Dudley Randall (1914-2000) Cary Nelson

| 1 F o r m A n t h o l o g y o f M o d e r n A m e r i c a n P o e t r y ( O x f o r d ) - T h e P o e t s

Dudley Randall (1914-2000) Cary Nelson

Dudley Randall (1914-2000)

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| Randall's Life and Career | On "Ballad of Birmingham" | A Dudley Randall Broadside | About

the 1963 Birmingham Bombing | About the Black Arts Movement | Online Poems | Bibliography

Prepared and Compiled by Cary Nelson

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Dudley Randall's Life and Career

Naomi Long Madgett

Poet, publisher, editor, and founder of

Broadside Press. Dudley Randall was

born 14 January 1914 in Washington,

D.C., but moved to Detroit in 1920. His

first published poem appeared in the

Detroit Free Press when he was thirteen.

His early reading included English poets

from whom he learned form. He was

later influenced by the work of Jean

Toomer and Countee Cullen.

His employment in a foundry is recalled

in "George" (Poem Counterpoem),

written after encountering a once

vigorous coworker in a hospital years later. His military service during World War 11 is reflected

in such poems as "Coral Atoll" and "Pacific Epitapns"v (More to Remember).

Randall worked in the post office while earning degrees in English and library science (1949 and

1951). For the next five years he was librarian at Morgan State and Lincoln (Mo.) universities,

returning to Detroit in 1956 to a position in the Wayne County Federated Library System. After a

brief teaching assignment in 1969, he became librarian and poet in residence at the University of

Detroit, retiring in 1974.

His interest in Russia, apparent in his translations of poems by Aleksander Pushkin ("I Loved

You Once," After the Killing) and Konstantin Simonov ("My Native Land" and "Wait for Me" in

A Litany of Friends), was heightened by a visit to the Soviet Union in 1966. His identification

with Africa, enhanced by his association with poet Margaret Esse Danner from 1962 to 1964 and

study in Ghana in 1970, is evident in such poems as "African Suite" (After the Killing).

When "Ballad of Birmingham," written in response to the 1963 bombing of a church in which

four girls were killed, was set to music and recorded, Randall established Broadside Press in

1965, printing the poem on a single sheet to protect his rights. The first collection by the press

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was Poem Counterpoem (1966) in which he and Danner each thematically matched ten poems on

facing pages. Broadside eventually published an anthology, broadsides by other poets, numerous

chapbooks, and a series of critical essays. These publications established the reputations of an

impressive number of African American poets now well known while providing a platform for

many others whose writing was more political than literary.

Following the 1967 riot in Detroit, Randall published Cities Burning (1968), a group of thirteen

poems, all but one previously uncollected. This pamphlet, like the first, contains poems selected

on the basis of theme and does not follow a chronological development in the author's work.

Fourteen love poems appeared in 1970 (Love You), followed by More to Remember (1971), fifty

poems written over a thirty-year period on a variety of subjects, and After the Killing (1973),

fifteen new poems that comment on such contemporary topics as contradictory attitudes during a

period of racial pride and nationalism.

Publication of A Litany of Friends (1981; rpt. 1983) followed several years of suicidal depression

that incapacitated Randall and put Broadside Press temporarily at risk. This period of recovery

was his most productive, comprising some of his most original--though not necessarily his best--

work. Included are eighty-four poems, thirty very recent ones and forty-six previously

uncollected.

On the basis of "Detroit Renaissance," published in Corridors magazine in 1980, the mayor of

Detroit named Randall poet laureate of that city in 1981.

A distinctive style is difficult to identify in Randall's poetry. In his early poems he was primarily

concerned with construction. Many of those in More to Remember are written in such fixed

forms as the haiku, triolet, dramatic monologue, and sonnet while others experiment with slant

rhyme, indentation, and the blues form. He later concentrated on imagery and phrasing, yet some

of his more recent work continues to suggest the styles of other poets. Although many of these

move with more freedom, originality, and depth of feeling, and encompass a wider range of

themes, others identifiable by printed date demonstrate a return to traditional form.

While Dudley Randall's reputation as a pioneer in independent African American book

publishing is secure, he is sure to be remembered for his poems as well, including "Booker T.

and W.E.B.," which succinctly summarizes philosophical differences between Booker T.

Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois in a simple dialogue; "Ballad of Birmingham," "Southern

Road," and "Souvenirs," all from Poem Counterpoem; "Roses and Revolutions," "Primitives,"

and "A Different Image" (Cities Burning); "Faces" and "Perspectives" (More to Remember);

"The Profile on the Pillow" and "Black Magic" (Love You); "Frederick Douglass and the Slave

Breaker" (After the Killing); and "A Poet Is Not a Jukebox" (A Litany of Friends).

See also: A. X. Nicholas, "A Conversation with Dudley Randall," in Homage to Hoyt Fuller, ed.

Dudley Randall, 1984, pp. 266-274. R. Baxter Miller, "Dudley Randall," in DLB, vol. 41, Afro-

American Poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1985, pp. 265-273.



Betty DeRamus

Midway through funeral services for Detroit poet and publisher Dudley Randall, librarian

Malaika Wangara leaped up and started singing, "He was a friend of mine." Her strong-willed

alto rose and spread its wings, filling Plymouth United Church of Christ with soaring

sweetness.

Wangara was not the only person who lifted her voice during Saturday services for Dudley

Randall, founder of the nationally known, Detroit-based Broadside Press.

Poets recited Randall's poems, a musician tinkled bells and squeezed fat, wet drops of the blues

from his harmonica and Randall's Kappa Alpha Psi brothers sang their fraternity song. Speakers

talked about the man who wore a tie, built his own house from the ground up, stayed married to

Vivian Barnett Spencer for 43 years and never quit being kind. They called him a friend, a

mentor, an inspiration, a Boy Scout troop leader, a calming influence during the 1967 riot, a

Wayne County librarian, a poet-in-residence at University of Detroit and Detroit's poet laureate.

Most of all, people remembered him as the man who built a publishing company that helped lay

the foundation for much of the success of today's African-American writers.

"Broadside Press was bigger in terms of impact than just the specific books," said Melba Boyd, a

Broadside Press poet and head of Wayne State University's Africana Studies department.

"As an independent press that was successful but small compared to mainstream (publishers), it

opened up the literary canon, and now mainstream publishers began publishing poetry and black

writers and other minority writers. It ... changed the whole character of American literature."

Randall was the other Berry Gordy, the one who never left the west side of Detroit, never made

millions and never became a glitter-sprinkled celebrity. Yet he, too, beamed black voices around

the world, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 from the National Endowment for

the Arts.

His stars weren't slinky singers or coordinated crooners. Randall showcased previously

unpublished poets and national figures such as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, LeRoi Jones,

Alice Walker and Haki Madhubuti.

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks left Harper and Row to become a Broadside

poet. And Audre Lorde's 1973 Broadside book, From a Land Where Other People Live, was

nominated for a National Book Award.

Like Berry Gordy, who boxed and worked on an assembly line before founding Motown,

Randall didn't become a legend overnight. He worked for Ford, and labored at the post office

while earning degrees in English and library science.

According to the often-told story, Gordy set up Motown with an $800 loan from his family.

Randall began his publishing career with $12.



However, Randall became a publisher by chance. In response to a 1963 church bombing in

Alabama, he wrote"The Ballad of Birmingham," and his poem was set to music and recorded by

a folk singer. To protect his rights, Randall had it printed on a single sheet, or broadside, in 1965.

That was the start of Broadside Press.

The Press grew "by hunches, intuitions, trial and error," Randall once wrote, until it had

published 90 titles of poetry and had printed 500,000 books. In his spare bedroom, Randall

licked stamps and envelopes, packed books, read manuscripts, wrote ads and planned and

designed books.

Dudley Randall, 86, died Aug. 5, but speakers at the poet's funeral -- which he planned 15 years

ago -- said his influence remains strong.

"I am the man I am today in part because of Dudley Randall," said Madhubuti, poet and founder

of Chicago's Third World Press. "I ... stayed in his house. He taught me what was possible.

(Without black poetry) I had about as much promise as a raindrop in the desert."

"He was my friend and colleague in the community of poets who flourished during the 1950s

and 1960s in Detroit," added Naomi Long Madgett, poet and founder of Lotus Press.

"Through Lotus Press I followed in his footsteps and brought out his last book (A Litany of

Friends) in 1981. The song may be ended, but the legacy lives on."

from The Detroit News (8/15/00).



On "Ballad of Birmingham"

R. Baxter Miller

In 1962 Randall became interested in Boone House, a black cultural center which had been

founded by Margaret Danner in Detroit. Every Sunday Randall and Danner would read their own

work to audiences at Boone House. Over the years the two authors collected a group of poems

which became the first major publication of Broadside Press, Poem Counterpoem (1966).

Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems each by Danner and Randall. The

poems are alternated to form a kind of double commentary on the subjects they address in

common. Replete with allusions to social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and

growth. In "The Ballad of Birmingham" Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of

blossoming, as he recounts the incident, based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church by white terrorists. Eight quatrains portray one girl's life and

death. (Four girls actually died in the real bombing.) When the daughter in the poem asks

permission to attend a civil rights rally, the loving and fearful mother refuses to let her go.

Allowed to go to church instead, the daughter dies anyway. Thus, there is no sanctuary in an evil

world, Randall seems to say, and one may face horror in the street as well as in the church. After

folk singer Jerry Moore read the poem in a newspaper, he set it to music, and Randall granted

him permission to publish the tune with the lyrics.

From Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955. A

Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill and Thadious M. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Copyright © 1985 by

The Gale Group.

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James Sullivan

[Dudley Randall’s Detroit-based Broadside Press issued a series of African-American

poetry broadsides.]

The first two in the series are poems by Randall

himself: "Ballad of Birmingham" and "Dressed All

in Pink." Folk singer Jerry Lewis had set them to

music, and to ensure his own copyright of the texts,

Randall published them as broadsides in 1965. In

1966, when he met Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson,

and Margaret Walker at Fisk University's first

annual Writers Conference, he asked each of them

for permission to print one of their already-published

poems as a broadside--Hayden's "'Gabriel," Tolson's

"The Sea-Turtle and the Shark," and Walker's "The

Ballad of the Free" (Randall, Broadside 23). Randall

also wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, asking permission to

use one of her poems. She wrote back that he could

pick any one he liked, and he chose "We Real Cool"

(ibid. 8). And so he had his initial "Poems of the

Negro Revolt" sequence. Most of the first twenty-

four issues of the Broadside Series continued to be

"favorite poems" that had already been published

elsewhere, but in 1968, a reviewer at Small Press

Review suggested that issuing previously

unpublished poems might be a greater literary

service, so beginning with Number 25,

"Assassination" by Don L. Lee--a response to the

murder of Martin Luther King Jr.--he made the

series mostly a forum for new work (ibid. 2-3 ).

"Ballad of Birmingham" deserves special attention as the first broadside Randall published and

also because it places the series in relation to the tradition of popular broadsides up through the

nineteenth century that recount sensational events in ballad form. Printed up, like them,

inexpensively for sale, it uses the conventions of the traditional broadside ballad for

contemporary political goals. Two broadside versions of this poem exist. For the first publication

in 1965, the graphics are simple: brown ink in a tasteful typeface on tan paper, priced at thirty-

five cents. But once the series was established, Randall reissued the poem in a new format and

with a new price, fifty cents. Though the words do not change, the second, more visually

complex version connects the whole series more directly to the older tradition of poetry

broadsides, and it raises issues of audience use and the role of graphic format in producing

meaning that other broadsides later in the series address more fundamentally.



The folded card carries the poem inside, arranged in a fairly standard format, title across the

breadth of the sheet, subtitle underneath it in parentheses--"(On the Bombing of a Church in

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)"--then the poem proper in two columns occupying most of the

page: all printed in black on white. But the outside (designed by Shirley Woodson, with title and

illustration on front, publication information on back) is printed all black, the text and drawing

appearing as negative space in this imposed black field. The white field on the inside is a given, a

publishing convention. But with the outside acting as a dark border and the text itself appearing

in a typeface with heavy vertical lines, it recalls the elegiac broadsides from two or three

centuries earlier. The card format and the somber illustration of six figures huddled together,

heads bowed, suggest a funeral.

These generic allusions in the visual format and the title indicate that, like seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century elegiac broadsides, this one will use the tragic occasion to expound upon the

spiritual values of the community. The tradition of basing broadside ballads on sensational

disasters and crimes further determines the poem as a tragedy. In this context, the first lines

already suggest the end of the story.

"Mother dear, may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,

And March the streets of Birmingham

In a Freedom March Today?"

Given the title and subtitle, as well as the funerary implications of the card's design, this

character will have to end up at that church eventually, probably to die, as ballad characters so

often do. This poem uses the ballad convention of the innocent questioner and the wiser

respondent (the pattern of, for example, "Lord Randall" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci"), but it

changes the object of knowledge from fate to racial politics. The child is the conventional

innocent, while the mother understands the violence of this political moment:

"No, baby, no, you may not go,

For the dogs are fierce and wild,

And clubs and hoses, guns and jails

Aren't good for a little child."

The mother, however, still believes that there is a place safe from racial hatred. She suggests that

her daughter "may go to church instead, / And sing in the children's choir." But by the end, the

horror of the bombing leaves her disillusioned:

The mother smiled to know her child

Was in a sacred place,

But that smile was the last smile

To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion,

Her eyes grew wet and wild.



She raced through the streets of Birmingham

Calling for her child.

At the end, the child's body and the mother's naive faith in the limits of hatred and violence have

been destroyed as the ballad leaves the mother transfixed among the "bits of glass and brick,"

where she can find only her little girl's shoe but not the girl herself.

Randall's broadside reminds the audience of what is at stake in the struggle for civil rights--no

sanctuary, no respect for innocence, the potential for violent resistance not just to social change,

but even to the presence, new or continued, of blacks in community with whites. There is no

such thing as staying out of the struggle in order to avoid trouble. The violence touches even this

woman who would keep her family out of the danger of active political protests like the Freedom

March. To read, buy, have, or give the card is to participate in the struggle she could not stay out

of.

Eighteenth-century broadside elegies used death as a public occasion for defining the values of

the community. The dead provided a moral lesson--either an example of a good Christian death

or a warning to sinners. Such broadsides disseminated Christian teachings and situated them as

the values of the community. The practice of distributing such broadsides and, today, of sending

sympathy cards (or, in Catholic tradition, Mass cards) reinforces, as a material expression of

shared grief, commuaal bonds among the living. The group of mourners figured on the front of

"Ballad of Birmingham provides a graphic model of communal grief over that bombing and

other acts of racist terrorism. The card, then, was a site for recognizing a shared emotional and

political response, part of a shared national identity. It contributes to that African American

identity an awareness of the ubiquitous threat of racial violence. it suggests a division between

those willing to risk violent injury by challenging Jim Crow through direct action and those

unwilling to take such risks, but it shows, through the story of this church bombing, that the basis

of that division, the risk of harm, can be the same for each group. The whole community has the

same stake in social change.

From On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s. Copyright ©

1997 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.



A Dudley Randall Broadside

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About the 1963 Birmingham Bombing

Birmingham, Alabama, and the Civil Rights

Movement in 1963

The 16th Street Baptist Church

Bombing

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in

Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil

rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph

David Abernathy and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions

became high when the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress

on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a

campaign to register African American to vote in

Birmingham.

On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man

was seen getting out of a white and turquoise

Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of

the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon

afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded

killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins

(14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday

school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a

week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama

needed a "few first-class funerals."

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed

the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged

with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On 8th October,

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1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-

month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected attorney general of Alabama. He requested

the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the organization

had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss that had not been used in the

original trial.

In November, 1977 Chambliss was tried once again for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

bombing. Now aged 73, Chambliss was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Chambliss died in an Alabama prison on 29th October, 1985.

On 17th May, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had

been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group, the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four

men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible

for the crime. Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested and Blanton has since been

tried and convicted.

Source

Timothy B. Tyson

Haven to the South's most violent Ku Klux Klan chapter,

Birmingham was probably the most segregated city in the

country. Dozens of unsolved bombings and police killings had

terrorized the black community since World War II. Yet King

foresaw that "the vulnerability of Birmingham at the cash

register would provide the leverage to gain a breakthrough in

the toughest city in the South."

Wyatt Tee Walker, who planned the crusade, said that before

Birmingham "we had been trying to win the hearts of white

Southerners, and that was a mistake, a misjudgement. We

realized that you have to hit them in the pocket." Birmingham

offered the perfect adversary in Public Safety Commissioner

Eugene "Bull" Connor, who provided dramatic brutality for an

international audience. SCLC’s [Southern Christian

Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization founded in

1957] goal was to create a political morality play so

compelling that the Kennedv administration would be forced

to intervene: "The key to everything," King observed, "is

federal commitment."

The movement initially found it hard to recruit supporters,

with black citizens reluctant and Birmingham police restrained. Slapped with an injunction to

Police use dogs to quell civil unrest in

Birmingham, Ala. in May of 1963.

Birmingham's police commissioner

"Bull" Connor also allowed firehoses

to be turned on young civil rights

demonstrators.

Photo Source: The Seattle Times

Online

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cease the demonstrations, King decided to go to jail himself. During his confinement, King

penned "Letter from Birmingham Jail," an eloquent critique of "the white moderate who is more

devoted to 'order' than to justice" and a work included in many composition and literature

courses.

The breakthrough came when SCLC’s James Bevel organized thousands of black school children

to march in Birmingham. Police used school buses to arrest hundreds of children who poured

into the streets each day. Lacking jail space, "Bull" Connor used dogs and firehoses to disperse

the crowds. Images of vicious dogs and police brutality emblazoned front pages and television

screens around the world. As in Montgomery, King grasped the international implications of

SCLC’s strategy. The nation was 'battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and

Africa," he said, "and they aren't gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men

and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin."

President Kennedy lobbied Birmingham's white business community to reach an agreement. On

10 May local white business leaders consented to desegregate public facilities, but the details of

the accord mattered less than the symbolic triumph. Kennedy pledged to preserve this mediated

halt to "a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the

country."

The next day, however, bombs exploded at King's headquarters and at his brother’s home.

Violent uprisings followed, as poor

blacks who had little commitment to

nonviolence ravaged nine blocks of

Birmingham. Rocks and bottles rained on

Alabama state troopers who attacked black

citizens in the streets. The violence

threatened to mar SCLC’s victory but also

helped cement White House support for civil

rights. President Kennedy feared that black

Southerners might become "uncontrollable"

if reforms were not negotiated. It was one of

the enduring ironies of the civil fights

movement that the threat of violence was so

critical to the success of nonviolence.

Across the South, the triumph in

Birmingham inspired similar campaigns; in a

ten-week period, at least 758 racial

demonstrations in 186 cities sparked 14,733

arrests. Eager to compete with SCLC, the national NAACP pressed Medgar Evers to launch

demonstrations in Jackson, Mississippi, On 11 June President Kennedy made a historic address

on national television, describing civil rights as "a moral issue" and endorsing federal civil rights

legislation. Later that night, a member of the White Citizen’s Council assassinated Medgar

Evers.

In Birmingham, anti-segregation demonstrators lie on

the sidewalk to protect themselves from firemen with

high pressure water hoses. One disgusted fireman said

later, "We're supposed to fight fires, not people."

Photo: © Charles Moore

Online Source: www.kodak.com

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Tragedy and triumph marked the summer of 1963. As A. Philip Randolph sought to fulfill his

vision of a march on the capitol for jobs, King convinced him to shift the focus to civil rights.

Joining with leaders from SCLC, SNCC, the Urban League, and the NAACP, Randolph chose

Bayard Rustin as march organizer. Kennedy endorsed the march, hoping to gain support for the

pending civil rights bill. On 28 August about 250,000 rallied in the most memorable mass

demonstration in American history. King's "I Have a Dream" oration would endure as a

historical emblem of nonviolent direct action. Prominent in the crowd was writer James Baldwin,

widely regarded as a black spokesperson, especially since the 1962 publication of his influential

work, The Fire Next Time. Malcolm X’s denunciation of the event as the "farce on Washington"

and sharp differences over the censorship of a speech by SNCC’s John Lewis would later seem

to foreshadow the fragmentation of the movement. But against the lengthening shadow of

political violence and racial division--the dynamite murder of four black children at the 16th

Street Baptist Church in Birmingham two weeks later and the assassination of President

Kennedy on November 22--the march gleamed as the apex of interracial liberalism. Toni

Morrison used the bombing of the church as part of the rationale for her characters forming a

black vigilante group in Song of Solomon.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford

University Press.

