Yesterday, I watched a documentary on terrorism, one in which the terrorists bombed innocent civilians, yet escaped justice because they were supported either by the fanatical hatred of much of the local populace, or enabled by many who deplored the violence but were too afraid to speak out against them and the political power they wielded. You see the terrorists controlled every aspect of life. There was no law that would prosecute them, and they were shielded by the very government that was supposed to be fighting to protect the public from their criminal activities.
Based on this description, you might imagine that I watched a documentary about Pakistan, where the terrorists that attacked America on 9/11 lead a protected, sheltered life, essentially free from all control by the central government, and protected by local tribal leaders who agree with the extremist goals and prejudices of Osama Bin Ladin and his Taliban allies. But you would be wrong. The terrorists of whom I speak lived right here in America, and their reign of terror lasted for nearly 20 years. Indeed, some would say it has never really gone away, merely gone into hiding, gone underground where it continues to poison the relations between white and black Americans.
Who were these terrorists and where did they live? They were members of the Klu Klux Klan, and they controlled the city of Birmingham, Alabama through their use of dynamite, and through their ability to infiltrate and corrupt of all levels of official authority, from the police department, the fire department to the local city government. Terrorists who operated without impunity to defy the mandate of the Federal government and Federal court orders to desegregate:
From the period of 1948 up to 1957, there were 48 unsolved racial bombings in Birmingham alone. An old industrial city of 350,000 people, Birmingham was the largest and most volatile city in Alabama. Its black population was severely segregated in every way, economically, socially and especially in the labor market where they were confined to menial, low-paying jobs. Under Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, an admitted supporter of segregation, the bombings had virtually no chance of being solved. Klansmen sometimes rode along with city police on patrol. Even the police officers who were not members were afraid to react lest they become the next target of the fanatical Klan. [
During only one month in 1957, four black churches were bombed in Birmingham as well as at least seven private residences. Most of these attacks took place in the Fountain Heights section, where black families were moving into a predominately white neighborhood. These bombings were so commonplace that the neighborhood became known as “Dynamite Hill.” Even the city’s newspapers used the term in print. Klan terrorism reached epidemic proportions. Violence seemed to be everywhere. On Labor Day in 1957, four Klansmen abducted and tortured a black handyman. They were arrested and received long prison terms. When George Wallace later became governor, he pardoned all four men without explanation. Such was justice in Alabama.
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Yet despite these ruthless, deadly attacks on the African American community, the federal government did little to oppose the Birmingham power structure which legitimated and enabled Klan activities meant to terrorize African Americans. Neither the Eisenhower administration, nor the Kennedy administration were inclined to spend their political capital taking on the Klan in Alabama. Many black citizens, fearful for their own lives, and fearful of losing their jobs or homes, were too intimidated to protest. In 1963, Martin Luther King brought his campaign for civil rights to Birmingham but found too few adults willing to risk their livelihoods to demonstrate in the streets with him. His protests were failing. The national media was not covering the story.
Indeed, it was not until he and his team of activists enlisted the black school children of Birmingham that his campaign began to garner significant national and international attention when the Birmingham police savagely set dogs and fired water cannons at the teenagers, and some younger than teenagers who were leading the fight for social justice in the heart of Alabama’s most heavily populated and racially segregated city. Hundreds were arrested, yet still they came, and it was their courage in the face of unwarranted police brutality and the lawlessness of the local authorities which garnered the headlines that shamed America.
Dr. King realized “If our drive was to be successful, we must involve the students of the community. Even though we realized that involving teenagers and high school students would bring down upon us a heavy fire of criticism, we felt that we needed this dramatic new dimension. Our people were demonstrating daily and going to jail in numbers, but we were still beating our heads against the brick wall of the city officials’ stubborn resolve to maintain the status quo. Our fight, if won, would benefit people of all ages. But most of all we were inspired with the desire to give to our young a true sense of their own stake in freedom and justice. We believed they would have the courage to respond to our call.
