Birmingham -- Formerly known as "Bombingham"

Jim and I spent March 2^nd through the 4^th in Birmingham - Alabama's largest city.  We played in a regional bridge tournament while there, but did not fare well.  Due to a comedy of errors regarding the events we mistakenly entered, we found ourselves at times playing against “pros."  It makes me laugh to think that there are professional bridge players! - but there are.  They are expert players paid to help their partners gain master points.  

So, instead of talking about our successes at the bridge table (since we didn't have any), I’ll talk again about civil rights.  We began our civil rights experience at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the largest museum we visited.  A brief introductory video described how the steel “boom town” of Birmingham grew on the backs of immigrant and black labor -- and also grew more and more racially segregated.  "Jim Crow" laws - passed in the 1920s -- segregated virtually every facet of life, including public restrooms, lunch counters, parks - even ambulances and hearses!   

Jim going first down the whites only side

When the film ends, the screen slides up, and you are invited to enter the museum through one of two routes – the whites only side or the colored side.  I was momentarily stymied; I didn’t want to choose.  

But after you enter you are able to go back and forth across the whites only and colored sides.  The exhibits showed the inequality of schools, jobs and living conditions in the 1950s, starting with the vintage water fountains labeled by race that you walk past to enter. Similarly, a side-by-side comparison of white and African-American classrooms of the time show the classroom for white students with a projector and glossy textbooks, while the classroom for black students was furnished with little more than beat-up wooden desks.

The institute is then organized by civil rights theme (i.e. freedom rides, voting rights, housing battles, etc.) and shows timelines and key actors relative to each.  So much information!  I've covered some of these at earlier stops.  Other areas of focus I decided to leave for the future. For example, we could go to Greensboro to honor the first lunch counter sit-in, or to Little Rock to remember school desegregation.  (Jim - I can envision several trips right now!)

Two exhibits I will cover, though, as they struck me as most relevant to Birmingham. The first was seeing the cell in which Dr. King was confined when he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after being arrested on Good Friday,1963. This letter – written on the margins of a newspaper and sometimes on toilet paper - defended his sense of urgency and his non-violent, but confrontational tactics. 

Dr. King's Birmingham jailcell

Looking at the cell and imagining him imprisoned there, I couldn’t help but think about the last jail cell we saw like this – Nelson Mandela’s on Robben Island, South Africa.  I considered how similar apartheid and our segregation were.  And, I realized that both these men were sitting in similar cells on the very same night.  How similar the cells – and how similar these good men.  Nelson Mandela, of course, was imprisoned much, much longer.  But, Dr. King was arrested 29 times, including once for exceeding the speed limit. 

The second exhibit covered the series of bombings that occurred in Birmingham.  Fire-bombing was a frequent tactic of the KKK.  In fact, from the late 1940s to mid 60s, nearly fifty still unsolved, racially directed bombings occurred in or near Birmingham.  So many that some national newspapers began referring to Birmingham as "Bombingham."  

One of the unsolved bombings targeted Dr. Martin Luther King’s brother.  On May 11, 1963, A.D. King’s house was bombed. When a bomb later exploded at the home of a black lawyer, thousands poured into the streets intent on revenge. As the situation escalated, A. D. King climbed on top of a parked car and shouted to the angry mob: “My friends, we have had enough problems tonight. If you’re going to kill someone, then kill me.  Stand up for your rights, but with nonviolence.”  The situation was defused, but the bombings continued.  

The final bombing occurred at the 16^th Street Baptist Church.  The exhibit shows a large photo of the blown-out wall, juxtaposed with smiling photos of the four girls who died. A wall clock is stopped at 10:22 – the time the bomb exploded during Sunday School.  Why was this the last bombing?  One of the girl's mothers sued the KKK and won! - and the monetary judgment was large enough that the KKK did not use bombs again.

Jim and I were at the museum the morning of Friday, March 2nd.  We had adequate time, but hurried some as we had been informed the institute was closing at noon for a private event.  We found out later than John Lewis, Doug Jones and others were coming as an early stop of the Selma Jubilee weekend.  It only seemed appropriate: Remember Doug Jones is Alabama's newest Senator after an upset win against Roy Moore.... and he prosecuted two of the KKK perpetrators of the 1963 church bombing.  Wish we would have stuck around and gotten a picture!

As we left, we realized that building the Institute at this location was not accidental.  Some of the most infamous scenes in Birmingham happened in the surrounding blocks. The museum faces Kelly Ingram Park, where early in 1963, public safety commissioner Bull Connor blasted protesters – many of them children - with fire hoses and set dogs on them. And, it was built directly across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church. We went there next.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church:  Tragedy during Sunday School

Because the 16th Street Baptist Church has an active congregation and isn’t just a museum, the story of the bombing is housed in a small room in the basement.  

Again, here's the history: On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded, killing four young girls attending Sunday School and injuring more than 20 others at worship.  The names of the four girls were: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all age 14 at the time of their deaths, and Denise McNair, who was 11.  

This replacement window was sent
to the church
from Wales after the bombing 

One of these girls loved Perry Mason.  Another - who was in 8^th grade - was wearing high heel shoes for the first time that morning.  A simple display case in the church basement contains those new shoes - along with the piece of brick that killed her taken from her skull.  I imagine I was attending Sunday School myself on that same day and time – only in Hawley, a world away. 

An enlargement of a vintage postcard shows the exterior rear steps under which the bundle of ten sticks of dynamite was hidden.  I was told at the church that the bomb blew out the face of Jesus from a full-length stain-glass window – and only his face.  Symbolic?  

No one was convicted in the bombing for 14 years.  The final bomber was convicted in 2002, some 39 years after the crime. 

