Nineteen sixty-three, the year of the March on Washington and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s greatest speech, was as pivotal in American history as 1863, the year of Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation. It is easy, gazing backward, to see that year as a great milestone in an inexorable march toward justice and equality, from Emmett Till to Rosa Parks to Barack Obama.
Easy, but incomplete. That is why it is helpful to pause to remember how difficult the path was, how uncertain, by recalling the terrifying moment that occurred 50 years ago Sunday, not even three weeks after "I Have a Dream." It was the bombing in Birmingham, Ala., of the 16th Street Baptist Church. That act of homegrown terrorism, which killed four young girls, sent a brutal message that the old order had no intention of surrendering and would not go down without bloodshed.
"Carry Me Home," Diane McWhorter's epic history of Birmingham in the civil rights struggle, tells the story in chilling detail — of Klansmen plotting, their ties to the police and the power structure giving them the reasonable expectation of getting away with murder. In fact, the investigation languished and nobody went to jail for more than a decade. The last bomber was convicted in 2002.
The church today stands as solid as ever, across from a civil rights institute and from Kelly Ingram Park, ground zero for protests and the atrocities of Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses. The city has planned a full day of remembrance and prayer on Sunday, along with a food festival and music. The commemorators have every right to blend somber and light as they mark a half-century of progress. But it's worth remembering a point Ms. McWhorter has powerfully made: the civil rights struggle was not simply a victory of good over evil, of the righteous defeating the Klansmen who gave "Bombingham" its bloody reputation. The struggle was good against "normal" — against the segregation that was seen as the natural order of things, buttressed by government, tradition and the law. In this, Dr. King and his allies were the radicals.
The most radical thing was their willful commitment to peace as a weapon for change and as a check on justified rage. The clouds from the dynamite blast had not even cleared when the Rev. John Cross stood before a furious crowd on the church's front steps and said, "We should be forgiving as Christ was forgiving." Then he handed a megaphone to the Rev. Charles Billups, who said: "Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed. We must have love in our hearts for these men."
Soon afterward, the bodies of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were uncovered in the rubble of what had been the women's washroom. Shrouded in dust, "they looked like old women." Addie Mae, Carole and Cynthia were 14, and Denise was 11.
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