Four Little Girls

Even the casual visitor to this blog will notice that I have a penchant for observing significant anniversaries.  This one is especially poignant.

Fifty years ago today, members of the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  The bombing marked the climax of the Klan’s terror campaign against the city’s African-American residents generally and civil rights activism in particular.  16^th Street Baptist was at the center of Birmingham’s civil rights struggle in the early 1960s and was a natural target for white supremacist violence.

Although Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the Klan ringleader in the bombing, claimed the bomb was meant to go off before that morning’s service when the church was unoccupied, the blast killed four girls attending Sunday school in the church basement.  Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair perished. Nearly two dozen more people were injured.

The bombing focused the world’s attention on Birmingham, a city with a white establishment determined to postpone desegregation as long as possible.  The prosecution of the bombers, whose identities were known early on, did not take place until fourteen years after the fact.  Bill Baxley, Alabama’s young Attorney General, had been horrified by the act and once in office made a concerted effort to bring the bombers to account.

Chambliss went to prison in 1978, where he died seven years later.  It took much longer to bring in his accomplices.  Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were finally convicted in 2001.  Cherry died in prison in 2004.  Herman Frank Cash escaped justice altogether, dying in 1994.  It took a good deal of courage for witnesses to come forward, even years later.  The late Rev. Petric J. Smith was a key witness at the trial of his uncle, Robert Chambliss.  Following the trial Smith was forced to leave Birmingham for good.  Had the trial taken place today, it’s quite possible he still would have been run out of town.  The New South may appear to have shed the darker burdens of its past, but the old attitudes lurk beneath the surface.

The memory of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing persists in our collective consciousness, albeit tenuously.  As our leaders are so fond of reminding us, we live under the constant threat of terror.  We should remember that on so many occasions in our history, we victimized our own. 

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar