Sixty years ago this month, the bomb explosion of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham shocked the nation and the world. Photographer John Kouns was in Birmingham on that day, and he captured important moments of the aftermath, some of which we offer you in this newsletter. Thanks to the support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we finished digitizing the Richard Cross’s collection but due to the pandemic, we were unable to show those images to the communities he documented. Now, Dr. Giovanni Batz has done that—he curated an exhibition of Richard’s images of the Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s that he brought to Chajul, Guatemala. We hope to continue and expand this collaboration with Dr. Batz and the Maya Ixil people there and here in California. Also, Richard’s digital archive of Palenque de San Basilio was shown via Zoom to people from the community and to Colombian scholars and curators working to establish the Museo Afro de Colombia. Lastly, we published Part 1 of the Farmworker Oral History Dramatization, a film series directed by Professor Doug Kaback, using photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns as a background to the actors's monologues.
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
By José Luis Benavides
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls and injuring more than 20 others. The four girls who were killed were Addie Mae Collins (14 years), Denise McNair (11 years), Carole Robertson (14 years), and Cynthia Wesley (14 years). The church was seen as a symbol and rallying place for civil rights activism. There were at least 20 prior bombings in Birmingham since the destruction of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s home in December 1956. Four Ku Klux Klan members were responsible for the church bombing. It took 38 years to bring them to justice. Photographer John Kouns was in Birmingham on the day of the bombing. While he was attending service at the Unitarian Church that morning, the minister announced the bombing. “I got in my Volkswagen bus,” he recalled in an oral history, “and drove down to the church and took some photographs.”
On September 17th, Kouns photographed the private funeral of Carole Robertson, and the next day, he photographed the public funeral service for Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. An estimated 800 clergymen and more than 8,000 people attended the funeral. “The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to the dark city,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the church service. Other members of the movement advocated for additional actions after the bomb explosion. Rev. Shuttlesworth unsuccessfully advocated for a march to Montgomery to place a funeral wreath at the Alabama statehouse. Diane Nash, also unsuccessfully, proposed recruiting and training young people across Alabama toward the goal of laying siege to Governor Wallace’s state government, according to historian Taylor Branch.
Photo Exhibition in Chajul
By Giovanni Batz
On August 17, 2023, the Maya Ixil Museum in Chajul, Guatemala inaugurated the photo exhibition entitled Chajul: Fotografías de Richard Cross durante el Conflicto Armado (Chajul: Photographs during the armed conflict by Richard Cross). This past year, through José Luis Benavides and Marta Valier at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, I became aware of the Richard Cross (1950-1983) archive. I would come to find out that Cross was a photographer who took pictures in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia, among other places. He visited Chajul in the early 1980s and took the photographs featured in the exhibition. He died in Honduras on June 21, 1983.
My research is based in the Ixil Region, consisting of the towns of Chajul, Cotzal, and Nebaj, where in the 1980s, state-sponsored genocide and massacres occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). Cross’ photographs in Chajul and Guatemala capture the daily harsh realities of life during the war, from the military occupation of churches to the forced training of civil patrolmen. One photograph demonstrates how Catholic saints inside a church were dressed in military outfits, while others show armed soldiers patrolling inside the bell tower and the town.
The Maya Ixil Museum was founded in 2007 and serves to maintain the historical memory of local communities. During the inauguration, Felipe Rivera Caba, the coordinator of the museum, and I were interviewed by the Ixil Maya news collective, Tiichajil K’usal, where we discussed the museum and the photo exhibition with local listeners and viewers. Some of the attendees who lived through the war noted that while the war and images at the exhibition could bring up painful memories, they were important to the historical memory of their communities. One attendee stated that while she was not born until after the war, the pictures were crucial in visualizing the stories that people have told her.
I served as the curator of the photo exhibition and provided additional copies to community members. The pictures were printed and kindly donated by Zbignew Banach. Special thanks to José Luis Benavides, Marta Valier and Monika Banach for supporting the photo exhibition. We hope that the exhibition is the seed of a new beginning of collaboration between the Maya Ixil Museum and the Richard Cross collection at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center. To contact the Maya Ixil Museum, you can email them at: comitedecofradia@yahoo.es.
Giovanni Batz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of the book La Cuarta Invasión (2022). Batz is an alumnus of CSUN where he obtained his B.A. in Political Science and Minor in History in 2008.
Museo Afro de Colombia
Last week, we were invited to join a session of the Study Group for the Museo Afro de Colombia’s Project. The group is formed by scholars, curators of Colombia’s National Museum working on this project, and community members from San Basilio de Palenque. We conducted a presentation titled: A Virtual Tour of the Archive of Images of San Basilio de Palenque from the Richard Cross Photographic Collection. Members of the community attended the event, including young people who had created a community archive. This is the first of what we hope will be a continuing engagement with the people of Palenque, something the pandemic years made impossible for us to do while working on these photographs. We include here some images of the presentation and we will prepare for distribution of the video recorded by the Study Group. We obviously thank all the members of the Study Group, and Guillermo Camacho in particular, for making this possible.
Farmworker Oral history Dramatization. Part 1: Joining the Union
This film series, directed by Professor Doug Kaback, is a dramatization of selected segments of several oral histories of participants of the Farmworker Movement. It uses photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns as a background to the actors's monologues, providing visual context to the stories. In Part 1, Bobby de la Cruz (Jesús Venegas Vázquez) tells how he and his mother, Jessie de la Cruz, joined the movement.; Carmen Hernández (Alejandra Guzmán) tells how all her siblings did chores to help her parents, Fina and Julio, who were active in the union; the Saludado sisters, María and Antonia, (Ruby Hernández and Eileen Ávalos) recount their experience working in the fields and why their family joined the union. Joe Serda (Aldeir Vázquez) explains how his family experience in the fields and his daughter's activism made him realize he needed to join the union.
Stay tuned for a longer piece that will come next issue.