While the World Watched (18 page)

Chapter 20

The First Arrest

* * *

Their lives were taken by unknown parties on Sept. 15, 1963, when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed. May men learn to replace bitterness and violence with love and understanding.

Memorial plaque for the four slain girls,
engraved on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

We had lived in Atlanta for several years when Sears decided to transfer Jerome to Warner Robins, Georgia.

Not another move!
I cried, as I thought about another change.
This will mean finding another place to live, another church to join, new community clubs to keep me busy. I just don’t think I can . . .

The telephone interrupted my thoughts.

“Caroline,” my father said. “I’m glad I reached you.”

“What’s up, Daddy?” I asked, knowing he was excited about something. Whenever he called me Caroline, it meant he was feeling good about life in general or he was in the mood to talk.
Well, at least he’s not calling me girl-chil
d
!
I thought.

“Robert Chambliss is finally going to trial for Denise McNair’s murder,” he told me.

“No! I can’t believe it, Daddy! It’s been fourteen years since Denise’s death.”

“Bill Baxley, Alabama’s attorney general, reopened the case, and Chambliss’s own niece is testifying against him. He’s the first of the bombers to come to trial.”

“When is the trial?”

“September. Police arrested Chambliss at his home here in North Birmingham. Finally, girl-child, maybe we’ll see some justice done.”

I hung up the phone and said a silent prayer:
Thank you, God, that I don’t live in Birmingham.
I couldn’t bear hearing or reading about the bombing details and Denise’s horrible death once again. I was trying so hard to put that tragedy far behind me.

When the trial began, my father kept me informed about unfolding events at the Jefferson County Courthouse.

“I heard they called Reverend Cross as a witness,” he told me. “They also called Addie’s sister, Sarah, to testify.”

Oh, Sarah. I’m so sorry you had to hear all the gruesome details again. How could you sit in that witness chair and look in the face of the man who killed your sister?

I imagined scared little Sarah in front of the courtroom, having to look at Robert Chambliss and reliving all the horrors of September 15, 1963.

I could never do that!
I thought.
Never.

“Poor Sarah,” I told my father. “She’s been through so much already.”

“Yes, she has, bless her heart. Caroline, I also heard that Chambliss’s niece Elizabeth Cobbs came forward in court and told her story to the judge and jury.”

“Is she the woman who became a Methodist minister in Alabama?”

“Yes. She worked with the FBI shortly after the church bombing,” my father said. “Apparently, before the bombing Chambliss had told her, ‘Just wait until after Sunday morning. They’ll beg us to let them segregate!’”

“What did he mean?”

“I guess he and the other Klan members planted the church bomb to explode on that Sunday as a threat to stop us from integrating the public all-white schools in Birmingham.”

“Elizabeth Cobbs overheard Chambliss say that?”

“That’s what they’re claiming. Cobbs also told the jury that after the bomb went off, she heard Chambliss say, ‘It wasn’t meant to hurt anybody—it didn’t go off when it was supposed to.’”

“Really?”

“It sounds like maybe they set the timer wrong or something. But the jury was convinced he planted the bomb that murdered Denise and the other girls.”

There’s no way to know for sure about the intentions behind the bomb, but I now believe it wasn’t meant to take human lives. The bomb was homemade, and it would have been impossible to determine exactly when it would explode. Based on Chambliss’s best guess, it should have gone off around three or four in the morning, which would have prevented our congregation from meeting for church but would not have harmed anyone. As for the phone calls, no one knows if they were simply idle bomb threats with eerie timing or if they were true warnings from someone on the inside. Either way, though, the results were the same.

Two months later, on November 18, only two days after what would have been Denise’s twenty-sixth birthday, my father telephoned me again with news about the trial.

“Caroline, the judge found Robert Chambliss guilty of murdering Denise! And he was sentenced to life in prison. I also heard that after the sentencing, Chambliss told the judge, ‘Judge, I swear to God I didn’t bomb that church! I never bombed nothing!’”

“I wonder if the others will ever come to trial, Daddy. After all, it took fourteen years to bring Chambliss to justice.”

“I don’t know, Caroline.”

Daddy paused. “Do you remember what everyone used to call Robert Chambliss?”

“Yes, Daddy. We called him Dynamite Bob.”

“And girl-child, do you remember how I told you children, ‘You aren’t to go near the white house down the street, the one across the railroad tracks going toward ACIPCO?’”

“I remember, Daddy. That’s where Dynamite Bob lived.”

“And Caroline, did you know that Bobby Frank Cherry lived up there too?”

We had lived on 24th Avenue. If I walked north on 24th Avenue, turned left at the corner, and walked a mere six blocks, I’d be at Dynamite Bob’s house.

“Thanks for letting me know about the trial, Daddy.” I hung up the phone.

Now one of the church bombers has been arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison,
I thought.
But two bombers still walk the streets as free men: Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry.

I shivered when I envisioned the hate-filled Klan on the loose, posing a real threat against the nation’s homes, churches, and neighborhoods.

While in prison, Robert Chambliss penned a handwritten letter on Kilby Correctional Facility’s inmate stationery to the pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I still have a copy of his letter:

Feb. 20, 1978

Rev. Preacher, 16
th
Street Babtist [sic] Church, 16
th
Street 6
th
Ave. North, Birmingham, Ala.

Dear Pastor. Read this to your Congogation [sic]. I would kneel on my mothers grave [and] pray to you I’ve never bomed [sic] any thing [or] killed anybody or bin [sic] in Tommy Blanton’s car in my life so help me God. Bill Baxley sent his investagators [sic] to Detroit to get that woman [Elizabeth Cobbs] to come down here and sware [sic] lies on me. He flew up there in a National Guard plane showed her my picture and the picture of Tommy Blanton’s car [and] got her to sware [sic] I was in his car with [the] door open and she could idinefy [sic] me over 20 feet away by Dome Light. Paid her 100 000 dollars. The crazy woman wasn’t crazy. She was a C.I.A. Member. My wife’s niece ant [sic] nothing. The Methodist don’t ordain or licen [sic] women to preach. They coached her on what to say and paid her when it comes to the showdown. There will be 5 C. I. A. Members/Police or more Rev. Baxley is just after the colored votes. I hope a [sic] pray the colored people have got better since [sic] than to vote for him.

Yours truly.

R. E. Chambliss. Kilby Correctional Center Facility, Rt. 5-Box 125. Montgomery, Ala. 36109

Dynamite Bob Chambliss died in prison eight years later, on October 28, 1985. In 1994, his niece Elizabeth Cobbs (who had changed her identity and name to Petric Smith) wrote a book about her uncle, the trial, and the entire ordeal. The book was entitled
Long Time Coming
.

And indeed it was.

Chapter 21

Back to Birmingham

* * *

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

Jeremiah 17:9

Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

Robert F. Kennedy

We had lived in Warner Robins, Georgia, for only two years when Jerome received a notice that his company planned to relocate him. When I mentioned this to the girls, who were nine and five at the time, they were not happy. We had done this before, and we knew firsthand that leaving friends and familiar surroundings behind would not be easy. It was even harder this time because the girls were getting older and they wanted some sense of permanency and continuity in their lives.

We lived in a predominately white neighborhood in Warner Robins. We had wonderful neighbors and the girls had made lots of friends, so I was hesitant about another move so soon. This move would bring us to a total of five moves in ten years. Jerome told me we had two choices: we could move to Chicago or we could go to Birmingham.

I told him, “If you move to Chicago, you will move alone.”

It was meant to be funny, and we both laughed. But I was serious, too. A part of me longed for Birmingham. The city held painful memories for me, but there were also many good ones. It was still home, and I longed to go back.

Less than a month later, we packed up and prepared to move to Birmingham. I was excited. I remembered all the good times I’d had growing up in Birmingham—at home, in the community, and at church. I would find a house, get the girls comfortable and adjusted in their new schools, find a job, rejoin my church, and begin where I had left off back in 1971. My relationship with my parents was stronger now, too—they were both retired and had time to spend with the grandchildren. And on some level, I expected a brand-new Birmingham—a friendlier and more accommodating Birmingham, where my children could experience the freedom that had been lacking for me as a child. I anticipated taking my girls to all the public facilities that had been denied to me—libraries, parks, restaurants. I thought about the old segregation rules and how it was time to put my feelings of hurt and resentment to rest.

Once we moved and had settled in, I began thinking about a job. One Monday morning I took our local phone book and selected the names of ten major companies. I sent résumés and letters to each company and requested an interview. Three of the companies called me. In September 1978 I accepted a job with BellSouth, a major telecommunications company. It was fifteen years after the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and fourteen years after the Civil Rights Act, but this Birmingham company still had an almost totally white workforce. They were under court order to hire a certain number of black employees, but in my particular office, I was the only black person. I was shocked at how slowly things had progressed in the journey to equality. I suppose I wasn’t so much angry as disappointed.

I worked in the company’s tax division and loved the work. My peers were not particularly friendly, but I weathered their silence, their stares, their whispering, and even the “one-some” lunches. I came to work and focused strictly on the job I had been assigned. I made my family the focus and recipients of my intense energy. Nine months after I began working for BellSouth, our son, Brandon, was born. Talk about timing! Now I had three children, a full-time job, and parents and in-laws living close by. Life seemed complete, and I was happy—utterly worn out, but happy.

