"Who's Really Guilty?"

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the more tragic moments of the civil rights movement — the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the deaths of four little girls inside.

Birmingham had a long history of racial violence, of course. The city suffered fifty different dynamitings of homes, businesses and churches between 1947 and 1965, a staggering number that led many African Americans to call the city “Bombingham.”

In early 1963, as Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led protests against segregation and discrimination in the city, the violence of white supremacy was put on full display, not just in terms of the Klansmen who bombed buildings under the cover of night but also in the broad-daylight brutality of the supposed “Public Safety Commissioner” Bull Connor who rode around town in a white assault vehicle as his underlings deployed police dogs and fire hoses on schoolchildren.

But the Birmingham protests had been successful, both in securing the local demands of the movement there and in elevating the civil rights struggle to a cause of national importance. President John F. Kennedy, who told aides he had been sickened by the scenes of violence there, introduced the Civil Rights Act in June 1963 and, two months later, the nation witnessed the power of the civil rights movement when activists convened for the March on Washington to lobby for the bill.

The optimism of the summer was quickly dashed only weeks later, however, by the church bombing back in Birmingham.

Sixteenth Street Baptist had served as a rallying point for activists during the spring protests, becoming a visible icon of the struggle in the eyes of supporters and opponents alike. In the early hours of September 15th, four members of the United Klans of America placed fifteen sticks of dynamite under the church with a timer attached.

The bomb went off shortly before the 11 o’clock services. The powerful blast blew through the neighborhood. A passing driver was tossed out of his moving car, while another man making a call on payphone was blown through the open door of a dry cleaner’s, the ripped-off receiver still clutched in his hand.

The church itself was devastated, with a seven-foot hole blown out of the back wall and huge crater smoking where a massive stone foundation and brick wall had once stood. In an eerie detail, debris from the explosion had blown out the face of Jesus Christ from a stained glass window.

Some deacons and church members ventured inside the wreckage, coming across blood-spattered leaflets that featured a child’s prayer: “Dear God, we are sorry for the times we were so unkind.” The services that Sunday had been dedicated to “Youth Day,” with children set to take part in the grown-ups’ ceremonies.

They soon discovered that four little girls, who had been in the basement, changing into their Sunday best for the services, had been killed in the blast: fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, and eleven-year-old Carol Denise McNair. (For more on the lives of these young girls and their families, I highly recommend Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls.)

As a crowd gathered to pull the girls' bodies from the rubble of the church, a group of white teens with a Confederate flag and a sign saying "Go Back to Africa" taunted them. Some of African American teens responded by throwing stones, trying to chase them away from the scene. At this point, the police intervened and tried to apprehend some of the black teens. A sixteen-year-old black boy ran away from them, and was shot in the back by a shotgun blast. 

At the same time, across town, another pair of white boys pulled up alongside two young black boys who were riding their bikes.  One of the white boys pulled out a pistol, put two bullets into a thirteen-year-old's head and chest, and drove away.

The violence in Birmingham that day — both the bombing itself and the cruel ripples of callous racist violence that came after it — served as a stark reminder for activists that, despite their many successes of the spring and summer, they still had a long way to go.

For some whites, meanwhile, the Sixteenth Street Church Bombing brought a different kind of reckoning.

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” MLK had called out self-styled white moderates who disdained the Klan but did little to stop them, who stood on the sidelines as children were assaulted by police dogs and fire hoses, who clucked their tongues about “law and order” and “outside agitators.” It was a powerful challenge, but one that fell on deaf ears throughout much of the South.

The bombing brought that challenge home again, and much more directly. The day after the bombing, when the white establishment held a meeting to try and figure out how to respond, a young lawyer named Charles Morgan delivered one of the most remarkable speeches of the entire struggle.

“Who’s really guilty?” he asked. “Each of us.”