Students from local colleges and high schools flocked to the call. Classes were conducted to train the students in nonviolence and discipline during the protest. On May 2nd, 1963, over a thousand students rose en masse and descended upon downtown Birmingham to protest. Leaving local schools on cue they joined to march from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which served as the center of the protest, to downtown Birmingham. Nearly three-fourths of them were arrested and placed in jail. But the jail was soon filled up with students. The next day over two thousand students marched in protest.
Up until the children marched, the nonviolent protests had been met by Birmingham police with routine arrests and imprisonment. The protesters were trained not to fight or resist arrest. But with the jails full, and facing thousands of more protest marchers, “Bull” Connor decided violence was necessary. Fire hoses that spewed streams of water hundreds of feet were turned on the students. Police dogs were brought out to attack the marchers. Police used clubs to try and stop the marchers.
King began to win concessions from more moderate elements among the local merchants and businessmen. His campaign of non-violence, and his decision to recruit children was paying dividends. However, the Klan did not stand idly by. Afraid of losing their stranglehold on power, they continued a behind the scenes campaign of terror in support of the official actions of their allies among the city’s local authorities. The bombings of black neighborhoods continued as did attempts on the lives of Dr. King and his associates.
Dr. King was able to win concessions from local businesses to take down the “whites only” signs and begin hiring blacks for more meaningful jobs. But Chief “Bull” Connor called King a liar and a self-promoter. That same night, bombs exploded at a local hotel and in the home of King’s brother. A riot broke out in the black community as several thousand blacks took to the streets. President Kennedy sent federal troops to Alabama as a warning and the violence soon stopped.
More bombings followed. In August, several bombs exploded on “Dynamite Hill.” No one was killed, but again, fighting quickly erupted. A black man was shot and killed by the Birmingham Police and dozens of others were injured or arrested. Cops were pelted with bricks and bottles. Stores were looted while young people, both black and white, roamed the streets, eager to vent their anger and frustration on the first victim that crossed their path. “Most of us felt we were caught in a war zone,” wrote Elizabeth H. Cobbs in her book, Long Time Coming. “We could feel the battle bearing down upon us.” This wave of lawlessness persisted throughout the summer of 1963. And at the core of this chaos was the mysterious Klan, unseen, unknowable, seemingly limitless in power and able to strike at anytime, at any place.
Yet, for some even that wasn’t enough. So on September 15, 1963, a cadre of four Klan members, known as the “Cahaba Boys” and led by the infamous Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, faced with the looming desegregation of Birmingham’s public schools, decided to teach the leaders of the African American community a bitter lesson, by bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church, the church that had been the unofficial headquarters of King’s campaign in Birmingham. The ringleader “Dynamite Bob” himself gave his niece, Elisabeth Cobbs this chilling statement the day before the bombing.
Chambliss had said before the bombing, “Just wait until after Sunday morning and they’ll beg us to let them segregate!”
On Sunday morning, four young girls, ages 12 and 14, were attending Sunday school at the 16th Street Babptist church. Their names were Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carol Robertson. At 10:22 AM that Sunday the bomb which had been created and planted by Robert Chambliss with the assistance of three of his fellow Klan’s men, exploded. What happened next was both a tragedy and an act of terrorism for which none of the terrorists would be tried in a court of law for another 14 years.