Not long after we moved, we had rejoined the church I loved so much—Sixteenth Street Baptist. My family and I attended faithfully. We walked down the aisle to the front of the church together and recommitted ourselves to God and to the church, just as I had done years before as a young girl. The congregation seemed genuinely glad to have us, and I was glad to be back. Over the coming years, I taught Sunday school and helped plan the church’s summer vacation Bible school. My girls went to the same Sunday school class I had gone to, and my parents were still there. The church asked me to play a major role each year when we formally remembered the September 15 bombing. In some ways, I felt I had never left Birmingham and the church at all.

But there were some significant changes at Sixteenth Street Baptist. For one thing, membership had decreased substantially in the past decade. Not many of the old members were still there—some had died, and others had moved on. The building itself was falling into disrepair. Other than the addition of an elevator, no renovations had been done since the ones immediately following the bombing. Still, it was home.

Before long, however, interracial incidents in my neighborhood interrupted my sense of peace and serenity. Jerome and I had chosen a home in an integrated neighborhood, some distance from where I’d grown up. But I quickly discovered that “integrated” was relative. First, I learned that the community swimming pool was private. In the predominantly white community in Georgia where we had previously lived, the swimming pool had also been private—available only to the community residents. Each new family—black or white—was welcome and was given a key to the pool and a copy of the rules. But in Birmingham, “private” had a different meaning. Here no people of color had access to this community pool. Only whites could join.

For several years Jerome took a different entrance in and out of our community to avoid driving by the segregated pool. Then we decided to borrow money and put in our own swimming pool. Ironically, our backyard pool became the “community pool.” That was all right with me. I knew God expected us to share his gifts with others, and we did.

Then I learned about another race-related problem in our city—the daily fights between black and white students on the city’s school buses. My children weren’t old enough to ride the school bus yet, but I knew that next year, if Leigh attended the public junior high school, she would be on one of those buses. I visited Jefferson County’s board of education and asked why there was a problem with fighting on the buses. I also asked, “What are you going to do to correct it?”

They told me the black and white children just “couldn’t seem to get along.”

So they came to a decision. They would run two buses—one for black children and one for white children. I was speechless—and angry! Later I heard that the problem on the buses came about because white students had boarded school buses wearing white sheets, mimicking the Ku Klux Klan, and black students had responded by trying to remove the sheets. Fights had broken out on the buses between the junior high school students.

Fighting among students proved even worse in the community high school. Black and white students carried mace and sprayed each other with it. They also fought during lunch and at other times. The local newspapers picked up the story, and parents started to maintain a vigilant presence at the school.

I couldn’t believe it. This was exactly what I had left behind in 1965! I hadn’t envisioned the same situation in Birmingham now for my own children to endure. I wanted what all parents expect for their children: for them to become happy, healthy, educated, productive citizens who contribute to American life in a positive, successful way. I wanted them to have a normal childhood—I didn’t want them to have to fight or march or try to justify who they were. It had been one thing to show patience during the marches in the 1960s, but I wasn’t sure I could be so calm when it concerned my children.

The following year I moved my children to private schools, where they attended for the remainder of their academic years. At these schools, the officials at least appeared to be fair and attentive to all the children, regardless of their color. This was something I desperately wanted for my children.

Ever since my return to Birmingham, I’d sensed a tension between two opposing mind-sets. One contingent in Birmingham seemed to make a serious effort to “leave the 1960s” and move forward to justice and equality for all citizens. But the other segment seemed intent on staying put—maintaining the old status quo. This saddened me, and I wondered whether we’d made the right decision in moving back to Birmingham. I knew what a tremendous price had been paid by the “innocents”—my friends—in the name of freedom. For their sakes, we couldn’t afford to settle for the status quo.

Still, I saw a renewed awareness of the racial unrest of the sixties as well as an interest in the Sixteenth Street Church bombing when I returned. Alabama newspaper and television reporters began to telephone me, asking for interviews. Soon I began receiving requests for interviews from other Southern states too.

For the first time Jerome became aware of how directly I had been engaged in Civil Rights activities in Birmingham. He knew what had happened in our city in the 1960s, but he hadn’t known how deeply involved I’d been. With little available to me in terms of post-trauma counseling and therapy, I had traveled this painful journey hand in hand with God alone.

“All along this Christian journey,” I had sung so many times, “I want Jesus to walk with me.” He had. And he’d also sent Jerome.

I have always believed, almost from the moment I met Jerome, that God sent him. Unlike many of my college friends, I was not looking for a husband when I enrolled in college. But Jerome and I discovered each other, and an unbreakable bond was created. He had a quiet yet gentle and responsible way about him—the opposite of myself. Surely God determined exactly what both Jerome and I needed in a mate, as he so often does in people’s lives.

We complemented each other in all the important ways and made a great team. Jerome affirmed and accepted me unconditionally, without demanding explanations. His acceptance proved essential, since my trust in people had been so badly damaged in my early years. Jerome became my greatest support.

Little did I know how much I would still need that support for the next task God had in mind for me.