Revisiting the 16th Street Baptist Church
This past summer, Keith Rice visited Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and here he chronicles his experience in the third installment of his trip to the U.S. South to celebrate and support African American History. Although we have already posted John Kouns’s photographs of the bombing on a previous post, we decided to add unpublished images of the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the church in 1963. We also include a short passage of the new book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, by Peniel Joseph, describing the immediate reaction in Birmingham to provide context to John’s visual record.
16th Street Baptist Church, Part 3
By Keith Rice
I returned to Birmingham on August 28th as planned. I returned to Kelly Ingram Park, which is across the street from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and 16th Street Baptist Church. Located on the corner of the park closest to the church is Four Spirits, a moving sculpture of the four young girls who lost their innocent lives to the evils of white supremacy. The sculpture is based on the recollections of bombing survivor Sarah Collins, the fifth girl who was in the same area, and the sister of Adie Mae Collins, who was killed in the blast.
There is no greater example of the hypocrisy of the United States than what took place in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As of 1963, Black people were still fighting for their unalienable rights in this country. In a world where white supremacy exists, there is no code of honor as to where battle can be waged, as Black people continue to be assassinated in the holiest of spaces. I managed to hold back tears of sadness and anger as I walked the grounds of Kelly Ingram Park and walked through the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but it was impossible during the guided tour of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Even as I write this article, tears well up.
It is a miracle that the 16th Street Baptist Church still stands. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, white supremacists planted 19 sticks of dynamite in the basement of the church. It detonated at 10:22 a.m., killing Cynthia Wesley, Carol Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, blinding Sarah Collins in one eye and injuring many others. During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous homegrown terrorist bombings occurred in Birmingham to discourage desegregation. The city was often referred to as “Bombingham.” Major damage occurred on the 16th street/north side of the church. In 1977, Robert Chambliss was found guilty of the murder of Carol Denise McNair and sentenced to life imprisonment. Thomas Edwin Blanton was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Unfortunately, these were not the only racially motivated murders that happened in Birmingham on September 15, 1963. Often left out of the story are the murders of Black teenagers Johnny Robinson, 16, and Virgil Ware, 13, both killed in the aftermath of the bombing. Policeman Jack Parker shot and killed Robinson for throwing rocks at a car draped in a Confederate flag. Parker was not prosecuted. White boys Michael Farley and Larry Sims mistook Virgil Ware for one of the boys throwing rocks, so Farley handed Sims a gun and told him to shoot Ware. Sims shot and killed Ware. Both were convicted of second-degree manslaughter, suspended sentence, and two years of probation.
The Wales Window for Alabama was constructed by Welsh artist John Petts. Donations from the Welsh public paid for the construction of the artwork in Wales, and its delivery and installation at the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was intended to replace one of the windows destroyed in the bombing. Instead, the window was installed over the front door of the church. The docent stated that the stained-glass window depicts a Black Christ with his right arm pushing away hatred and injustice, the left extended in an offering of forgiveness.
John Kouns and the 16th Street Baptist Church
By José Luis Benavides
Sixty-two years before Keith visited Birmingham, photographer John Kouns started a self-financed sabbatical by traveling to the March on Washington in August, and later to Birmingham, Selma, and New Orleans. “I was in a Unitarian church in Alabama, in Birmingham,” he recalls in an oral history interview. Kouns used the Unitarian church as an “oasis” because having California plates on his car made him a target in the South. He was at the Unitarian church when the minister announced the bombing. Kouns then decided to drive to the church and take photographs. So far, we have been unsuccessful in securing funding to make John’s images—an important visual record of this struggle in the South—digitally available. Here, we offer some of them, hoping people or institutions interested in this rich material will support our educational efforts (contact us or donate directly).
In his new book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, Historian Peniel Joseph describes how the bombing turned the city “into a kind of war zone. The force of the blast destroyed five cars in the back of Sixteenth Street Baptist, two of them appeared crushed ‘like a toy.’”
Historian Joseph continues: “Black and Confederate-flag-waving white youth waged rock fights from street corners. Police fired shotguns over the heads of waves of surging Negro demonstrators, who responded by retreating to the back street while lobbing rocks and pieces of glass picked up from the bomb debris. Five hundred national guardsmen stood on alert, and three hundred Alabama state troopers armed with pistols, rifles, carbines, and shotguns represented an occupying army in a city under siege.”