Patricia Sullivan

Less than a month after the March on Washington, the sense of foreboding articulated by

Malcolm X overshadowed the euphoria of that extraordinary late summer day. On September 15

white terrorists dynamited the basement of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church during

Sunday School, killing four young girls: Denise McNair and Cynthia Wesley, both 11 years old,

and Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, both 14. Dreading that the families would blame

him for exposing the children to risk, King returned to Birmingham and presided over the funeral

of the movement's youngest victims.

From Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Expereince. Copyright ©

1999 by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.



News Stories about the Bombing

UPI News Report of the Birmingham Church Bombing

Six Dead After Church Bombing Blast Kills Four Children; Riots Follow

Two Youths Slain; State Reinforces

Birmingham Police

United Press International

September 16, 1963

Birmingham, Sept. 15 -- A bomb hurled from a passing car

blasted a crowded Negro church today, killing four girls in their

Sunday school classes and triggering outbreaks of violence that

left two more persons dead in the streets.

Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven

hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.

As darkness closed over the city hours later, shots crackled sporadically in the Negro sections.

Stones smashed into cars driven by whites.

Five Fires Reported

Police reported at least five fires in Negro business establishments tonight. A official said some

are being set, including one at a mop factory touched off by gasoline thrown on the building. The

fires were brought under control and there were no injuries.

Meanwhile, NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins wired President Kennedy that unless the

Federal Government offers more than "picayune and piecemeal aid against this type of bestiality"

Negroes will "employ such methods as our desperation may dictate in defense of the lives of our

people."

Reinforced police units patrolled the city and 500 battle-dressed National Guardsmen stood by at

an armory.

City police shot a 16-year-old Negro to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt

after they caught him stoning cars. A 13-year-old Negro boy was shot and killed as he rode his

bicycle in a suburban area north of the city.

Police Battle Crowd

Downtown streets were deserted after dark and police urged white and Negro parents to keep

their children off the streets.



Thousands of hysterical Negroes poured into the area around the church this morning and police

fought for two hours, firing rifles into the air to control them.

When the crowd broke up, scattered shootings and stonings erupted through the city during the

afternoon and tonight.

The Negro youth killed by police was Johnny Robinson, 16. They said he fled down an alley

when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt.

The 13-year-old boy killed outside the city was Virgil Ware. He was shot at about the same time

as Robinson.

Shortly after the bombing police broke up a rally of white students protesting the desegregation

of three Birmingham schools last week. A motorcade of militant adult segregationists apparently

en route to the student rally was disbanded.

Police patrols, augmented by 300 State troopers sent into the city by Gov. George C. Wallace,

quickly broke up all gatherings of white and Negroes. Wallace sent the troopers and ordered 500

National Guardsmen to stand by at Birmingham armories.

King arrived in the city tonight and went into a conference with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a

leader in the civil rights fight in Birmingham.

The City Council held an emergency meeting to discuss safety measures for the city, but rejected

proposals for a curfew.

Dozens of persons were injured when the bomb went off in the church, which held 400 Negroes

at the time, including 80 children. It was Young Day at the church.

A few hours later, police picked up two white men, questioned them about the bombing and

released them.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wired President Kennedy from Atlanta that he was going to

Birmingham to plead with Negroes to "remain non-violent."

But he said that unless "immediate Federal steps are taken" there will be "in Birmingham and

Alabama the worst racial holocaust this Nation has ever seen."

Dozens of survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church's

stained glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised by the

explosion. The blast crushed two nearby cars like toys and blew out windows blocks away.

Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro

firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the

screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.



At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more,

cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.

(The Associated Press reported that among the injured in subsequent shooting were a white man

injured by a Negro. Another white man was wounded by a Negro who attempted to rob him,

according to police.)

Mayor Albert Boutwell, tears streaming down his cheeks, announced the city had asked for help.

"It is a tragic event," Boutwell said. "It is just sickening that a few individuals could commit such

a horrible atrocity. The occurrence of such a thing has so gravely concerned the public..." His

voice broke and he could not go on.

Boutwell and Police Chief Jamie Moore requested the State assistance in a telegram to Wallace.

"While the situation appears to be well under control of federal law enforcement officers at this

time, the possibility of further trouble exists," Boutwell and Moore said in their telegram.

President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney

General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to

Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being

rushed in.

City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used.

"We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before

the bomb hit," he said.

In Montgomery, Wallace said he had a similar report and said the descriptions of the car's

occupants did not make clear their race. But he served notice "on those responsible that every

law enforcement agency of this State will be used to apprehend them."

The bombing was the 21st in Birmingham in eight years, and the first to kill. None of the

bombings have been solved.

As police struggled to hold back the crowd, the blasted church's pastor, the Rev. John H. Cross,

grabbed a megaphone and walked back and forth, telling the crowd: "The police are doing

everything they can. Please go home."

"The Lord is our shepherd," he sobbed. "We shall not want."

The only stained glass window in the church that remained in its frame showed Christ leading a

group of little children. The face of Christ was blown out.

After the police dispersed the hysterical crowds, workmen with pickaxes went into the wrecked

basement of the church. Parts of brightly painted children's furniture were strewn about in one



Sunday School room, and blood stained the floors. Chunks of concrete the size of footballs

littered the basement.

The bomb apparently went off in an unoccupied basement room and blew down the wall,

sending stone and debris flying like shrapnel into a room where children were assembling for

closing prayers following Sunday School. Bibles and song books lay shredded and scattered

through the church.

In the main sanctuary upstairs, which holds about 500 persons, the pulpit and Bible were covered

with pieces of stained glass.

One of the dead girls was decapitated. The coroner's office identified the dead as Denise McNair,

11; Carol Robertson, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14, and Addie Mae Collins, 10.

As the crowd came outside watched the victims being carried out, one youth broke away and

tried to touch one of the blanket-covered forms.

"This is my sister," he cried. "My God, she's dead." Police took the hysterical boy away.

Mamie Grier, superintendent of the Sunday School, said when the bomb went off "people began

screaming, almost stampeding" to get outside. The wounded walked around in a daze, she said.

One of the injured taken to a hospital was a white man. Many others cut by flying glass and other

debris were not treated at hospitals.

Fourth in Four Weeks

It was the fourth bombing in four weeks in Birmingham, and the third since the current school

desegregation crisis came to a boil Sept. 4.

