All Things in Moderation

I came across this story this morning and thought it was worth reminding all of us how far we’ve traveled in fifty years.

On this day fifty years ago, a box of dynamite rigged to a timer exploded beneath a stairway at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., just as a group of African-American children were heading inside to prepare for Sunday morning services. Four girls were killed, more than a score more were wounded, and the South’s long intransigence against equality for African-Americans took yet another deadly turn.

That bloody summer of 1963—which McWhorter detailed in her 2001 book, “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution”—was a pivotal experience for the nation, and helped pushed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. But it also was only part of a long arc of the troubled history of race relations in the country. At The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen writes of white Birmingham lawyer Charles Morgan Jr., who, a day after the bombing, issued an eloquent plea for white Alabamans to shoulder the blame for the region’s heinous acts of racism. Morgan’s speech included a challenge to his fellow white citizens who kept asking, “Who did this?”

“Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the law is not, when they know full well what the law is?

Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the “good people,” whose ready answer is for those “right wing extremists” to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this morning, “Me? I’m not guilty!” he then proceeding to discuss the guilt of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court did not properly interpret the law. And that’s the way it is with the Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for speaking while they sit in fearful silence.”

Morgan eventually was hounded out of town by death threats.

With its large African-American congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who once called Birmingham a “symbol of hardcore resistance to integration.” Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, made preserving racial segregation one of the central goals of his administration, and Birmingham had one of the most violent and lawless chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

The church bombing was the third in Birmingham in 11 days after a federal order came down to integrate Alabama’s school system. Fifteen sticks of dynamite were planted in the church basement, underneath what turned out to be the girls’ restroom. The bomb detonated at 10:19 a.m., killing Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins–all 14 years old–and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Immediately after the blast, church members wandered dazed and bloodied, covered with white powder and broken stained glass, before starting to dig in the rubble to search for survivors. More than 20 other members of the congregation were injured in the blast.

Filed under: This Day in History | 1 Comment »

2011 – A motley crew of political junkies and refugees from other blogs join forces to create All Things in Moderation, “a place where political discussion and debate can take place in the absence of the kind of unproductive vitriol that has come to characterize much of blog commentary these days.” The significance of this on the world outside their little bubble is highly questionable, but since this post is inside that bubble, it remains worth noting.

1971 – A four day riot in Attica prison in New York, during which prisoners held employees hostage and took over portions of the prison, ends abruptly when police open fire on the prisoners, killing 29 inmates and 10 hostages. Four days earlier, an inmate attack on a guard had grown into a full-fledged riot and inmate take-over. Three days of negotiations ensue, with prisoners demanding improved living conditions. When negotiations fail, Governor Nelson Rockefellar authorizes the police to re-take the prison by force. Lawsuits surrounding the event will carry on for decades, with New York State being ordered by a federal judge to pay $8 million in damages to sruviving inmates in 2000, and in 2005 the state finally settles with the families of those employees who were killed, for at total of $12 million.

1814 – As the British bombard Fort McHenry from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, American Francis Scott Key pens The Defense of Fort McHenry, a poem that will eventually be set to music, renamed The Star Spangled Banner, and go on to become the US national anthem. Key had gone to Baltimore in order to negotiate the release of a friend of his who had been captured by the British. Brought aboard a British ship, Key secures the release of his friend, but is prevented from going ashore until the British finish their attack on Fort McHenry. Key was inspired to write his poem when, after an all night barrage, he awoke in the morning to the sight of the Stars and Stripes still flying over the fort. The Star Spangled Banner is now heard virtually daily in sports stadiums throughout the nation.

Filed under: This Day in History | 6 Comments »