That afternoon, around one o’clock, Carole’s mother, Mrs. Alpha Robertson, phoned Mama.
“Is your Carolyn at home?” she asked.
“Yes, Alpha,” Mama told her. “Carolyn is here with me.”
“Well,” she said, “if your Carolyn is home, maybe my Carole went home with somebody from church.”
That afternoon my family and I all stayed around the house, not talking about much of anything. No one mentioned the Cavalettes’ meeting, but there was an unspoken understanding that we wouldn’t meet that day. Everything just seemed to freeze in time.
Around four o’clock that afternoon the telephone again interrupted our silence. Mama answered, then told us the news she had just received.
“There were four girls in the restroom who never made it out,” she said. “They’re all dead.” She touched me on the shoulder as she told me this news. Mama didn’t cry, but she seemed very sad—a soft kind of sadness. She didn’t say it, but I imagine she was grateful I was still alive—that all three of her children who were at church were alive. And I’m sure she was also thanking God for bringing her children home safely.
My mind was whirling. In the restroom? No, it can’t be. I was just in there. I didn’t see anyone. And I didn’t hear anything.
“They found them buried under a pile of rubble,” Mama said.
“Who were they, Mama?” I asked.
“Addie, Denise, Carole, and Cynthia.”
No! No! No! It can’t be! I’d spoken to them seconds before the bomb exploded. I’d stood right there and talked with them.
“Some woman claims she saw Tommy Blanton’s Chevrolet parked a block from the church around two o’clock this morning. Said she saw three white men in the car, and one of them was ‘Dynamite Bob’ Chambliss.”
Little did I know that the loss of those girls was, ironically, the real beginning of hope for blacks and whites in Birmingham. Their blood—the “blood of the innocents”—had spilled on the hands of Birmingham’s people. And now, finally, the whole world was watching.
Chapter 5
Life Is But a Vapor
* * *
Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
James 4:14
Four or more who were attending Sunday School at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the day of Sorrow and Shame were killed. Their bodies were stacked up on top of each other like bales of hay from the crumbling ruins left by the dynamiting. They were girls. They were children. . . . Those who died in the September 15 bombing also died serving the Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified. This will be an unforgettable day in our nation, in world history, in the new rebellion of which the Confederate flags seem to symbolize. Yet, if members of the Negro group pour into the churches on Sunday, stream to the voter-registration offices, make their dollars talk freedom, and build up a better leadership, those children might not have died in vain.
“Killers of the Innocents—Commentary,” Birmingham World, September 18, 1963
When the words came out of Mama’s mouth, I think my heart stopped beating. I could barely breathe. My whole body went suddenly numb.
“Addie? Denise? Carole? And Cynthia?” I asked.
Mama nodded.
“My best friend, Cynthia? Dead? Are you sure, Mama?”
Mama just nodded her head.
Images of Cynthia raced through my mind. We had planned to meet that very afternoon with the Cavalettes club members. This was the day we were going to pay for our matching caps and T-shirts.
Does this mean I won’t ever see her again or talk with her on the phone?
The girls are gone, dead. I repeated the words over and over in my mind, as if trying to convince myself. The girls are gone, dead.
Mentally I retraced my steps from that morning. With a jolt, I remembered the phone call. “Three minutes,” the male caller had said. In the aftermath, we learned that the bomb had blown a seven-foot-high, three-foot-deep hole in the restroom wall. It had also demolished the stairs—the steps I had climbed only seconds before the blast.
I struggled to let the awful news sink in. My friends were lying dead under all that mess of rubble? They were there, under the debris in the bathroom?
Don’t think about it, Carolyn, an inner voice warned.
But if I had stayed in the bathroom one minute longer to talk . . .
Put it out of your mind, Carolyn, the voice urged.
Or if I had left my own Sunday school class just two minutes later . . . I sucked in a breath. I would have died in the bathroom with those girls.
My brush with death had been close. Terrifyingly close. The realization was too painful to mention out loud, and almost unbearable to think about.
I am alive and safe at home. But they are gone, dead.
* * *
It was several months before I found out that Sarah Collins, Addie’s sister, had also been in that restroom. Sarah later related to me her account of what happened that morning. “I couldn’t see anything,” she said. The flying glass had penetrated Sarah’s eyes. She ended up being hospitalized for two months, losing one eye completely and retaining only partial vision in the other. She would never be the same again.
A few moments after the blast, Sarah had called out for her sister: “Addie! Addie! Addie?” When she heard no response, she called out again, louder this time. “Addie!” Sarah imagined the other girls had run off and left her. She didn’t know they lay just a few feet from her . . . dead beneath the rubble.