Desegregation of schools in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee was finally brought about last

Wednesday when President Kennedy federalized the National Guard. Some of the Guardsmen in

Birmingham are still under Federal orders. Wallace said the ones he alerted today were units of

the Guard "not now federalized."

The City of Birmingham has offered a $52,000 reward for the arrest of the bombers, and Wallace

today offered another $5,000.

Dr. King Berates Wallace

But Dr. King wired Wallace that "the blood of four little children ... is on your hands. Your

irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere

that has induced continued violence and now murder."

Online Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

srv/national/longterm/churches/archives1.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/churches/archives1.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/churches/archives1.htm



Killer of the Innocents -- Commentary

Birmingham World -- Sept. 18, 1963

Lethal dynamite has made Sunday, September 15, 1963, a Day of Sorrow and Shame in

Birmingham, Alabama, the world's chief city of unsolved racial bombings.

Four or more who were attending Sunday School at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the

day of Sorrow and Shame were killed. Their bodies were stacked up on top of each other like

bales of hay from the crumbling ruins left by the dynamiting. They were girls. They were

children. They were members of the the Negro group. They were victims of cruel madness, the

vile bigotry and the deadly hate of unknown persons.

Society in a free country has a solemn responsibility to itself and those who make it up. Free men

are bound by an irrevocable civic contract to safeguard the rights, safety, and security of all of its

members. This is the basic issue in what is happening in Birmingham. The continued unsolved

racial bombings tend to suggest the deterioration of society in this city.

Our neighborhood and church leaders has also the challenge of seeking some lofty, but real self-

defense strategy and technique. Patience is a human element and subject to no less frailties. The

unsolved bombings have taxed patience and aroused unquenchable fears - fears of police, of the

sincerity of public leaders, and of the quality of Negro leadership in this City of Sorrow and

Shame.

To the families of the bombed victims, the Birmingham World offers its sympathy. To the pastor

and the members of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church we offer a friendly hand. We are angered by

the murderous bombing ad shocked by the lack of solution. The Birmingham World has been in

the struggle against this kind of insanity, intolerance, disrespect of the House of God, defiance of

established law, and disregard of human values since its beginning which the bombings

substantiate. We shall try to carry on in the struggle, believing in the divine goodness. We have

that overcoming faith in a Higher Being to guide us.

Those who died in the September 15,bombing also died serving the Lord Jesus Christ, who was

crucified. This will be an unforgettable day in our nation, in world history,; in the new rebellion

of which the Confederate flags seem to symbolize. Yet, if members of the Negro group pour into

the churches on Sunday, stream to the voter-registration offices, make their dollars talk freedom,

and build up a better leadership, those children might not have died in vain.

The Negro group in Birmingham is unhappy. The Negro group is dissatisfied with the kind of

protection they are getting. The Negro group is disturbed when law enforcement remains all-

white in Birmingham and in Jefferson County. The Negro group is disappointed with the lack of

more help from the Federal Government. This makes Birmingham a city of uneasiness for the

Negro group.

Where does Birmingham go from here? The huge bomb reward fund grows bigger, but the

bombings solution does not seem to be near. Governor George Wallace says he stands for law



and order but he seems to attract the support of the negative forces whose credo inspires less.

From the lips of the Governor come assertions which seem to imply defiance of the Supreme

Court decision on schools.

Is Birmingham a sick city? We cannot answer for sure. There are tensions because there is

fear...there is a feeling of diminishing faith in City Hall to measure up to the responsibility of the

kind of municipal leadership needed in his City of Sorrow and Shame. The killers of the

innocents have challenged the conscience of decent person everywhere.

Neither the living who were bombed nor those who have not been bombed should give ground to

the bombers. The United States government and other law enforcement agents must leave no

stone unturned until the perpetrators of this heinous crime are brought to justice

"Birmingham Bombing"

David J. Garrow, Newsweek, July 21, 1997

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in

Birmingham, Alabama. Four girls in the ladies lounge were instantly killed. Though no other act

of terror during the course of the civil rights movement would claim as many lives, the case was

never cracked.

In July 1997 the Justice Department and the state of Alabama announced that they had reopened

the investigation. This threw fresh light on the murky subculture of truck-stop racists that was at

the heart of the South worst moments and on how J. Edgar Hoover's peculiarities may have

helped the guilty men go unpunished. By coincidence, Spike Lee has just released a documentary

on the church bombing, "4 Little Girls."

The probe is a part of a larger, more important trend: a series of visits back into the deadly days

of the movement. First came the 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963

assassination of Medgar Evers; James Earl ray, Martin Luther King jr.' convicted killer, wants a

new trial. The interest in these long-dormant cases is a sign that the New South is still desperate

to make sense of the bloody baggage of the Old.

In the Birmingham of the early 1960s, 16th Street Baptist Church was a natural target. King used

it as staging ground for his marches against segregation and the integration of the city's schools

had just gotten underway. Even before the Sunday-morning blast, Birmingham had become

known as "Bomingham" on account of the city's violent KKK chapter, Eastveiw Klavern 13.

It took Alabama 14 years to convict one of the terrorists "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss. Other

coconspirators, whose identities were known to the authorities, were left alone. The central

problem was the FBI. The then director J. Edgar Hoover disliked King, but the director had other

reasons, too. He focused the FBI's resources on sure things, and he doubted that a white Alabama



jury would convict the men. And he was reluctant to reveal his informants and questionable

wiretapping in court.

According to FBI files, there were at least five potential members of the bombing conspiracy.

Whatever the specifics turn out to be, the case is proof positive that William Faulkner had it

right: in the south, he once wrote, "the past is never dead. It isn't even past."

Jury Convicts Ex-Klansman

Associated Press, Monday, July 9, 2001

A former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of murder Tuesday for the 1963 church bombing

that killed four black girls, the deadliest single attack during the civil rights movement.

Thomas Blanton Jr., 62, was sentenced to life in prison by the same jury that found him guilty

after 2½ hours of deliberations. Before he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, the judge

asked him if he had any comment.

"I guess the good Lord will settle it on judgment day," Blanton said.

Blanton is the second former Klansman to be convicted of planting the bomb that went off at the

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, a Sunday morning.

The bomb ripped through an exterior wall of the brick church. The bodies of Denise McNair, 11,

and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14, were found in the

downstairs lounge.

Denise's parents, Chris and Maxine McNair, did not comment as they left the courthouse. Chris

McNair was hugged by U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who fought back tears as he told reporters:

"We're happy for the families. We're happy for the girls."

The Rev. Abraham Woods, a black minister instrumental in getting the FBI to reopen the case in

1993, said he was delighted with the verdict.

"It makes a statement on how far we've come," said Woods, the local president of the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference.

"We're mindful that this verdict will not bring back the lives of the four little girls," added

Kweisi Mfume, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a

statement. "(But) justice has finally been served."

