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The Bombs, the Church, the City, the State

What was Alabama back then? And what is Alabama right now?
Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress

And then there are certain iconic places from our history that make us avert our moral inner eyes because, while we admire the people that made these places historic, we remain uncomfortable with the situations that made that courage necessary. They put a flinch in our historical memory. Since the 1950s, Alabama has been awash in these places. There is Montgomery, where the bus boycott began. There is the bus station in Anniston, where a mob tried to burn the Freedom Riders to death. There are the stops along Route 80, where the great march from Selma to Montgomery passed in 1965. There is the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

And there is the 16th Street Baptist Church here in Birmingham, which has been a gathering place for African-Americans since it was finished in 1911. Paul Robeson sang there. W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune spoke there. And, at 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, a Sunday morning, a group of four white supremacist terrorists planted 15 sticks of dynamite in the church and blew it up, killing four little girls and injuring at least 20 other parishioners, and converted the 16th Street Baptist Church into one of those places that all Americans of a certain age know about instinctively, and one of those places that many Americans talk about with a familiar flinch in their memory.

The flinch keeps too many of us from remembering that this was the third bombing in Birmingham over the previous 11 days, and that the campaign of destruction came in the wake of a federal court decision mandating the integration of Birmingham’s public schools. The flinch keeps us from remembering that the people of the church rebuilt it in less than a year, that a stained-glass window was donated by some people in Wales who were shocked and disgusted by something that had happened in America. The flinch never has left our national mind. It keeps us from remembering that the forces that brought down the walls of the church still maintain a certain destructive power. The flinch is caused by something real, something dark, something alive.