The Day a Birmingham Church Was Bombed

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A couple of weeks ago, the nation paused to remember Dr. Martin Luther King's inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech that was given at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

That was certainly a great moment — an uplifting moment — in American history. But 2½ weeks later, in the truest sense of Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, there was an equal and opposite reaction.

Fifty years ago today, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. — which had been used as a meeting place for King and other civil rights leaders (and a gathering place for civil rights rallies) — was bombed during the Sunday School hour. Four black girls were killed. Three were 14 years old, and one was 11.

As much credit as one may be tempted to give King for the legislative and judicial triumphs of the civil rights movement of the '60s, it is my opinion that what happened 50 years ago today was the movement's critical moment.

There were still a few places in America in 1963 — as there are today — that were thought to be safe places to be — home, school, church. To attack one of any of these was to attack all such places in America — and thus it was an affront to nearly all Americans, whether they supported or opposed the civil rights cause, because nearly all Americans have homes (however modest), attend school and/or frequent a house of worship.

Martyrs are often necessary for truly transformational movements to achieve their objectives, and I think it was that way with the civil rights movement. King's speech was a tremendous high for supporters of the movement, but, as such things often do, it seems to me that it may have created a sense of complacency. The momentum of the movement may have stalled.

I don't know. It was before my time.

But, based on what I have read, in books and newspaper accounts, it was far from certain, in the aftermath of King's speech, that the Civil Rights Act would pass. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church restored the movement's momentum.

Sympathetic Americans were probably tempted to believe, after seeing King's speech, that the movement's triumphs were coming at an historically rapid clip, which may have led many to assume that supporting civil rights and voting rights legislation were no–brainers — while unsympathetic Americans may have felt a sense of urgency to stop what was perceived as a threat to a way of life.

In the aftermath of the bombing, many newspapers in the North lamented that they hadn't taken the movement as seriously as they should have. The Milwaukee Sentinel, for one, wrote in an editorial that "the hour is late and the situation is critical."

The bombing had the effect of ratcheting up sympathy and support for civil rights. On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was enacted, winning congressional approval by better than 2–to–1 margins in both the House and Senate.

It probably wouldn't surprise many 21st–century observers to know that most of the opposition in both chambers came from Southerners.

But it might surprise those observers to know that most of those Southerners were Democrats.

And it might also surprise those observers to know that, outside the South, nearly as many Republicans as Democrats supported the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

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George Wallace: No Middle Ground

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"There's some people who've gone over the state and said, 'Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation.' Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You're either for it, or you're against it. There's not any middle ground as I know of."

George Wallace
1962

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There are many people who, regardless of almost anything else they ever did or will do, will forever be linked to the American civil rights movement.

Some made only brief contributions to the movement's history; others were a part of the conversation for years.

George Wallace, who died 15 years ago today, was one of the latter.

Earlier this year, MSNBC's Chris Hayes asserted that Wallace had been a Republican. Hayes and I don't always see eye to eye on issues, but ordinarily we do agree on historical facts. This time? Well, I'm sorry, but he had his facts wrong.

His was an understandable assumption, I suppose. Most Southern states have been solidly Republican for many years, and Wallace probably would be a Republican if he was living and running for office.

(Wallace's son and namesake was elected state treasurer in Alabama as a Democrat, but he switched to the Republican Party a decade later and was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission.)

But George Wallace's time was the middle of the 20th century. Most successful Southern politicians were still Democrats, as they had been for more than a century.

If that sounds strange to 21st–century ears, remember that it was a time that was significantly different from today. In those days, both parties had liberals, conservatives and moderates. The parties are far more polarized today.

(I noticed in yesterday's Dallas Morning News that editor Sharon Grigsby wrote about "sorority racism" at the University of Alabama.

(With a black man in the White House for nearly five years now, it's been fashionable to toss around the accusation of racism at anyone who so much as disagrees with the president. I grew weary of that long ago. But that doesn't mean that I deny the existence of racism. I just think there are more important battles to fight than the ones that have been waged.

(This sorority thing falls in that category. I appreciate, as does Grigsby, the work that went into the Alabama student newspaper's article that exposed sorority racism on campus, but if the exclusive nature of the Greek system is the most egregious offense that one can find on the 'Bama campus, things are a lot better than they used to be.)

Wallace was probably best known for seeking the presidency as the nominee of his own political party, the American Independent Party, in 1968. Well, Wallace wasn't actually the founder of the party. That was Bill Shearer, a right–wing political activist who, along with his wife, founded the party to give Wallace, by that time the former governor of Alabama (existing state law prevented him from seeking re–election in 1966), a platform from which to campaign for the presidency.

