Birmingham 1963
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
Aftermath
The bombing of the 16th Street Alabama
In the aftermath of
the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the
bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the
protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were
arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before
the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).
Negroes stoned cars in
other sections of Birmingham
At least 20 persons
were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut
and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.
…
City Police Inspector
W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say
they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he
said (Six Dead 2-3).
Two Negro youths were
killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street
City police shot a
16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to
death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him
stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning
cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).
Virgil Ware, aged 13,
was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15
miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the
gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was
sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley
had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the
church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice,
reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of
second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and
imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).
Civil rights activists
blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama Alabama
Upon learning of the
bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to
Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating
bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street
King also sent a
telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO
PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the
federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS
EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).
President Kennedy,
yachting off Newport , R.I. ,
was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered
his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham Washington
Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can
only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to
a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it
is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress
before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).
A witness identified
Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb
under the steps of the Sixteenth
Street Baptist
Church 16th
Street
Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto
mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait
until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th
Street 6).
On 8th October, 1963,
Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and
a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street
In a 1965 memo to J.
Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing -
Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four
men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the
Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was
considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for
the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham
The investigation
ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had
identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical
evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not
admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The
chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although
Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the
1960s for the bombing of the church.
In 1971, Alabama
Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the
FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street
Baxley had received
death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand
Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on
official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February
19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown
4).
Investigators
discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers,
under orders from Hoover Alabama 16th Street
What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of
the slain? Several have bared the souls
to the media.
Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court
proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all
of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back
home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips
haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham ,
never wanted to live in Birmingham
Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t
have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go
find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing
with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”
Cross says she
forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School
lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was
centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies.
“I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of
the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who
don’t know any better.”
They went back to
school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they
were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that
he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works
with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it
wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that
she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that
day. (Waxman 5-6).
Sarah and Janie
Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah
and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34
years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had
happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it
was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended
up checking into Brookwood (Medical
Center
Janie, like Sarah, now
works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no
notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell
off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no
grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true
of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member
of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.
"She is
queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing
that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for
so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge
from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."
(she now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).
She worked as a
short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city
worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she
married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful
prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's
family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to
find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet
called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness
and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the
night finally subsided."
What most concerns
Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so
close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners
below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but
Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says
Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama
Carolyn McKinstry:
When I went home that Sunday, I remember
one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them
was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that
the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they
were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at
10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No
one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one
said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t
talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are
you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because
there was nothing we could do about it.
The first thing that
stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my
friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No
one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no
one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they
didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say
they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham Birmingham
It [the bombing] gave
us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can
go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how
people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later
and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the
rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends.
That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the
name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two
men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.
It softened the heart
of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was
always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve
as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham ,
Alabama
Sources cited:
“16th Street
Baptist Church
“1963 Birmingham
Church
“Birmingham
Church
Brown, Deneen
L. “Doug Jones
triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The
Wasnington Post. December 12,
2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/09/an-alabama-senate-race-conjures-the-awful-1963-church-bombing-that-killed-4-black-girls/?utm_term=.3cdc1377862a
Joiner, Lottie L. “50
Years Later: The Sixteenth
Street Baptist
Church
Longman, Martin. “Remember
the 16th Street Washington
“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United
Press International. September 16,
1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm
“The
16th Street Baptist Church
Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street
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