September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

James Baldwin  New Orleans, 1963

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts. As was his wont, my dad didn't talk much about that evening when they came home--I only remember him saying he did not entirely agree with Baldwin, whom he said struck him as being too strident and "arrogant"--but he did make it a point to leave the book sitting out where I could "find" it. Entitled The Movement: Documentary of A Struggle for Equality, it was a collection of photographs depicting the Civil Rights Movement at a moment when the movement was indeed still a vivid and very present reality. Containing photographs by a number of photographers, including Danny Lyons, Charles Moore, and others, its text had been authored by the African American playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry. The book was published by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SNCC), and contained Hansberry's short but evocative texts alongside the photographs. The photographs themselves ranged from scenes of demonstrations, sit-ins, along with photographs of everyday black life in America at that moment..which is to say that some of the pictures were quite gruesome.

16th Street Baptist Church on the morning of the bombing

Along with photographs of menacing white racists taunting civil rights marchers there were other pictures that more starkly visualized the often  horrific results of  the ongoing attempts of America's black citizens to lift themselves out of a state of enforced apartheid, as well as the violence that befell them and their non-black sympathizers who dared to resist. The pictures came at me in a rush. While I had indeed begun to experience the sting of racism as a black student bussed into previously white schools as part of the first wave of Northern school integration, I had never experienced anything like the raw, naked racist violence that these pictures described. Fire hoses, dog, and tear gas set loose on black citizens, those same citizens publicly stalked and beaten with baseball bats, and set upon by white mobs for daring to sit at a lunch counter or ride a Greyhound bus. Pictures made at lynchings, in which the white participants posed as if at a family picnic while a black body swung from a tree, or smoldered in the embers after being burnt to death.

Sarah Collins in the hospital after the bombing Photograph by Frank Dandridge

By the time The Movement had appeared in print, blacks in the south had been living through an orgy of violence directed against them for two centuries. Blacks in Birmingham, AL had their homes so frequently dynamited by racists who resented their presence and home ownership, that the city had become known as Bombingham. On September 15, 1963 this dynamiting of black lives reached a crescendo with the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The week before, Alabama governor George Wallace had stated that in order to stop integration Alabama needed, "a few first-class funerals." Four young girls were killed that Sunday morning. A bomb having been placed there earlier by  Robert "Bomber Bob" Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas Blanton--Ku Klux Klan members all--exploded at 10:22 AM, taking the lives of Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) who were attending Sunday school and preparing for church service. The bomb exploded with such force that one of the girls was immediately beheaded. Twelve year old Sarah Collins [now Sarah Collins Rudolph], sister of Addie Mae, was blinded when flying glass pierced her eyes. She later lost one eye. It was a picture of a young Sarah Collins, lying in a hospital bed, her eyes covered with huge patches of cotton gauze, that was among the images in The Movement that grabbed my attention and permanently seared itself into my brain.

Odessa Woolfolk Courtesy The Birmingham News

I was eleven years old when I saw that image of the immobilized little black girl laid out, helplessly scarred and traumatized, and that image has stayed with me all of these years. I realize now that I was at the time the same age as the youngest girl killed in that attack, Denise McNair. Deciding some seven years ago that I wanted to somehow work with this experience, to use it somehow, to confront it by putting myself in Birmingham, I contacted the curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art to see if I might shape a project, working with them on what would become a residency project that would honor the memory of those killed that day while also engaging the contemporary Birmingham community. During that initial visit I was able to attend a service at 16th Street Baptist Church and to have lunch with Odessa Woolfolk, the President and a founding board member of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which had opened in 1992. I had lunch with Ms. Woolfolk, who began to give me a deeper sense of the history as well as the various ways in which that history was still playing out in the Birmingham community. When I told her that I would be visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning, she asked me with a knowing look, "Let me know what happens." I am pretty sure she knew what would happen, but she likely thought it best that I have the experience myself.

From top left (clockwise) Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins

16th Street Baptist Church

My initial visit to 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning began to give me a sense of the complexity of the situation I was actually entering into. I had approached Birmingham full of the known history. But history as it is lived is usually messier and certainly more nuanced than the mythic history afforded by historical hindsight. Mythos and reality may be, in some ways, related but they are generally never quite the same. This first occurred to me when, entering the church to attend the service, I noticed unsettlingly that they church was filled to only perhaps a quarter of its capacity...at best. I had expected a full and rousing congregation, but was met instead by an almost empty building that was in a sad and obvious state of disrepair. Greeting the minister and several of the deacons after service, I introduced myself and briefly described the work I hoped to do. As soon as I mentioned September 15, 1963 the minister stopped me in mid-sentence. His words echo in memory still. "Stop right there," he admonished me. "Here at 16th Street we're not about all of that business; we're about the business of Jesus Christ. If you're interested in that, we'd love to help you." Stunned though I was, I did my best to keep a straight and polite face. Who was I, after all, to tell them what their "business" should or should not be. Of course "all of that business" was basically all  that I knew of 16th Street. Recalling her knowing look, I realized then that this response would not have surprised Odessa Woolfolk at all. I realized then that I had much to learn indeed about the place where I hoped to make my work. I left Birmingham after that first visit more perplexed than when I came. [Note: 16th Street Baptist Church was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 2006, after my initial visit, and has since undergone a $3 million restoration of the building, reversing years of neglect, including water damage, and damage to the facade masonry.]

Taylor Branch Parting The Waters

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Birmingham, AL 1963

Virgil Ware 13 years old

Filming in Birmingham, AL Photograph by Truman Grayson

Photographing in the Birmingham Museum of Art Photograph by Truman Grayson