Hard history = necessary history
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carole Robertson
Cynthia Wesley
We say their names on this holy September 15. All could easily still be alive. The oldest would not yet be 80. But they have been gone, gallingly, for 63 years today, dynamited to death at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. They were just 11-14 years old back then, the whole big, imperfect, heartbreaking, and glorious world sitting in front of them. Who knows what they could have been?
I read the account of the bombing in The New York Times by the intrepid and compassionate reporter John Herbers. He somehow convinced all of the grieving parents to talk with him the very next day, and the portraits are just wrenching. He spoke, for instance, to Claude Wesley, a school principal and husband of a second grade teacher. Wesley had dropped Cynthia off at church that morning. Moments later, he was at a gas station filling up when he heard the menacing blast. He returned to a seen of chaos, and then made it over to the hospital for a grim identification: He knew it was Cynthia, he told Herbers, because of her “little class ring” and her “black patent leather shoes and white socks.”
The mind just recoils at such pain.
The bombing of the Birmingham church was not just tragic because of the loss of life and the attack on a sacred space. It was also an attack, just as menacingly, on hope. Just 18 days prior, Martin Luther King, Jr., had stood at the Lincoln Memorial holding the nation rapt with his vision for a multiracial democracy. This church bombing was a stark reminder that the dark forces were not going away.
The bombing also galvanized other acts of hatred. It was just three nights later, right after King had eulogized the victims, that the Ku Klux Klan rallied in the nation’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. During that terrifying evening, the traveling Klan “minister”—unbelievably named Connie Lynch—spoke in the most venomous terms of what had transpired in Birmingham. He disputed the innocence of the victims, who, he asserted, were “old enough to have venereal diseases” and said he’d be surprised if “all of ’em didn’t have one or more.” Further, he said, they shouldn’t be thought of as children at all: “Children are little people, little human beings, and that means white people.”
Hateful words came ever so close to cataclysmic consequences that night, something I recount in detail in Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida. It’s out a month from today from Cambridge University Press. Learn more at www.civilwriter.com.
These are dark moments of our nation’s past, no doubt. There is a big school of thought in parts of the country and parts of our politics that we should just let them fade away. Bury the hard history. Rewrite it. Don’t make certain people feel “uncomfortable.” (As Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”)
I think we need to fight hard against that sensibility. The people I admire most are those who look unflinchingly in the mirror and make concerted efforts to become better. That is true of the cities I must admire, and the schools as well. Also, the countries.
It makes us stronger, not weaker; better, not worse. That aspiration is right there in the preamble of our mighty Constitution: “We the people of the United States, in order to build a more perfect Union.”
There is a difference between becoming “great again” and becoming “more perfect.”
Taking a school trip down to Alabama a few years ago was one of the most gratifying experiences of my career. We went to Birmingham and visited the 16th Street Baptist Church. In Selma, we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where John Lewis had been clubbed over the head in his push for voting rights in 1965. We had a mesmerizing visit to the Legacy Museum, the brainchild of the brilliant Bryan Stephenson.
It was hard history, but it was a beautiful and inspiring trip—one that I would recommend for every single American.
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