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But his political story actually began some 30 years earlier when, as a 19–year–old, he contributed to his grandfather's campaign for probate judge. Seven years later, he was appointed one of Alabama's assistant attorneys general. About a year after that, he was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.

Ironically, considering the tone of his later political career, he was considered a moderate on racial issues in those days. But he shifted his politics after losing the Democratic nomination for governor to an avowed segregationist in 1958.

"I was outniggered," Wallace reportedly told Seymore Trammell, his 1958 campaign director, "and ... I will never be outniggered again."

(Such a pivotal moment in a politician's life story always sounded like satire to me — sort of like Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind.")

He gained national notoriety in 1963, when he pledged, in his inaugural address, to "toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny" as a tireless advocate of segregation. About six months later, he made what was largely a symbolic gesture when he made his "stand in the schoolhouse door" in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

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As I say, the value of the stand in the schoolhouse door was largely symbolic. There was Wallace, small of stature, trying to stand up to the big guys who were assaulting the beliefs and values of his state. He lost, but he was able to take credit for the attempt to defend the little guy.

"There was always a grand sense of persecution among the Wallace workers," wrote political historian Theodore H. White of the 1968 campaign, "a nearly religious faith that everyone was against them but the people, and that the saving of white America from the pointy–heads was a cause greater than politics."

And in the cauldron that was 1968, there was a time when Wallace was a serious contender for the presidency. Like Ross Perot in 1992, though, Wallace did best in the national polls when he said the least. But it simply wasn't in Wallace's nature to remain silent.

Thus, it was probably inevitable that he tumbled in the polls the more he opened his mouth.

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"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"

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His rhetoric was incendiary, and, ultimately, it appealed to only a small minority of American voters — too small even to force the race into the House of Representatives, where Wallace hoped to play kingmaker.

Nevertheless, his campaign was the most successful third–party effort in nearly 60 years; forty–five years later, he is still the last third–party candidate to win at least one state (he won five — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — worth 45 electoral votes).

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His national ambitions were dealt a permanent blow in 1972 when he was shot while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Wallace tried to win the nomination again in 1976, but by that time, another Southern politician, Jimmy Carter, had overtaken him in his regional base. Wallace's day had ended.

My memory is that, at the conclusion of the 1976 primary season, Wallace gracefully accepted the voters' verdict and told the nominee–to–be that he would support him in the general election campaign.

"It must have been one of the most difficult conversations Wallace had ever had to conduct, this telephone call to the man who had dashed his own presidential hopes and replaced him as the South's political hero," wrote Jules Witcover and Jack Germond in their book about the 1976 presidential campaign, "Marathon."

Wallace returned to Alabama. In 1982, after apologizing to the black voters of Alabama for his racist past, Wallace won his final term as governor. When that term ended in January 1987, he retired from public life.

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"I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

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I guess that was the great irony of George Wallace.

Nationally, I guess he was the poster child for bigotry and intolerance, but, in his judicial career before he ran for governor, Wallace was known as a liberal judge who treated everyone the same, regardless of race.

Wallace was an enigma in life, and he remains one 15 years after his death.

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Riding For Freedom

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It was on this day half a century ago that the "Freedom Riders," civil rights activists of all races and faiths, embarked on bus rides into the segregated American South.

The intention was to test the Supreme Court's decision the previous year in the Boynton v. Virginia case. The details of that case are not all that important; what is important is that the ruling essentially declared that segregation in public transportation was against the law.

I am no legal scholar, and someone who remembers those times might have a different take on it, but I always felt that ruling was not intended to be a social statement — well, not entirely. I felt it was mostly about the conduct of business.

It was made within the context of interstate travel, but it wound up having a much broader application to American life.

Segregation in places like waiting rooms and diners that served buses with passengers who crossed state lines was a violation of a mid–1950s ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC had not been enforcing its ruling, though, and Boynton v. Virginia was the Court's way of telling the ICC to clean up its act.

(It is also important to note, I think, that the majority opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black, an FDR appointee who is considered one of the most influential justices of all time. For a short time in his youth, Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan — apparently, for much the same reason as the late Sen. Robert Byrd.)

Civil rights activists saw an opportunity to draw attention to their cause, and they set out on the "Freedom Rides," starting on this day 50 years ago.

They drew a lot more than attention. The reactions in the South were violent, brutal. I grew up in the South, and there are many things about this region of which I am proud. But its history in racial relations is not one of them.

Later this month, when PBS broadcasts a documentary on the Freedom Riders, I presume you can see archival footage of burning buses and passengers who were savagely beaten by mobs in the Deep South.

(If you don't want to wait nearly two weeks until PBS shows its documentary, NPR has posted photographs from LIFE magazine.)