A massive explosion shook the church to its foundation. The noise was deafening. The entire Sixteenth Street wall of the building collapsed into the room amid screams of terror. Broken glass flew through the air like bullets. Rocks and chunks of mortar crashed into the ceiling and into opposite ends of the basement. Those that survived said the incredible force of the explosion propelled the little girls through the air like rag dolls. “It sounded like the whole world was shaking,” said Reverend Cross later in court. “And the building, I thought, was going to collapse!” All the stained glass windows in the upper part of the church were shattered. The basement room filled with fine dust and all the lights went out. But one windowpane, which later became symbolic of the explosion, had remained mostly intact. Only the face of Jesus had been blown away. […]
Within minutes, the first of the dead girls was pulled from the rubble of the basement. It was Denise McNair. In succession, the bodies of the other victims were removed. Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson were dead, their Sunday dresses shredded into bloody rags, their bodies horribly mangled. “They were all found almost within the same location,” Reverend Cross said later, “as if they had been thrown on top of each other.” A fifth girl, Sarah Collins, who was Addie Mae’s older sister, was dug out from under large slabs of concrete and stone. “I didn’t know what happened,” she later told police, “I was calling for Addie because I thought she and the others had run out of there!” Sarah had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face. Though badly injured, she survived. […]
The four girls at the Baptist Church weren’t the only ones to die that Sunday in Birmingham. James Robinson, a black 16-year-old, became involved in a rock-throwing incident with a gang of white teenagers. As he fled from the scene, Robinson ran down an alley near the Sixteenth St. Church and was promptly shot in the back and killed by a white City of Birmingham police officer.
A few hours later, on the outskirts of the city, 13-year-old Virgil Ware, black, was riding on the handlebars of a bicycle with his older brother. From the opposite direction, a red moped, decorated with the Confederate flag, quickly approached the two boys. Without warning, the operator of the motor bike, a white 16-year-old, pulled out a gun and shot Virgil twice in the chest, killing him instantly. The moped sped off (the shooter, who was later convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter, received a seven-month jail sentence).
I can’t imagine the horror, the shock and the grief experienced by the family and friends of these four young women, caught at that moment in their lives when the transition from child to adult had kust barely begun. I have suffered violence in my life, but it was personal, directed at me, not my family, not my children. And I can’t begin to fathom the mind of the individuals who bombed that church, and who were widely suspected of being the cause of numerous other unsolved terrorist bombings. They are human beings, I suppose, but human beings whose twisted hate and desire for vengeance against the black people of Birmingham had no reason, no cause, other than sheer unadulterated hatred. They were not wealthy men, not anyone with a stake in keeping the black people in Alabama ostracized and stigmatized and brutalized other than that deep seated anger and hatred and prejudice that they had received from their own parents and grandparents. Indeed, it was rife in the the white culture around them which placed no value on the lives of black men and women and they took it all in, infusing its rancid mixture of bile and bigotry into the darkest parts of their souls.
The bombing shocked the nation as nothing before had done. Not the assassination of Medgar Evans earlier that year, not the public lynching of African Americans throughout the 20th century, not the many televised and printed images of violence carried out at the order of Bull Conner, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety. In many respects it may have been the tipping point that eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Certainly it was a crystallizing moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement and of our country. While African Americans had been dying at the hands white supremacists for years, including far more heinous events than the 16ht Stree Baptist Church bombing (if one measure the evil of the deed by the number of the dead, as e.g., the hundreds who died in the infamous and largely forgotten Tulsa massacre of 1921), the deaths of these four beautiful children had a deeper impact on the conscience of America’s white society, both South and North. In that respect it was the galvanizing event that helped finally eradicate the so-called “Jim Crow” laws which mandated segregation and the kept African Americans politically and socially powerless.
Yet in many respects, it also represents a symbol of how far we still have to go, and how little progress has been made since those heady years of the 60’s when a true emancipation of African Americans seemed not just a dream, a something that could be realized in the lifetimes of its participants. For as a country, though we may have abandoned de jure segregation and discrimination, it has been repalced by a more insidious, harder to eradicate de facto discrimination still fueled by the prejudice, bigotry, fear and hatred of so many Americans. Look at the skyrocketing prison population of young black men, the evidence of disparities in heath care services and educational opportunity between blacks and whites, the increase in poverty among African Americans that has occurred even as other black men and women have raised themselves into the middle class, and have assumed positions of prestige and political power in many parts of the country.
