Remembering Iconic Civil Rights Moments
By: Terry Donnelly
September 16, 2013
Less than three weeks ago we, as a nation, commemorated the
50th anniversary of the March on Washington and celebrated Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Unfortunately, that August
day with a quarter million or more people on the Washington D.C. mall didn’t
end the fight for integration and equality.
In fact, the march and the speech did little more than
provide inspiration.
Now, less than three weeks after our celebration of the
Southern Christian Leadership Council’s model of organization and Dr. King’s
mastery of the spoken word, it is time to revisit that era for another golden
anniversary.
This scene is not the Federal Mall, but a stone place of
worship in the black section of Birmingham, Alabama–one of the iconic cities of
segregation and hatred in the old Confederacy. On Sunday, September 15, 1963,
four young girls; 11 year-old Denise McNair and three 14 year-olds, Carole
Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley were in the basement of the 16th
Street Baptist Church taking a break after Sunday School when a bomb planted by
the Ku Klux Klan exploded. The blast ripped apart the church and took the four
little girls’ lives. Dozens more were injured and later that same day while
citizens were protesting the bombing; two more black children were shot and
killed. Police shot Johnny Robinson, 16, and two white teens shot Virgil Ware,
13.
Klan related bombings in Birmingham were so common it was
dubbed “Bombingham”.
There are reasons for one or another of the thousands of
these criminal acts to withstand the test of time and become a symbol of the
cause for which it is remembered. The reason for this particular act of terror
to stand out is surely the fact that these four girls were absolutely free from
any guilt. They were young, innocent, with their entire lives ahead of them.
They were killed solely because of the color of their skin.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was eight at the
time and lived in Birmingham. She often speaks of her friendship with Denise
McNair. Her father was a minister and his church was about two miles away. The
bombing could have just as easily been in his church and we could be
remembering Dr. Rice for being a child martyr rather than National Security
Advisor and Secretary of State–we’ll never know what Carole, Addie Mae, Denise,
and Cynthia may have become.
The summer of 1963 was the first time any concentrated
efforts were made to get masses of black citizens registered to vote. So few
Black Mississippians were franchised, no one knew if they were interested or
not. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a mock Freedom Vote.
These local organizers along with help from a handful of students from Stanford
and Yale (called “outside agitators” by the white locals) worked to bring
together as many black citizens as possible for a trial vote.
The success was overwhelming. Tens of thousands of potential
black voters filled out a simple registration form and voted for a slate of
candidates to run for office in a mock election.
The experiment in Mississippi was so successful that SNCC
organized groups of college students to travel from their homes and to try to legally
register voters across the south in what became Freedom Summer of 1964. Along
with the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE), organized
by comedian Dick Gregory from a base in Chicago, they did it again in 1965.
The killings weren’t over. On June 21, 1964 three SNCC registration
volunteers; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were arrested
for speeding on their way to investigate the burning of a church. Police
detained them for several hours and then, under cover of darkness; the boys
were delivered to the Klan. It took until August 4, over six weeks, for citizen
search parties to locate their bodies.
March 7, 1964 became “Bloody Sunday” when an MLK lead group
tried to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to show support for the voter
registration efforts. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies stopped
the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Clark distinguished himself by always
wearing a button on his uniform that read “Never”–meaning never to segregation.
The group was beaten and dispersed. The march finally happened, with the
assistance of a federal ruling, five months later.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July
2, 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act on August 16 the next year.
Any legal restraints to equalize voting rights had been
felled. But, as we see today, states are still trying to keep certain voters
away from the polls. This is why we need to keep these incidences clear and in
the front of our minds so the American spirit of inclusion with its basic tenet
of everyone having the right to vote is maintained.
Terry Donnelly is a retired teacher and the
author of First You Hear Thunder;
historical fiction retelling events and history of the civil rights movement,
and Unfinished; a novel focused on a photojournalist’s
coming of age and living life on the edge. Order both in either print or e-book
format from Amazon.com. For more of Terry’s writings, both opinion and fiction,
go to www.firstyouhearthunder.blogspot.com.
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