The footage I have seen is horrific enough. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to witness in person.

The destination of the original Freedom Riders was New Orleans, but, as Katy Reckdahl writes for the New Orleans Times–Picayune, they didn't get that far.

However, they inspired a movement that involved more than 400 Freedom Riders on more than 60 excursions into the South in 1961.

Angela Tuck writes, in the Atlanta Journal–Constitution, that the Freedom Rides still resonate with us in the early 21st century.

It is interesting to note the ways that some people are observing the 50th anniversary.

Last week, Aaron Barnhart of McClatchy Newspapers drew a distinction between this anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War.

Civil rights leaders whose names were hardly household words at the time, much less today, have been reminiscing about their experiences.

So have folks who were, for all intents and purposes, participants in, not facilitators of, the rides.

PBS has chosen some college students — from Virginia, Georgia, Utah, Kansas City, all over — to re–trace the footsteps of those original Freedom Riders for an American Experience program.

And, as Gail Kerr points out for Nashville's The Tennessean, the Freedom Rides have other implications today.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Freedom Rides played a significant role in accelerating the momentum of civil rights in America.

And, although I am not proud of chapters of my native region's history, I am proud of the lessons we learned and the progress we made because of them.

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Thoughts on King's Day

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"If only we would see and respect our shared humanity, so much of what ails America could be healed.

"That was the essence of the message of Martin Luther King Jr. It was the underlying theme of President Obama's speech last week in Tucson.

"It was, as well, the heart of a lovely letter first lady Michelle Obama wrote last week to the parents of America's children about the tragedy in Tucson.

"If only we would acknowledge our shared humanity, our common desire to do what is right by our best lights, we might learn to listen and trust and work out our differences on firmer ground."

Chicago Sun–Times
Jan. 17, 2011

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Today is, of course, Martin Luther King Day.

If you have today off from work, you may already know that this holiday encountered some obstacles along the way to becoming a federal holiday. Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983, and it was first observed 25 years ago this Thursday. But it has only been recognized in all 50 states in the last decade.

King has been dead now for more than 40 years, but his memory is still vibrant for those who remember when he walked the earth, his words still speak to what Lincoln called the "the better angels of our nature."

Many people are putting their own spin on King's words today. Some are on target; others, not so much. The validity of one's interpretation depends, I suppose, on those who are doing the interpreting.

Well, people have been known to interpret and re–interpret things for years, generations, even centuries. They're still interpreting the Constitution in the courts.

But, today, I would just like to let King's words speak for themselves.

And I want to focus on three of his speeches that are considered among the Top 100 speeches of the 20th century by AmericanRhetoric.com.

King's "I Have a Dream" speech is, of course, at the very top of the list.

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And the speech he gave the night before his assassination, in which he proclaimed that he had "been to the mountaintop" and almost seemed to know that his life would end soon, is considered the 15th best speech of the 20th century.

I don't think that speech exists in its entirety on video. At least, I haven't seen it if it does — only clips like the one above. But if you want to read the text of the speech, you can find it here.

And then there was a great speech that is often overlooked by people but holds a unique significance in the story of King's life — "A Time to Break Silence" — that King delivered exactly one year before he was killed.

On April 4, 1967, King spoke out against the war in Vietnam. It was a costly decision for him. Many white Americans who had been his allies when he confined his activities to the pursuit of civil rights turned against him when he spoke against the war. The Washington Post editorialized that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

I've heard some people speculate that, because King made that speech, powerful white Americans who had protected him to that point stepped to one side and let the conspirators hatch the plan that resulted in King's death.

I don't know if there is any truth to that.

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But I know that the words King spoke that day still resonate with us today.

"A time comes when silence is betrayal," King said. "And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."

Many white Americans turned against King after he spoke those words. But not my mother. She always admired King and his nonviolent approach to social change, and she was a devout supporter of civil rights. When he spoke against the war, he spoke about another issue that was important to her.

And she grieved when he died.

But the things he stood for did not die with him.

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Back to the Future

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Today is the 42nd anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

When many people think of King, they think of his inspiring, uplifting messages — his "I Have a Dream" speech that he delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March on Washington or the speech he gave 42 years ago last night, the night before his assassination, when he told his followers he had been to the mountaintop.

In the 1950s and 1960s, King was reviled by segregationists, but he had the support of many who held positions of power in Washington and many who held positions of influence in the media. Among those groups, his work for racial equality was perceived as being on the right side of history.

But I have long believed that it was a speech he gave exactly one year before his assassination, at Riverside Church in New York, that changed his relationship with many who had supported and protected him. On that occasion, he spoke against American policy in Vietnam.