I wandered the basement, primarily taking pictures of Carole Robertson. 

I felt the greatest connection to her.  You see - when I worked on the Superintendent’s team at the Minneapolis Public Schools in the 1990s, one of my team members was an aunt of Carole Robertson.  Her name was Katrina Reid and I’ll always remember the day I found out.  I asked her, “How do you live without bitterness, without hating all whites?” and she answered, “You can’t live with hate. You only die from hate.”

I remember her words as I walk, thinking how this bombing during Sunday School is only too similar to the 2017 mosque bombing in Bloomington MN minutes before morning prayers.  Thankfully, no one was hurt there, but it was a hate crime.  Hope we can all learn the lesson someday: “You can’t live with hate.  You only die from hate.”

Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March

On March 7, 1965, over 600 people lined up by twos prepared to walk from Selma to Montgomery to protest voting rights violations.  Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, they walked through Selma peaceably, before state troopers met them at the Edmund Pettus bridge and ordered them to go home.

John Lewis (white coat) and others chose to stand still

Instead, they stood still.  The troopers swept forward, pushing the marchers back and knocking them to the ground.  Dogs were unleashed on them.  Tear gas was sprayed.  As the marchers struggled to breathe, men on horseback - local deputies and posse members - joined in the assault, using cattle prods, clubs wrapped with barbed wire - and bullwhips! 

"Prods" used that day

 John Lewis suffered a skull fracture; fifty-seven others were sent to the hospital.  This day became known as “Bloody Sunday.” 

Jim and I visited Selma very close to the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.”  We knew there was going to be a Bridge Crossing re-enactment and jubilee this year on March 3 and 4.  We debated whether to go then, or to go earlier in order to allow for more solitary reflection.  We decided on the latter.

U.S. Highway 80

So, on March 1, we left Montgomery and slowly drove U.S. Highway 80, going backwards along the fifty-four miles the marchers eventually walked.  I looked at the rural countryside and tried to imagine walking beside them -- spending four nights along the road, sleeping in ditches, on farmland and in a Catholic churchyard.  The ultimate Selma to Montgomery March helped win passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  However, the story behind the march began much earlier than that.

State Constitutions amended to restrict Black voting 

As you recall, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed blacks the right to vote back in 1870.  But, in 1901, Alabama amended its state constitution with requirements that African Americans could not meet: such as literacy tests, comprehension tests, poll taxes (i.e. fees to vote) and grandfather clauses.  (“Grandfather clauses” – often used today to “protect” someone’s previous rights – were literally used here to exclude any person from voting whose grandfather had not voted – namely, any descendant of an enslaved grandfather.)

Disenfranchisement – the denial of the right to rote – was swift.  Within one year, the number of black voters in Alabama dropped 98 percent!   Blacks who tried to vote faced threats, harassment, the loss of the jobs and even their lives.

When they tried to register to vote, the tests were applied very subjectively.  For example, a person recounted at the Selma museum that one comprehension question was: “How many bubbles does a soap bar make?”  For some “strange” reason, a black person always got the answer wrong.  By 1940, only 3 percent of Black Alabamans were registered to vote.  By 1961, a federal civil rights report revealed that, in Montgomery County, fewer than 1 percent of the voting-age black population was registered.  In another county, Blacks comprised more than 80 percent of the population, but none were registered.  Oh, disenfranchisement was effective! 

In 1964, voting registration campaigns and voting rights protests became more organized.  This all came to a head in the small town of Marion, Alabama.  On February 18, 1965, during a peaceful protest there against voting barriers, state law enforcement officers began once again to beat the demonstrators.  Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year old Vietnam veteran and church deacon, was fatally shot when a state trooper attacked his mother and grandfather and he tried to defend them.  At his funeral, an outraged Reverend James Bevel urged the community “to march Jackson’s body to Montgomery, lay his coffin at the feet of the Governor and demand action”. 

March 7^th was the date chosen for that first march – and, as I described earlier on, it became known as Bloody Sunday.  But, something new occurred that day, too.  For the very first time, national television broadcasts were interrupted to bring live coverage of the violence wrought upon the protesters.  The images stunned the nation.  A lawsuit quickly won stipulated that marchers were to receive police protection the next time. And, while the court order also said that only 300 could march from Selma, it went on to say that others could join them along the route.  Due in part to the televised coverage of the beatings, 8000 marchers poured in from across the country to walk some or all of the path to Montgomery.

           

With the protection of the National Guard, the ultimate Selma to Montgomery walk occurred on Sunday, March 21.  It was led by Dr. Martin and Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, and Cager Lee -- the grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson.  They walked for five days along U.S. 80 to the Capitol steps in Montgomery where Dr. King delivered a speech to 25,000 people – a speech that has become known as “How Long? Not Long!”  

As a result of the events that occurred in Selma, on August 6, 1965, five months after “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While Jim and my time in Selma was short, the small museum at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge included the original film coverage of Bloody Sunday.  Viewing that footage again caused me to greatly increase my respect for John Lewis, who still serves our country as Congressman from the state of Georgia.  The son of a share-cropper, he was only 25 when he led much of the voter registration drives of what's called Freedom Summer.  He also looked so small at the front of that line of marchers who faced dogs, horses, whips, and cattle prods.  Yet, neither he nor the marchers turned to violence themselves.  

I also thought about those of us who maybe don’t even vote.  I thought about the many who lost their lives in order to vote.  Never should we take this right for granted.

Last, one final injustice.  Here is my picture of the Edmund Pettus bridge.  Since I had never heard of Edmund Pettus, after we left Selma I looked him up.  Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general, and a Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan!  In my opinion, this bridge connecting Selma to Montgomery should be renamed for John Lewis.