Defense attorney John Robbins said the swift verdict showed the jury was caught up in the

emotion surrounding the notorious case. He said he would seek a new trial, arguing the case

should have been moved out of Birmingham and Blanton's right to a speedy trial had been

violated.



He also said the lack of white men on the jury -- eight white women, three black women and one

black man returned the verdict -- "absolutely hurt Blanton." The jurors, who were publicly

identified only by number, left without comment.

The case is the latest from the turbulent civil rights era to be revived by prosecutors. Byron De

La Beckwith was convicted in 1994 of assassinating civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963

and former Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers was convicted three years ago of the 1966

firebomb-killing of an NAACP leader.

But the church bombing was a galvanizing moment of the civil rights movement. Moderates

could no longer remain silent and the fight to topple segregation laws gained new momentum.

During closing arguments, Jones told the jury that it was "never too late for justice."

He said Blanton acted in response to months of civil rights demonstrations. The church had

become a rallying point for protesters.

"Tom Blanton saw change and didn't like it," Jones said as black-and-white images of the church

and the girls dressed in Sunday clothing flashed on video screens in the courtroom.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Posey added: "The defendant didn't care who he killed as long as

he killed someone and as long as that person was black."

"These children must not have died in vain," he said. "Don't let the deafening blast of his bomb

be what's left ringing in our ears."

Robbins argued that the government had proved only that Blanton was once a foul-mouthed

segregationist, not a bomber. He said murky tapes of his client secretly recorded by the FBI were

illegally obtained and should not have been admitted as evidence.

The surveillance began after Blanton and other Klansman were identified as suspects within

weeks of the bombing.

The FBI planted a hidden microphone in Blanton's apartment in 1964 and taped his

conversations with Mitchell Burns, a fellow Klansman-turned-informant.

Posey went over the tapes for jurors, putting transcript excerpts on the video screens. He read

from one transcript in which Blanton described himself to Burns as a clean-cut guy: "I like to go

shooting, I like to go fishing, I like to go bombing."

Posey also quoted Blanton as saying he was through with women. "I am going to stick to

bombing churches," Blanton said, according to Posey.

On one tape, Blanton was heard telling Burns that he would not be caught "when I bomb my next

church." On another made in his kitchen, he is heard talking with his wife about a meeting where

"we planned the bomb."



"That is a confession out of this man's mouth," said Jones, pointing to Blanton.

The defense argued that the tape made in Blanton's kitchen meant nothing because prosecutors

failed to play 26 minutes of previous conversation. "You can't judge a conversation in a

vacuum," Robbins said.

Robbins also said Blanton's conversations with Burns were nothing but boasting between "two

drunk rednecks." He dismissed Burns and other prosecution witnesses as liars.

Another former Klan member, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, was convicted of murder in

1977 and died in prison in 1985.

Another former Klansman, Bobby Frank Cherry, was indicted last year but his trial was delayed

after evaluations raised questions about his mental competency. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash,

died without being charged.

The Justice Department concluded 20 years ago that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had

blocked prosecution of Klansmen in the bombing. The case was reopened following a 1993

meeting in Birmingham between FBI officials and black ministers, including Woods.

The investigation was not revealed publicly until 1997, when agents went to Texas to talk to

Cherry.

About the Girls

"The Day The Children Died"

People Magazine

by Kyle Smith, Gail Cameron Wescott in Birmingham

and David Cobb Craig in New York City

Photographs by Ann States/SABA

SUNDAY SCHOOL HAD JUST LET OUT, and Sarah

Collins Cox, then 12, was in the basement with her sister

Addie Mae, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, a friend, getting

ready to attend a youth service. "I remember Denise

asking Addie to tie her belt," Cox, now 46, says in a near

whisper, recalling the morning of Sept. 15, 1963. "Addie

was tying her sash. Then it happened." A savage explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite stashed

under a stairwell ripped through the northeast corner of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in

Birmingham, Alabama. "I couldn't see anymore because my eyes were full of glass - 23 pieces of



glass," says Cox. "I didn't know what happened. I just remember calling, 'Addie, Addie.' But

there was no answer. I don't remember any pain. I just remember wanting Addie."

That afternoon, while Cox's parents comforted her at the hospital, her older sister Junie, 16, who

had survived the bombing unscathed, was taken to the University Hospital morgue to help

identify a body. "I looked at the face, and I couldn't tell who it was," she says of the crumpled

form she viewed. "Then I saw this little brown shoe - you know, like a loafer - and I recognized

it right away."

Addie Mae Collins was one of four girls killed in the blast. Denise McNair; Carole Robertson,

14; and Cynthia Wesley, 14, also died, and another 22 adults and children were injured. Meant to

slow the growing civil rights movement in the South, the racist killings, like the notorious

murder of activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi three months earlier, instead fueled protests that

helped speed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"The bombing was a pivotal turning point," says Chris Hamlin, the current pastor of the

Sixteenth Street church, whose modest basement memorial to the girls receives 80,000 visitors

annually. Birmingham - so rocked by violence in the years leading up to the blast that it became

known as Bombingham - "Finally," adds Hamlin, "began to say to itself, 'This is enough!'"

The Justice Department is saying it too. Last month it announced it had reopened the probe into

the bombing, delivering the statement a day after the theatrical release of 4 Little Girls, a Spike

Lee documentary about the attack that will play in 10 cities before airing on HBO in February.

Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, a truck driver and longtime Ku Klux Klan member, was

convicted of the murders in 1977. Though the FBI always believed had had accomplices, even

identifying three suspects, the case against them was marred by conflicting accounts, and

Chambliss, who died in prison at age 81 in 1985, refused to the end to cooperate. But new leads

that emerged a year ago have made the FBI cautiously hopeful. "You have an old case, and we

don't want to raise expectations too high," says Craig Dahle, an FBI spokesman in Birmingham,

"but we would not have reopened the case if we did not believe there was a possibility of solving

it."

Still, the community holds some hope for final justice (the case was reopened in 1980 and 1988

without arrests) for the young martyrs. Denise McNair, the daughter of photo shop owner Chris

and schoolteacher Maxine, was an inquisitive girl who never understood why she couldn't get a

sandwich at the same counter as white children. Carole Robertson, whose father was a band

master at an elementary school and whose mother was a librarian, was an avid reader, dancer and

clarinet player. Cynthia Wesley, whose parents were also teachers, left the house that day having

been admonished by her mother to adjust her slip to be presentable in church.

Addie's family was the poorest of the four. She was one of seven children born to Oscar Collins,

a janitor, and Alice, a homemaker. "It was clear that she lacked things," recalls Rev. John Cross,

the pastor of the church at the time of the bombing. "But she was a quiet, sweet girl." And, Sarah

adds, a budding artist: "She could draw people real good."



It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Junie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day

34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Junie. "Then,

back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So

I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."

Junie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting,

had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool

when she told me," he says, adding that while Junie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be

in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Junie lives in a spacious one-story home and

is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.

