While the World Watched (15 page)

Chapter 15

Bombingham

* * *

The deaths of the children followed by the loss of President Kennedy two months later gave birth to a tide of grief and anger—a surge of emotional momentum that helped ensure the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

U.S. National Park Service
[62]

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Martin Luther King Jr.

When 1964 dawned, I wondered,
Will the new year bring relief from bombings and some much-needed peace to my city? Will Kennedy’s wish of national desegregation ever come true now that he’s dead?

The bombings and killings didn’t stop after the calendar page turned. Birmingham’s nickname still fit: not much had changed in “Bombingham.” With all the mining operations around the area, dynamite was easy to come by and hard to trace. And so was hatred.

Every black family in my neighborhood knew the familiar sound of a bomb exploding. On any given day or night, we’d be in the house or sitting on the front porch and hear the distinctive boom. In an instant, everything would grow still and quiet. We would look at one another and wait for the phone to ring. Within minutes, someone would call us and say, “They just bombed attorney Shores’s home [or the Gaston Motel or A. D. King’s house or another location]!” We would hang our heads and say a silent prayer.

Spring 1964 came to Birmingham, Alabama, as usual. Turmoil and questions about John F. Kennedy’s killer kept the nation in a state of unrest. I was still reeling from the assassination of my president and the deaths of my four friends. I felt miserable and depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I thought a lot about death and dying. The cloud still followed me everywhere I went.

At three o’clock one morning in April 1964, we heard an unmistakable boom. The bomb’s bright light lit up the sky above our street, and for a few seconds night became day. The force of the blast knocked my brothers Wendell and Kirk out of their top bunk beds with a loud thud. I was asleep in my room and shot up in bed when I heard the shattering glass.
What in the world?
I thought. In my grogginess, it took a moment for me to understand what was going on, but this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Almost immediately I heard Mrs. Crowell screaming—she was trying to wake up her family and get them out of the house in case another bomb exploded.
I can’t believe it’s happening again.

I looked out through the hole where my now-shattered bedroom window had been, and I saw smoke coming from the house across the street. The Crowells’ home!

Please, Lord, let the Crowells be alive and unhurt!
I jumped out of bed and slipped on my clothes. I had the sinking sensation that sooner or later a bomb would go off that I wouldn’t live to talk about. I felt as if it were only a matter of time.

* * *

I liked Mrs. Crowell. She was a big woman, about five feet ten and big boned. Her skin was so fair—a sort of reddish yellow—that she almost looked white. Her hair reminded me of actress/singer Diana Ross’s, except Diana’s was reddish brown. I often wondered whether she was a person of mixed parentage.

Mrs. Crowell was different from the other black women who lived in my neighborhood. She marched to a different beat. She pulled her long, thick hair back into a ponytail and wore unusual dresses and skirts with colorful printed patterns. She didn’t talk like any of us, either. Someone told me, with a smirk, that she was “cultured.” An artist by profession, Mrs. Crowell taught music and art. She had traveled the world and collected art from France and Africa. Her house was decorated in a sort of European way—I especially remember all the nude wood statues from Africa she had placed in almost every room.

I spent lots of time at the Crowell home, and I enjoyed being around Mrs. Crowell even though most all the women in our neighborhood kept their distance. I became like a daughter to her. Sometimes we went shopping together, and sometimes she would sit at the beautiful white baby grand piano in her living room and play her heart out. She shared things with me too—recipes, memories from her time abroad, hot dogs cooked on the outside grill. She never fried chicken and cooked greens like my mother did; instead, she collected and made recipes from France. Sometimes white friends of hers came all the way from Paris to eat dinner and spend time with her and her family. She often invited me over to eat with her foreign friends, and I always looked forward to meeting all the interesting guests.

 After the explosion, my family and all our neighbors ran out into the street. Mrs. Crowell stood in her front yard in her nightgown, screaming as loud as she could. “My husband and sons are still in the house!” she cried.

Everyone tried to figure out exactly what had happened. It didn’t take long. The Klan. A bomb. At first the neighbors stayed in the street, a safe distance from the house. We worried that the Klan might have planted a second, deadlier bomb to explode after a crowd had gathered.

Someone called the Birmingham police. The officers took their time getting there, but they finally arrived. Mr. Crowell and their sons, George and Weymoth, came out the front door, terrified but not hurt. Somehow, inexplicably, they had managed to sleep through the whole thing.

When the situation was assessed, we discovered that the blast had ripped through many of the nearby homes, had broken most of the windows on the neighbors’ houses, and had dented cars that were parked on the street. The damage proved great because the homes in my neighborhood sat side by side or faced each other and had simple wooden foundations.

The word around the black community was that the Crowells were bombed because they had too many white people at their house—they needed to be reminded of who they were and the penalty for not obeying the rules. I guess the Klan wanted to teach the Crowells a lesson about mixing and socializing with whites.

When the sun came up that morning, the Crowells packed up their belongings and furniture and moved out of the damaged house. They never came back. They fully intended to leave this memory behind.