Mr. Rutledge, a deacon in our church, heard Sarah’s cries and moans. He followed the sound of her voice and rushed into the restroom. He found Sarah entombed in debris, about five feet from the rest of the girls’ bodies. He lifted her up and carried her to a waiting ambulance outside. In the hospital that day, there was one glimmer of hope in the midst of so much tragedy: a little black girl with pieces of glass penetrating her face did not have to experience the same treatment my grandmother had just a few years earlier. Thanks to the courage of a white nurse named Jim Jones, the whites-only University Hospital admitted Addie, purposely and intentionally breaking segregation rules.
Two more deacons ran inside the restroom. They dug through the rubble with their bare hands. Other church members, however, stayed a good distance back. They were afraid to go into the restroom, assuming the Klan had prepared a second charge of dynamite and more deadly bombs would follow the first explosion after a crowd had formed.
While the deacons clawed at the pile of broken glass and bricks, Reverend prayed aloud that another bomb had not been planted and that God would keep them safe.
Soon someone saw a hand sticking out from the debris. They kept digging until they uncovered each girl. The girls lay lifeless on top of each other in a pile that resembled stacked-up firewood. One by one their bodies were lifted from the rubble.
From what I heard later, the blast had rendered the girls’ bodies unrecognizable. Cynthia’s head was dismembered from the rest of her body. Her family identified her by the birthstone ring found on her finger.
A large, sharp stone had embedded itself in Denise’s skull during the explosion. At the morgue, Denise’s mother removed the rock and took it home with her. She placed it in a glass case and kept it for years in the family’s photography studio.
Shortly after the bombing, the FBI summoned my friend Junie Collins to accompany them. Her parents weren’t home when the agents came, and since Junie was the oldest child in the family, it fell to her to assume adult-level responsibility. She thought she was going to see her sister, Addie, in the hospital. Instead, they took her to the morgue to identify Addie’s body. Junie later told me, “If my life depended on it, I couldn’t say this was my sister. But then I saw this little brown shoe—like a loafer—on her foot. And I knew it was Addie.”
I did not see the bodies, but in the coming days I read the paralyzing and chilling descriptions in the newspaper. I sh
ook my head and covered my eyes, attempting to remove the horrible images from my mind. I didn’t want to know the gruesome details. But it was too late—over the long years since the bombing, the painful images have continued to recall themselves to me.
* * *
My family and I were in shock. Complete disbelief. Over the course of the evening—through phone calls, the radio, and the evening news—we pieced together what had happened that morning. The story surfaced in bits and pieces, like segments of a strange puzzle.
We sat at home in stunned silence.
Someone had turned on the television. We turned it off because we couldn’t continue to watch the news. I felt more frightened than ever. An air of woe and doom came over me. A voice inside my head kept telling me, They missed you this time, Carolyn. But the girls are dead. You were there—you talked with them right before they died.
At that moment, the bombings in Birmingham took on a new twist for me. People were dead. And these were people I knew! The racial situation had now become very real and very personal.
My young, innocent mind made another powerful note: It happened in my church! Church had always been a special place, a haven where we worshiped God. It was his place—a spot reserved each week just for God.
My parents had drilled into our brains the sacredness of God’s house. “In church, we don’t run,” they explained with definite seriousness in their voices. “We don’t chew gum. We don’t eat food. We don’t talk loud. We don’t play. Church is a place where we show respect and reverence.”
Instead we had people planting bombs in our church and my friends dying there.
Until that moment, I had not understood the depth of the volatility between blacks and whites in Birmingham. I could not fathom the extent of the hatred some whites had for black people.
Oh, I knew about segregation, about the protests and marches down city streets, about black people trying to get the “whites only” and “coloreds” signs taken down from restroom doors, restaurants, train stations, and city buses. But I had always felt protected by my father, my grandfather, my brothers, and my church. Before September 15, 1963, I didn’t know to worry about dying because of my skin color. But the thought kept echoing and refused to leave my mind: People will actually kill us over this! What is this thing about skin?
And I felt helpless because I was just a child and I couldn’t change anything.
* * *
That Sunday evening Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wired President Kennedy from Atlanta, telling him he was going to Birmingham to plead with blacks to remain nonviolent. He added that unless “immediate Federal steps are taken,” there will be “in Birmingham and Alabama the worst racial holocaust this Nation has ever seen.”[8] President Kennedy was yachting off Newport, Rhode Island, and was notified of the bombing by radiotelephone. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief Civil Rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham, along with twenty-five FBI agents and bomb experts from Washington, D.C.[9]
Dr. King also wired Governor George Wallace: “The blood of four little children . . . is on your hands,” he wrote. “Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”[10]
Twelve days later, on September 27, Time magazine placed on its front cover the steel-cold, angry face of Governor George Wallace with the inscription “Alabama: Civil Rights Battlefield.” In the background, the editors placed the photograph of the church’s stained-glass window with the kind face of Jesus blown clean away.