"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me

to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she

thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."

After the blast, Sarah's face was so drenched in blood, says Cross, that "when they asked me who

she was, I had to say I had no idea." In the hospital, Sarah, whose eyes were bandaged, wondered

why Addie didn't visit with the rest of the family. Her sister Janie told her that "Addie's back is

hurting." Sarah learned of Addie's death when she overheard Janie talking to a nurse. "It hurt real

bad," Sarah says. "I just didn't know what I would do without Addie." Sarah spent three months

in the hospital, ultimately losing her right eye (she now suffers from glaucoma in her left).

She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city

worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy

Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the

Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the

peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet

called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has

been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."

What most concerns Sarah and Junie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery

so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The

grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Junie and Sarah can't afford to

move their sister. "It is," says Junie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening,

"like an open sore to us."

Profiles of the victims

Addie Mae Collins

Addie Mae Collins and two of her sisters would go door to door every day after school, selling

their mother's handmade cotton aprons and potholders.

The trio collected 35 cents for potholders and 50 cents for aprons. The bibbed aprons netted 75

cents.



"Addie liked to do it. She looked forward to it," said sister Sarah, now Sarah Rudolph. "We sold

a lot of them."

When she wasn't selling her mother's wares, Addie liked to play hopscotch, sing in the church

choir, draw portraits, and wear bright colors.

The Hill Elementary School eighth-grader loved to pitch while playing ball, too. "I remember

that underhand," said older sister Janie, now Janie Gaines.

She also remembers Addie's spirit. "She wasn't a shy or timid person. Addie was a courageous

person."

Addie, born April 18, 1949, was the seventh of eight children born to Oscar and Alice Collins.

When disagreements erupted among the siblings inside the home on Sixth Court West, Addie

was the peacemaker.

"She just always wanted us to love one another and treat each other right," Mrs. Rudolph said.

"She was a happy person also, and she loved life."

The routine was the same every Saturday night at the Collins household - starching Sunday

dresses for church. Sept. 14, 1963, was no different when Addie pulled out a white dress. Older

sister Flora pressed and curled Addie's short hair.

"We thought it looked pretty on her," said Mrs. Gaines.

When Addie died in the explosion, Mrs. Rudolph lost her right eye. "I feel like I lost my best

friend," said Mrs. Rudolph. "We were always going places together."

Four broken columns in Birmingham's downtown Kelly Ingram Park and the nook in the

basement of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church are both memorials to the four girls killed in the

1963 church bombing.

For 29-year-old Sonya Jones, that is not enough. In January, she renamed her 1-year-old youth

center in memory of an aunt she never knew.

Every second and third Saturday, children file into the Addie Mae Collins Youth Center in an

Ishkooda Road church to build positive attitudes, develop talents and learn to deal with adversity.

"Not only will it be a memorial to her but also we'll be helping other kids who are dealing with

tragedies," said Mrs. Jones, whose mother is Janie Gaines.

Cynthia Wesley

There were times when Cynthia Wesley's father came home weary after a night of patrolling his

Smithfield neighborhood for would-be mischief-makers. Or worse, bombers.



Claude A. Wesley was one of several men who volunteered to ensure another peaceful night on

Dynamite Hill, nicknamed for the frequent and unsolved bombings in a former white

neighborhood that was increasingly a home to blacks.

The Wesleys tried to protect their daughter from segregation's brutality.

"We were extremely naive," remembers friend and playmate Karen Floyd Savage. "We didn't

really discuss things in depth like that."

The first adopted daughter of Claude and Gertrude Wesley, Cynthia was a petite girl with a

narrow face and size 2 dress. Cynthia's mother made her clothes, which fit her thin frame

perfectly.

She attended the now-defunct Ullman High School, where she did well in math, reading and the

band. She invited friends to parties in her back yard, playing soulful tunes and serving

refreshments. She was born April 30, 1949.

"Cynthia was just full of fun all the time," Mrs. Savage said. "We were constantly laughing."

It was while the two girls attended Wilkerson Elementary School that Cynthia traded her gold-

band ring topped with a clear, rectangular stone for a 1954 class ring that belonged to Mrs.

Savage.

"We just sort of liked each others' rings and we just traded with no question of wanting it back,"

Mrs. Savage said.

Cynthia made friends easily, talking often to close pal Rickey Powell. On Sept. 14, 1963, she

invited Rickey to church the next day for a Sunday youth program. Powell accepted, only to

reluctantly decline when his mother wanted him to accompany her to a funeral.

"We were like peas in a pod," Powell said. "That was my best bud."

When Cynthia died in the church blast, she was still wearing the ring Mrs. Savage gave her when

they were younger. Cynthia's father identified her by that ring when he went to the morgue.

The death of the four girls crushed Mrs. Savage.

"I was so young. I never realized someone would hate you so much that they would go to that

extent. In a way, that was sort of the death of my own innocence."

Denise McNair

Denise McNair liked her dolls, left mudpies in the mailbox for childhood crushes and organized

a neighborhood fund-raiser to fight muscular dystrophy.



Born Nov. 17, 1951, Carol Denise McNair was the first child of Chris and Maxine McNair. Her

playmates called her Niecie.

A pupil at Center Street Elementary School, she had a knack of gathering neighborhood children

to play on the block. She held tea parties, belonged to the Brownies and played baseball.

"Everybody liked her even if they didn't like each other,"said childhood friend Rhonda Nunn

Thomas. "She could play with anybody."

She and Rhonda would dream of husbands, children and careers. "At one point I would be

delivering babies and she was going to be the pediatrician,"Mrs. Thomas said.

At some point in her young life, Denise asked the neighborhood children to put on skits and

dance routines and to read poetry in a big production to raise money for muscular dystrophy. It

became an annual event. People gathered in the yard to watch the show in Denise's carport — the

main stage. Children donated their pennies, dimes and nickels. Adults gave larger sums.

The muscular dystrophy fund-raiser was always Denise's project — one that nobody refused.

"It was the idea we were doing something special for some kids,"Mrs. Thomas said. "How could

you turn it down?"

A relative always thought the girl with the thick, shoulder-length hair and sparkling eyes would

be a teacher because she was "a leader from the heart."

Friend and retired dentist Florita Jamison Askew remembers Denise as a child who smiled a lot,

even for the camera when she lost her baby teeth.

"She was always a ham,"Mrs. Askew said.

"I bet she would have been a real go-getter. She and Carole (Robertson) both. I just wonder

sometimes."

Carole Robertson

Smithfield Recreation Center's auditorium became a dance school every Saturday afternoon

when eager girls arrived for lessons in tap, ballet and modern jazz.

Carole Robertson, wearing a leotard and toting black patent leather tap shoes and pink ballet

slippers, was among the crowd.

"We didn't have any problems getting our chores done so we could get to dancing class on

Saturdays,"said Florita Jamison Askew, who attended classes with Carole and Carole's big

sister."Nobody ever wanted to miss them."