Later that morning, about an hour before lunchtime, Alabama governor George Wallace himself came to our neighborhood. Several security cars accompanied him—for protection, I reckon. I recognized him from the television news, the newspapers, and the
Time
magazine cover the past September.

Why is he here?
I asked myself. With some pomp and circumstance, Wallace stood in front of the Crowell house and gave a brief speech to the crowd of black spectators, white reporters, photographers, and our neighbors.

“I apologize for this bombing,” I remember hearing him telling us. He said something about it being “a horrible act.” He promised, “We are going to get the perpetrators!” I think I recall his asking, “Is everybody okay?”

I felt confused.
Why would Governor Wallace come to our neighborhood?
I wondered.
It’s obvious he doesn’t like us!

As I listened to him speak and strive to show some sense of sympathy, I couldn’t help but remember his famous inaugural words the year before: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”

Surely that speech then made a more permanent impression on my young mind than his offer of apology now.

Did Wallace ever get the perpetrators, as he promised? No. This bombing turned out to be just one more “unsolved” explosion in Bombingham, Alabama.

Not long after the Crowell house bombing, another close neighbor, Mrs. Ryles, came home from teaching school one day and saw a mysterious brown paper bag lying in the bushes by her front porch. She bent down and tried to examine it. She thought it looked suspicious, so she called the police. They came, checked it out, and found fifteen sticks of dynamite in the bag.

* * *

Kirk, Wendell, and I had now experienced two bombings—two close calls in our lives. After the church bombing in September 1963, Kirk stopped speaking, except when he felt it absolutely necessary. The next April, after he and Wendell had been thrown from their beds, Kirk became even more withdrawn. What was going through his young mind? We never discussed it.

When Birmingham’s Phillips High School finally integrated in 1963, my brother Kirk enrolled as one of the school’s first black students. Although we never explicitly talked about it, I imagine this must have been a difficult experience for him, especially with his quiet nature. He was smart in math but came home with a C on his report card in math that year, so my mother went to school and asked the teacher about it. She was told that Kirk had sat in the wrong seat and was given the wrong grade by mistake. That experience seemed to diminish his faith in people, and he became even more quiet and withdrawn after that.

After school Kirk worked part-time at Birmingham’s Greyhound bus station. “I’ve never seen a person so quiet,” his employer once told my mother. “He just works. He never says a thing!”

Kirk eventually earned an MBA from Auburn University, became a seasoned chess player, a vegetarian, and a marathon runner. He never married. He never fathered children. He worked for the Department of Transportation in Atlanta, Georgia, for two decades. A devout Christian, he tried his best to follow God’s teachings all his life. My inclination is that he forgave the people who had wronged him, but I don’t know for sure. We never discussed it. My silent little brother, Kirk, died in November 2000.

* * *

During those weeks and months after the bombing, I kept on helping Pastor Cross while we waited for workers to complete the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church renovations. The pastor asked me to plan a church program based on Psalm 23. I had read this psalm of David’s many times, but now when I read it, the words spoke directly to my heart and brought me some comfort.

The L
ORD
is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

he leads me beside quiet waters,

he restores my soul.

He guides me in paths of righteousness

for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk

through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and love will follow me

all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the L
ORD

forever.

I found David’s psalm to be a great source of strength. I read it every night before I dressed for bed, and eventually I memorized it. But I still had questions and uncertainties about life and death.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death?
Death proved to be no shadow in my life—it was real. And I walked near that valley every day!

Eventually another family bought the house, fixed it up, and lived there for many years. Still, even years later, no one spoke about the Crowell house bombing. As a black community, we tried hard to forget it. But there was no denying its shadow over our neighborhood.

Chapter 16

Will the Violence Ever End?

* * *

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one third as much chance of completing college; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.

John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1963
[63]

Racial violence, bombings, and murders continued during the summer of 1964.
When will the violence stop?
I asked myself again and again. I became physically sick to my stomach when I heard about three more Civil Rights workers killed in Mississippi.

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were two white men who worked with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), a group that encouraged black Americans to register to vote and coached them on how to pass the voter registration exam. Along with James Chaney, an African-American from Mississippi, they were heading south to Mississippi to investigate the burning of a church there. On Sunday night, June 21, 1964, the three men disappeared. We watched the news report on television, and that night I overheard my mother talking with a neighbor on our front porch about the missing men.

“I wonder where they are,” my mother said. She was especially concerned because she had four sons of her own. When we found out two of the men were white, it struck terror in our hearts. It seemed Civil Rights workers’ lives were worthless—black or white—when they stood up for black people.

The next day we heard that someone had found a burned-out station wagon in the Bogue Chitto swamp. A month and a half later, the FBI discovered the three men’s bodies buried in a fifteen-feet-deep earthen dam. Three years later, on February 27, 1967, the Neshoba County deputy sheriff and eighteen others (all Ku Klux Klan members) were indicted for the murders. A two-week federal trial in Meridian, Mississippi, resulted in seven guilty verdicts and sentences ranging from three to ten years.
[64]

Good-hearted people paid a dear price for standing up for African-Americans’ equal rights. Before his untimely death, President John F. Kennedy had promised my people he would set the wheels in motion to outlaw segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels and in public places such as swimming pools, libraries, and other public facilities. He also promised to ban discrimination in employment. Technically, according to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, the law called for the desegregation of all-white public schools as well. But as late as 1963, only twelve thousand of the 3 million African-Americans in the South attended integrated schools.
[65]

That summer, on July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in the workplace, in schools, and in public places. But this measure was not without opposition. Johnson’s main opponent was his longtime friend and mentor Richard B. Russell, who told the Senate, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states.” Russell then organized eighteen Southern Democratic senators in filibustering this bill.
[66]
I thought,
This man must be a friend of George Wallace. Surely not all white men think this way!

