?” “Carolyn, do you miss your friends?” “Carolyn, are you afraid?” “Do you want to talk about what happened at church?”

Nothing was said—not at home and not at school.

* * *

Shortly after the bombing, Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, an African-American pastor in Birmingham, typed out a page-long, single-spaced letter to his fellow members of the Inter-Citizens Committee. The day before, he had telegrammed President Kennedy and listed twenty different, racially motivated, unpunished actions taken by white men against black people in Birmingham. He included the bombings of black homes and businesses, teargassings, shootings, physical violence—all committed against black people between the months of March and September 1963.

Oliver wrote, “The savage, brutal, murderous, and ungodly bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, Sept. 14 [sic], has revealed to the whole world the evil of racism. Those few terrifying moments of the blast said what we have been trying to say to the nation for years, that there exists in Alabama the most unconscionable disregard for man and God on the part of some.” Oliver continued, “If white supremacy consists in the wanton and brutal destruction of worshippers of God in the very house of worship, then I must confess that the church bombers are the most supreme murderers and cowards the world has ever seen. Only the diseased mind can aspire to reach such depths.”