This is just a brief reminder that it’s the 54th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. We should take a moment to remember Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Carol Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14), the four African-American girls who were killed in the attack while they were changing into their choir clothes. We should also remember the four Klansmen who were responsible: Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry.
I also want to mention another victim:
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.)
I’d like to look back at this history and see it as little more than an unfortunate part of our past. But then I see stuff like this on a constant basis:
A St. Louis judge on Friday found former police officer Jason Stockley not guilty of first-degree murder in the 2011 shooting death of black motorist Anthony Lamar Smith.
“This Court, in conscience, cannot say that the State has proven every element of murder beyond a reasonable doubt, or that the State has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense,” St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson wrote in his ruling.
I didn’t sit in the courtroom and hear all the evidence in this case. I do know that the officer stated that he was going to kill the motorist and then did in fact kill him. I know that there is footage that doesn’t show the gun that was recovered, and that the gun had the officer’s DNA on it and not the DNA of Anthony Lamar Smith.
Without committing one way or the other in this particular case, I just see a lot of acquittals in cases where there seems like there should be a conviction. I see a lot of decisions not to prosecute when it seems like there’s a strong case. And I see a lot of ticky-tack penalties and sanctions meted out for behavior that seems like it should warrant severe punishment.
I don’t know how you give someone two years probation for shooting and killing a 13-year-old boy while he’s sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. But I also don’t know how you say it’s okay to choke and kill a grown man for selling cigarettes on the street.
Things have not improved enough in the fifty-four years since the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. And that’s why we should all take a moment today to remember that tragedy.
The ugliness in this country seems endless. Thanks for writing about this.
It seems the police have little to fear when the judges have already made up their minds, evidence be damned.
When my middle son was five years old, we watched a documentary on integration. There was footage of the little black girl being pelted with tomatoes by ugly, angry white people on her way into school. My son, who went to an integrated public school, looked at me wide-eyed and asked, “Mommy, why are they doing that to her?!” I explained that years ago, some people believed black people were not as good as white people and should not be allowed in the same schools.
He was stunned.
Racism is taught and learned. Hate is taught and learned. It seems we are still unable to see the world as a five-year-old can, stunned that we still haven’t learned.
Sadly, 63 years after Brown v. Board of Education that sentiment is strong enough to have suburban towns around Birmingham AL and St. Louis MO able to incorporate new school districts just for the purposes of re-establishing segregation.
It is not the matter of believing that nonsense, nor is it the matter of teaching their children that nonsense. What is galling is the courts continuing to allow sidestepping equal justice under law, the basis of Brown v. Board of Education, and actively conspiring to prove that belief is true through the misallocation of resources between schools with smaller and larger proportions of students of color. Damaging someone else’s ability to prove your belief wrong by damaging their life is a most hideous action.
Especially decades after all objective evidence (there’s that currently contentious phrase again) has long ago proved that race and its supposed attributes are fundamentally social constructs that misinterpret the complexity of human variation at the same time that they introduce bogus so-called biological categories.
Sadder still that it still gets people killed.
In 1992 Jonathan Kozol reported that US schools were as segregated then as they were before Brown. As very brief update from Kozol in 2011
Yes, racism is taught and learned. But there is also a genetic component for those who are predisposed towards like-group thinking (tribalism) and who lack empathy – and even have antipathy – for those who are different than them. This is why some people who are raised in environments of pure racial hatred (such as I was, by my step-father) were able to escape that thinking, and why those who are raised in liberal (as in: open, accepting, loving, caring) homes sometimes join mens’ rights groups and the KKK.
Thanks for this timely reminder. Race relations have improved considerably in many communities and in parts of the business world but poverty remains concentrated in communities of color and policies and practices to remove access to equal opportunities for personal advancement for people of color remain all too common. I do believe the long period of conservative backlash since the early 1980s has seriously set back a lot more progress than if that backlash hadn’t occurred. In the case of the police, the situation seems to me to have not improved at all in many communities even though I know it has in some.