* * *
Before darkness fell on the night of September 15, the reverend and his deacons closed the front doors of the wonderful old Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. For the following eight months, the congregation met to worship in the nearby L. R. Hall Auditorium. Money and donations poured into the church from all over the world. Local contractor L. S. Gaillard worked hard to make the needed repairs to the church. He did everything he could to make it a sturdy building—a safe place for young black girls in white Sunday dresses to once again worship God.
Jesus’ stained-glass face was also remade and set back in the window. I have no idea why only Christ’s face was blown away in the explosion—I have to wonder if perhaps that’s just the way God allowed it to happen. Now, thanks to careful restoration, Jesus again looks down upon his congregation with kind, loving eyes.
But as a remembrance of that morning, the reverend and his deacons decided to leave two damaged things in the church untouched and unrepaired. One was the antique clock on the sanctuary wall. In the midst of the bombing, the old timepiece stayed attached to the wall, its glass case intact and undisturbed. But for some reason its faithful tick and accurate hands stopped dead at the exact moment of the blast—10:22. Nearly five decades later, the clock—in unmoving silence—tells the story to worshipers and to pilgrims who walk through the church doors.
The girls’ restroom—the place where the bomb exploded—has also remained frozen in time. After the bombing it was simply sealed up. A wall was built in front of the restroom door as if to say, “Forget that it happened!”
But some of us refuse to forget. We will forever worship on sacred and holy ground.
* * *
Slipping into bed that night, I felt sick. I was afraid to close my eyes. So I started to sing:
All along this Christian journey,
I want Jesus to walk with me.
I want Jesus to walk with me.
All along this Christian journey,
I want Jesus to walk with me.
In my troubles, walk with me.
When I’m dying, walk with me.
All along this Christian journey,
I want Jesus to walk with me.
I want Jesus to walk with me.
Is this going to continue? I asked myself late that night as I scooted deeper under the blankets. Will this wave of killing and bombs ever end?
The thought of death and bombs frightened me. I felt powerless to do anything about the hatred and violence in this city—my city.
My inner voice spoke loud and clear to me: Carolyn, it’s not if you will get blown up and killed by a bomb, but when. It’s just a matter of time, and then it will be your turn. One day a bomb will explode, and you will not escape it. Like Denise, Addie, Carole, and Cynthia.
I finally drifted off into a troubled, restless sleep. Darkness engulfed Birmingham, Alabama, on that tragic day of sorrow and shame. And a heavy, incomprehensible dark cloud of depression and sadness settled over my own head and heart—a nightmarish web of memories that would hover over me for many years to come.
The following week I went to Fred Singleton’s sporting-goods store. With my saved-up money, I bought Cynthia’s gold cap and shirt. Her name, “Cynthia,” was printed in black letters on the front of the shirt, and the letter C, for Cavalettes, was printed on the back. I gave the cap and shirt to Cynthia’s mother, Mrs. Wesley. I realize now it was a small token, but it was my way of saying how important Cynthia was to me—to all of us. Almost five decades later, I still have my gold cap. It hurts me to look at it.
* * *
We had had unsolved bombings for years in my city. Bombs exploded, and the city of Birmingham went on with business as usual. No arrests were made, so there were no convictions. We heard no public apologies, few empathetic speeches from the white community. No one sent letters of righteous indignation or sympathy. A bomb exploded, and it proved just another day in the life of Birmingham Negroes.
We knew that on any day, at any time, a bomb might explode. After a blast the phone would ring, and the caller would tell us the bomb’s location. Our family would spend the rest of the evening quiet and somber, often in prayer, contemplating such a depth of hatred and depravity. Black people somehow adapted to the blasts—the destroyed homes, businesses, and churches. It was our way of life, a cross that each of us thought we had to bear.
Lord, can we really bear this cross?
It was one thing to turn our heads when a building had been smashed. But now four girls had died.
This event proved a pivotal point in my life and in my church, and in the nation as well.
On the day after the church bombing, a young, white Birmingham attorney, Charles Morgan Jr., publicly blamed the pillars of the city for the girls’ deaths. “Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” Mr. Morgan said.
He blamed politicians who catered to racist votes, newspaper editors who fueled the racial tension, and church and business leaders who refused to take responsibility for the pervasive racial hatred in the city. “We all did it,” he said. “Every one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and for the one last month, last year, a decade ago. We all did it.”
Then he added, “Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.”
The speech destroyed his budding law practice, led to death threats against his family, and got him run out of town.[11]
* * *
Scripture tells us that life is but a vapor (see James 4:14, NKJV). The morning of the bombing my friends and I had looked forward to a Sunday afternoon Cavalettes club meeting. Just that morning I had spoken with them face-to-face. But now they were gone. With a sudden explosion, like an invisible breath or vapor, four young girls simply vanished. I was overwhelmed with disbelief. This feeling would last a long time. I tried hard to process what happened at church on my own, attempting to put everything together, to make sense of it all. But it would get worse for me before it got better.
Chapter 6
Four Little Coffins
* * *
The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And so this afternoon in a real sense [the four girls who died] have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
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