A week before the Civil Rights bill became law,
Newsweek
magazine published a nationwide poll titled “The Negro Revolution—U.S. Attitudes Now.” Most of the nation said they believed it was wrong for unions and churches to refuse black people membership and for employers to refuse to hire African-Americans. Less than half, however, believed it was wrong for neighborhoods to refuse to rent or sell homes to black people or for social clubs to refuse to admit them. More than half of the nation thought black people wanted to take over white jobs. But less than half believed black people wanted to move into white neighborhoods, take over politics, and enroll in white schools. Only 23 percent of Americans believed black people wanted to marry and/or have sexual relations with whites.
[67]
Clearly, we still had a long way to go.

It was only two years earlier, in January of 1962, that Birmingham’s Bull Connor had refused to desegregate the city’s public facilities. He chose the extreme of closing down the city’s sixty-eight parks, thirty-eight playgrounds, six swimming pools, and four golf courses rather than allowing black people to enjoy them.
[68]

“Federal meddling,” Connor had remarked. Along with the other two city commissioners, Jabo Waggoner and Art Hanes, Connor bought concrete and poured it in the golf course holes.

Things were changing in the South. But slowly.

* * *

That autumn, on October 14, 1964, I heard that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating a policy of nonviolence.

Surely he deserves it
, I thought.

King traveled to Oslo, Norway, and on December 10, 1964, delivered his acceptance speech. I had always loved and admired Dr. King, and when I read his speech, that love and admiration deepened.

“I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace,” Dr. King said, “at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a Civil Rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.”

He continued, “I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.”

Dr. King ended his speech with both a question and a statement: “Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize. . . . Most of these people will never make the headlines and their names will not appear in
Who’s Who
. Yet when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live—men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization—because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.”
[69]

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. . . .

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. . . .

We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.

Let me close by saying that I have the personal faith that mankind will somehow rise up to the occasion and give new directions to an age drifting rapidly to its doom. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. . . . “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.
[70]

These humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake
, I repeated to myself over and over. When Dr. King said those words, I thought of all those courageous souls who had died to help make Dr. King’s dream come true for my people—Cynthia, Carole, Denise, Addie, John F. Kennedy, Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, and many others throughout the ages. Other names would soon join the list of martyrs: Jimmy Lee Jackson, an impoverished, black, twenty-six-year-old advocate of equal voting rights, killed on February 18, 1965, by an Alabama state trooper during a small protest in Marion, Alabama; James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, who on Dr. King’s invitation traveled to Selma, Alabama, and was beaten to death by a mob of white men in March 1965; and others. I wondered about the safety of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the fearless Civil Rights advocate and the pastor of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church. Would he, too, become a martyr? And I worried about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before someone kills Dr. King, too
, I thought.

On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, ending the practice of requiring literacy, knowledge, or character tests (administered solely to African-Americans) to keep them from registering to vote. Within a year, 450,000 Southern blacks successfully registered to vote for the first time.
[71]

* * *

In the fall of 1965, I left Birmingham and traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to go to college. Rather than fight possible racial roadblocks, I enrolled at all-black Fisk University, as my parents had suggested. I enjoyed my classes and my professors. But I found it difficult to study and concentrate like I once had. Ever since the church bombing, I had lost my enthusiasm for school.

The gloom and depression that constantly tormented my soul deepened. I wanted to be alone. I attended few social gatherings and made few friends. Sleep was one of the few things that helped me escape the world, and I tried to sleep a lot. But deep sleep continued to elude me and was proving to have been a prebombing gift. I often sat under an isolated tree on a distant part of campus and wrote in my journal. Writing seemed to help me make some sense out of life. But my written ponderings came from a dark, depressed heart. I wrote of pain and suffering and death. I saved those writings—they now sit in a box on a closet shelf—and to this day it still hurts me to read them. I’ve never shared them with anyone, not even my husband.

During those college years, I discovered that a glass or two of wine took the edge off my inner pain and helped me forget. I shared my deep pain with no one but God. Few of my classmates or professors knew of my church-bombing experience or any of the other traumatic events from my childhood. I just didn’t talk about any of it. Drink would eventually become my friend, my artificial comforter. I never would have imagined where this drinking would lead. I was too wrapped up in finding a way to ease the pain and depression—in making myself feel happy, at least for a while. It would take me a long time to realize that the relief a drink brought was always temporary and that the pain and depression always returned. It was not a permanent fix.

I wasn’t sure if my open and bleeding wound would ever heal.