In fact, as a nation of the people and for the people, we are actually regressing. Schools have become re-segregated as white flight to the suburbs and the enrollment of white students in private schools has led to many inner city public school systems essentially becoming a ghetto of failed dreams and diminished ambitions for the black students left behind in their crumbling school buildings and underfunded school budgets. Fewer and fewer African Americans are going to college, and the drop out rate for blacks (as does the unemployment rate and the life expectancy) far exceeds that of the dominant group, white Americans.
But aside from these general, macroscopic failures to carry through on the debt owed to the victims of the Birmingham bombing, the story of the four little black girls is also a personal story of justice delayed, and justice denied. Indeed, though the FBI agents sent by President Kennedy to investigate the case (one everyone knew the local authorities would sweep under the rug) soon ascertained who the bombers were, their investigation stalled, and the Justice Department did little to push for prosecution of the bombers for their acts of terror:
The FBI sent dozens of agents to Birmingham. This was in addition to the staffing that was already present to investigate the previous series of bombings. The FBI followed up hundreds of leads that poured into local law enforcement offices. The Alabama State Police and the Birmingham City police joined forces in an all-out effort to identify and apprehend the killers of the four girls. {…]
On September 30, three Birmingham men were arrested on charges of possessing dynamite. The suspects were identified as Charles Cagle, John Wesley Hall and Robert Chambliss, the same man who was observed near the church on the night of the explosion. Although they were not charged with the Sixteenth Street murders, investigators believed they were involved in the bombing. […]
The outcome of the charges against the three men confirmed that belief. They were fined $1,000 and given six-month jail sentences, which were suspended. In the meantime, the Klan, never squeamish when it came to spreading its twisted vision of America, refused to remain silent. “It’s four less niggers tonight!” shouted the leader of a hate rally in Florida, “Good for whoever planted the bomb! We’re all better off!” […]
Through hundreds of interviews, the FBI concluded that four individuals were responsible for the Sixteenth Street Church bombing. These men were Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas Blanton Jr., all members of the Eastview 13 Klavern. It was later discovered that Chambliss himself had bought a case of dynamite from a store in Daisy City, Alabama, on September 4, 1963. He also had made incriminating statements to family and friends before the bombing. Agents said Blanton’s vehicle was seen near the church at 2:10 a.m. on September 15, 1963. “Photograph of his car positively identified,” the report reads. In the same report, the FBI said, “Blanton’s alibi for September 14-15, 1963 cannot be verified and stated to Bureau agents that he had heard Chambliss say he would make a shrapnel bomb.” […]
However, Hoover did not approve of an arrest at that point. He felt that prosecutors could not get a conviction in any court in the South at that time. Hoover believed that the black civil rights movement was under the control of foreign and domestic communists. […]
Although agents favored a prosecution of the four suspects as early as 1964, Hoover would not approve of a meeting with U.S. attorneys. According to a review of the case by the Department of Justice, which was obtained by The New York Times in 1980, Hoover stated, “the chances of a prosecution in state or federal Court is very remote.” In addition, Hoover was so tight-fisted about what the FBI knew about the bombing that all the details in the case were never completely passed on to the Department of Justice.
No one was indicted for the murders until 1977, when William J. Baxley, the Alabama Attorney General re-opened the investigation. After much effort and time he eventually obtained the voluminous files the FBI had from their investigation. With those files he was finally able to indict one of the bombers, Robert Chambliss, for murder. Even then, Chambliss believed his connections with the Klan and local authorities would intimidate witnesses against him, and no jury would vote to convict. And he was nearly right, as many witnesses refused to testify. If not for the damning evidence of his niece, Elisabeth Cobbs, who came forward and related incriminating statements he had made both before and after the bombing, he might never have been convicted.
Yet even this victory was tarnished because none of the other men involved in the bombing had been brought to trial. Another 20 long years would pass before the murder investigation was re-opened, this time by the FBI and the Birmingham police (none of Baxley’s successors as Attorney General had been interested enough to continue his efforts). Three years later, Blanton and Cherry, two of Chambliss’ associates were indicted. The fourth man, Herman Frank Cash, had already died, escaping earthly justice for his crimes.