America sadly really has still never shaken off its founding as a place of genocide, racial and religious intolerance and slavery.
I was going to post, but you said it all exactly as I think, but better than I could and more to the point with greater brevity, so I just say “basically what he said.”
We should also remember the four Klansmen who were responsible: Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry.
How long did it take to actually arrest and convict these scumbags? Like 30 years after the fact, right? Despite the FBI fingering these scum only weeks after it happened.
Indeed. And remember the clergy who had to deal with those situations, including my colleague from the 1970s, the Rev. John Cross. There were some strong commitments made through having experienced those attacks.
That we are back to where we now are is a testimony to white laziness and white supremacist determination.
I know a guy who’s a cop. A chief of police on a Native American reservation in fact. He claims that in thirty years of service he’s never seen evidence of white privilege or discrimination against people of color. I find him profoundly ignorant. Of course he was a Trump voter.
To his credit, when he claimed Arpaio is a great man, I sent him a bunch of articles detailing the abuses of power and he then wrote me back to say he didn’t know about any of that stuff. I don’t see this man as malevolent. Just ignorant and uneducated (even though he has a university degree).
I bet one guess is all that’s necessary to identify his primary source of news and information. I would also wager that your “facts” did not change his mind at all on Arpaio.
Sadly, I learned a long time ago that a university degree was not necessarily a marker of wisdom or enlightenment. Too often, that education merely gets used in the service of better defending willful ignorance. Seen that too often, especially as of late.
Perhaps. But, nothing makes for ignorance like ignorance. The biggest problem with America is that Merkins listen only to Fox News & Hate Radio. And, because of this they know NOTHING about the world, or how government works, or anything. And because they never learned anything in school, they are easily gulled and they become willing tools of the 1%.
And this happens because of a lack of education among the working class. During the heyday of unionism in the 30’s, workers actually attended classes teaching worker history given by the union. The unions thought that educating workers was the most important thing they could do because educated workers would naturally defend their rights effectively.
That’s what created the modern United States and modern Europe, an educated voting class voting their interests and putting taxation of the rich up to above 70% between 1934 and 1963, which prevented them from dominating politics as they had done in the past.
And now it’s all being undone. Would be tyrants always want an ignorant population, thus the home schooling movement. We are undoing the work of the 19th and 20th centuries in which the public insisted on more and more equal and sound primary education. Now the working class population is becoming wilfully more ignorant with each generation as they turn their backs on reality and indulge their various grievances against black and brown people they imagine are “stealing our jobs.”
The officer said he was going to kill the suspect, actually does it, uses a non-standard weapon and possibly plants a gun, and then the judge says that statement didn’t matter. This is the kind of twisted legal “logic” that was used to ignore evidence and acquit murderers like those who killed Emmitt Till and many others. Its just as bad today as it was back then. This is why the justice system is not trusted, and why “waiting for the facts to come out” is simply code for, give us time to concoct the story we’re going to go with to justify the unjustifiable.
As long as police are allowed to get away with murder against unarmed blacks, its not unreasonable for a black person to be in fear for their lives when stopped by the police. To wit:
“We only shoot black people,” Georgia cop assures woman during traffic stop
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/31/16232880/georgia-police-cobb-county-video
Mississippi officer on leave after threatening to shoot black motorist’s car
http://wreg.com/2017/09/14/mississippi-officer-on-leave-after-threatening-black-driver/
These incidents are too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say that these cops never face any consequences for their actions, ever. And as long as this is the case America cannot reasonably expect any person of color to go along with the fiction that this nation is just or “colorblind.”
It’s time for the democrat party to move beyond identity politics. Amirite?
No can do. The Democratic Party has very high percentage of minorities. They cannot be ignored.
Obviously, my sarcasm key is busted.
Don’t you just hate when that happens?