Students worked hard on their ballet and shuffle steps in preparation for the annual spring recital,

where they got to wear makeup and dance with their hair down."It was a lot of fun,"Mrs. Askew

said.

Born April 24, 1949, Carole was the third child of Alpha and Alvin Robertson. Older siblings

were Dianne and Alvin.

Carole was an avid reader and straight-A student who belonged to Jack and Jill of America, the

Girl Scouts, the Parker High School marching band and science club. She also had attended

Wilkerson Elementary School, where she sang in the choir.

Carole walked fast and with a smile.

"She moved through the halls rapidly, not running, but just full of life,"said retired Birmingham

teacher Lottie Palmer, who was a science club sponsor."She was a girl that was anxious to .¤.¤.

succeed and do well.

Carole grew up in a Smithfield home that was full of love, friends and the aroma of good

cooking, especially her mother's spaghetti.

"There was a lot of warmth in the house. The food was good and the people were kind," Mrs.

Askew said."That was kind of my second home."

Inside the one-story home with the wrap-around porch, Mrs. Askew and the Robertson girls

practiced dances such as the cha-cha and tried out different hairstyles — often on Carole, who

didn't mind being the model.

Carole once told Mrs. Askew, now a retired dentist, about her desire to preserve the past.

"I remember a statement she made — she wanted to teach history or do something his torical. I

thought how ironic it was that she would remain a part of history forever."

In 1976, Chicago residents established the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, a social service

agency that serves children and their families. Named after Carole, it is dedicated to the memory

of all four girls.

Members of the Jack and Jill choir were scheduled to sing at Carole's funeral Sept. 17, 1963, at

St. John AME Church."Of course, we didn't do much singing,"said choir member Karen Floyd

Savage."We cried through it."

by Chanda Temple © The Birmingham News.



Martin Luther King's Eulogy for the Young Victims of the

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, delivered at Sixth

Avenue Baptist Church

18 September 1963

Birmingham, Ala.

[Delivered at funeral service for three of the children—Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise

McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesley—killed in the bombing. A separate service was held for the

fourth victim, Carole Robertson.]

This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these

beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief

years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly

well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a

close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.

These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most

vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.

And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and

human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in

their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent

behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every

politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the

spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has

compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant

hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every

Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on

the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that

we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely

about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced

the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the

realization of the American dream.

And so my friends, they did not die in vain. (Yeah) God still has a way of wringing good out of

evil. (Oh yes) And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is

redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force (Yeah)

that will bring new light to this dark city. (Yeah) The holy Scripture says, "A little child shall

lead them." (Oh yeah) The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland (Yeah)

from the low road of man's inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. (Yeah,

Yes) These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an

aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of

Birmingham (Yeah) to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes



of a bright future. Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its

conscience. (Yeah)

And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of

this hour (Yeah Well), we must not despair. (Yeah, Well) We must not become bitter (Yeah,

That’s right), nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith

in our white brothers. (Yeah, Yes) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among

them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

May I now say a word to you, the members of the bereaved families? It is almost impossible to

say anything that can console you at this difficult hour and remove the deep clouds of

disappointment which are floating in your mental skies. But I hope you can find a little

consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is

an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy

for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and

young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the

irreducible common denominator of all men.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end.

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more

lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness,

but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible

surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and

difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and

its moments of flood. (Yeah, Yes) Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the

soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. (Yeah) And if one will hold

on, he will discover that God walks with him (Yeah, Well), and that God is able (Yeah, Yes) to

lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate

valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

And so today, you do not walk alone. You gave to this world wonderful children. [moans] They

didn’t live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives. (Well) Their lives were distressingly small

in quantity, but glowingly large in quality. (Yeah) And no greater tribute can be paid to you as

parents, and no greater epitaph can come to them as children, than where they died and what they

were doing when they died. (Yeah) They did not die in the dives and dens of Birmingham (Yeah,

Well), nor did they die discussing and listening to filthy jokes. (Yeah) They died between the

sacred walls of the church of God (Yeah, Yes), and they were discussing the eternal meaning

(Yes) of love. This stands out as a beautiful, beautiful thing for all generations. (Yes) Shakespeare

had Horatio to say some beautiful words as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet. And today,

as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of

Shakespeare: (Yeah, Well): Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a

new day. (Yeah, Yes) And may the flight of angels (That’s right) take thee to thy eternal rest.

God bless you.



Richard Farina's 1964 Song "Birmingham

Sunday"

Lyrics as reprinted in Guy and Candie Carawan, Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights

Movement through its songs, Bethlehem, PA, 1990, pp. 122-123.

Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.

I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.

On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,

And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,

And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.

At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.

And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,

The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,

And Denise McNair brought the number to two.

The falcon of death was a creature they knew,

And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,

The church it was crowded, but no one could see

That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.

Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.


Young Carol Robertson entered the door

And the number her killers had given was four.

She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,


On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.

And people all over the earth turned around.

For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.


The men in the forest they once asked of me,

How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.

And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.

How many dark ships in the forest?

The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.



And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.

I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.

And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.

Legal Chronology

Sept. 15, 1963: Dynamite bomb explodes outside Sunday services at Sixteenth Street Baptist

Church, killing 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson

and Addie Mae Collins, and injuring 20 others.

May 13, 1965: FBI memorandum to director J. Edgar Hoover concludes the bombing was the

work of former Ku Klux Klansmen Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank

Cash and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr.

1968: FBI closes its investigation without filing charges.

1971: Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopens investigation.

Nov. 18, 1977: Chambliss convicted on a state murder charge and sentenced to life in prison.

1980: Justice Department report concludes Hoover had blocked prosecution of the Klansmen in

1965.

Oct. 29, 1985: Chambliss dies in prison, still professing his innocence.

1988: Alabama Attorney General Don Siegelman reopens the case, which is closed without

action.

1993: Birmingham-area black leaders meet with FBI, agents secretly begin new review of case.

Feb. 7, 1994: Cash dies.

July 1997: Cherry interrogated in Texas; FBI investigation becomes public knowledge.

Oct. 27, 1998: Federal grand jury in Alabama begins hearing evidence.

April 26, 2000: Cherry arrested on charges he molested a former stepdaughter 29 years earlier.

He is later extradited to Alabama.

May 17, 2000: Blanton and Cherry surrender on murder indictments returned by grand jury in

Birmingham.



April 10, 2001: Judge delays Cherry trial, citing defendant's medical problems, but refuses to

dismiss charges against either man.

April 16, 2000: Jury selection to begin in case against Blanton.

May 1, 2001: Blanton convicted

The Black Arts

Movement

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African American Poetry--An Overview, by Joanne V.

Gabbin | Documents from the Movement | External

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Dudley Randall (1914-2000) Cary Nelson

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modern american poetry

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