Blanton was convicted at his trial in 2001. That left only Frank Cherry as the last remaining terrorist to face justice. His trial was held in 2002:
In his closing argument, U.S. Attorney Jones told the jury that Cherry “was a murderer who lived among us.” He said that Blanton, Chambliss, Cash and the defendant were the “forefathers of terrorism.” After six hours of deliberations, the jury of six white women, three white men and three black men found Cherry guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life in prison. At his sentencing, Cherry told the court that he was framed.
You might wonder why I’m dredging up this story now. Well, despite the fact that tomorrow millions of Americans will have the opportunity to vote for the first serious African American candidate for President (and by serious I mean the first in which a black candidate has a realistic shot at winning his party’s nomination, and possible the Presidency itself in the Fall), we are a long way from eliminating racism against African Americans, and most other oppressed groups as well: Latinos, Women, the LGBT community, Asian Americans, Muslims and so one. As a nation we have wallowed in the mudpit of the politics of divisiveness and hatred, a pit which the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the consolidation of commercial media outlets, the rise of right wing radio and the Conservative Movement, and a series of Republican Presidents running straight from from Nixon through Reagan to the Bushes have aided and abetted and striven with all their might to bring to pass.
A politics which has divided us along racial, ethnic, religious, regional and sexual orientation lines. A politics of meanness, and a politics that has empowered the worst racists and bigots among us. Does anyone doubt that without the “Reagan Revolution” and the conservative movement which made it a reality that affirmative action would still exist? Or Bill O’Reilly would still be sitting next to the latest blond bubblehead stuck reporting on unimportant celebrity news rather than received a platform to spout his racist and sexist and homophobic rambles every night? Or that Lou Dobbs would be just another boring financial reporter? Or that the ready to “defend the border against illegal aliens” “Minutemen” would exist? Or that perhaps even the Oklahoma City bombing would never have been conceived by Timothy McVeigh, much less acted upon.
February is Black History Month. Most of the white people I know are surprised to learn that, and even more surprised to learn that the history of African Americans in our country has been the single most important narrative in the long history of our nation. The stain on the ideals and principles we so loudly proclaim. It gives the lie to all those protestations that we are the Land of the Free. This story is just one small part of it, but an important part. For it speaks of a time when terror was the norm, when black people feared for their homes and their lives and the lives of their children if they had the temerity to stand up for the rights that were guaranteed to them in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.
A time that is not that far removed from our own, when travesties like the Jena 6 still occur, and when nooses hanging from trees or buildings or workplaces are once more considered a good way to “blow off steam” or “joke around” at the expense of black people. A time when black men and women are far too often the victims of police brutality including unjustified taserings and shootings. A time when race riots still occur, and bigots of all stripes go looking to beat down members of communities they have been encouraged to hate. A time when African American churches are still being burned.
You see, we really haven’t left our history of racism and ugliness in the past like a bad habit we gave up long ago. It is still here with us, creeping among the body politic, more cautious, more careful, perhaps, but just waiting for the right time, the right chance to re-enter the mainstream. Waiting for a return to a time when four little girls were taught a deadly lesson regarding the dark heart of the American soul.
This is why it’s important to tell these stories, again and again. Because the poison is still out there, and it’s stronger than it’s been in a long, long time, despite Obama, despite all our beloved African American sports and entertainment stars. Despite the belief that the past is behind us. Despite the hope that that we stand upon the doorstep of a new beginning, one in which race won’t matter as much as it has previously in our history, and that we can put all our animosities and hatreds and love of violence against the “other” aside, out of the necesssity to reflect upon them in our beautiful minds.
For as Al Pacino in The Godfather so astutely observed, “if history teaches us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” And they will if we let them. They did in Katrina, after all?