His allies would not stand with him on the subject of Vietnam. The war had nothing to do with racial injustice, they argued. Not so, said King, who believed that peace and prosperity went hand in hand. And he believed that to remain silent was betrayal.

(Or, as Edmund Burke put it, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.")

Because so many rejected his message in 1967, the tragedy of Vietnam went on, and thousands more Americans died needless deaths. In recent years, I have felt that we were repeating that mistake in the Middle East.

Apparently, Bob Herbert agrees with me, although the focus of his attention is mostly on Afghanistan, not Iraq — of the two, I have believed for many years that Iraq was the unjustifiable war.

King's message in that speech at Riverside Church in 1967 wasn't a radical departure from what he had been saying throughout his public life. But, as Herbert observes in the New York Times, it was controversial because he questioned what the government was doing in Vietnam.

Even the NAACP thought he was making a mistake in shifting his focus from civil rights to foreign policy. But King felt (and said so, in words that were far more eloquent than mine) that economic opportunity and peace were compatible, and economic opportunity was the key to equal rights. The war in Vietnam ran counter to the ultimate objective of the civil rights movement.

In 1967, to question the government's policy in Vietnam was seen as nothing short of heresy — and those who spoke out were often seen as advocating communism. Even entertainers (i.e., the Smothers Brothers) were censored when their comedy was believed to be contrary to national policy abroad.

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King was not a communist, and, eventually, a majority of Americans came to share his view of Vietnam. But his speech drove a wedge between him and many who had supported him in the past.

And things, Herbert argues, haven't changed all that much in four–plus decades. True, America has a black president now — something that even Dr. King may not have dared to imagine — but Herbert sees that president making the same mistake that Lyndon Johnson made in the 1960s — sending more troops (this time to Afghanistan) "in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support," to use King's own words.

"More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal," writes Herbert. "Those two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have told us, will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion.

"And yet the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the 'madness,' in search of the nation–building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed."

Until America learns from the mistakes of the past, it will continue to make them.

And the madness will go on.

During his life, King was an advocate of civil rights, as everyone knows, but he advocated civil rights for all, not just one group. That is why the words he spoke still speak to us today. He spoke of fairness, not unfair advantage. And he knew that economic opportunity was at the heart of the human struggle.

No doubt he agreed with Gandhi, who said, "Poverty is the worst kind of violence." He certainly made it clear what he thought of a government that would commit so much money and so many lives to waging war overseas instead of dedicating those resources to programs designed to improve things at home.

I wonder how he would feel about an administration that, faced with massive unemployment and under–employment and budget crises in nearly every state, chose to escalate a war?

Well, just as in Dr. King's day, the poor, the hungry, the unemployed will pay the price for it.

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The LBJ Era Departs

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For many years, I worked in a building that was located along LBJ Freeway here in Dallas.

I worked for an auto loan company, and I often had to call people — customers, dealers — and sometimes those calls required me to give them our mailing address. More than one gave me a questioning response when I told them the street address.

"LBJ stands for Lyndon Baines Johnson," I would tell them. If that produced no knowing response, I elaborated. "He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy." That was usually sufficient. The people with whom I spoke were not always old enough to remember Johnson, but they recognized Kennedy's name.

Those conversations always struck me as odd because, when I was a child, everyone knew what LBJ stood for.

I was still quite young when he left the White House. I knew his first name was Lyndon and his last name was Johnson. I had heard him called Lyndon B. Johnson. I'm not sure if I knew exactly what his middle name was, but I had heard plenty of people refer to the president as LBJ.

There always seemed to be footage on the evening news of angry college students marching in protests against the war and chanting things like "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?"

I mean, unless you were deaf, dumb and blind (or, perhaps, just plain Forrest Gump stupid), just about everyone who was alive in those days knew what LBJ stood for!

My father was a college professor, and I knew some of his students. And they not only knew what LBJ stood for, most of them seemed to think LBJ was going to be around forever.

That wasn't true, of course. As I say, he left the presidency in 1969 after choosing not to run for another term; then, in one of those ironic twists of history, he died of a heart attack two days after that term would have ended.

Thus, he proved all those predictions of his immortality to be indisputably wrong in rather short order.

And, one by one, most of the figures from Johnson's administration have left the earthly scene as well. His secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, died last summer, and then today, two more people from the LBJ days — Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Liz Carpenter, a close aide to both President and Mrs. Johnson for many years — have died.

Udall was 90. Carpenter was 89.

It strikes me as ironic that not one but two people from the Johnson presidency should die within a week of the 45th anniversary of what is arguably the most significant speech that Johnson ever gave.

On March 15, 1965, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to press for the passage of the Voting Rights Act about a week after the infamous "Bloody Sunday" confrontation in Selma, Ala., during the first Selma–to–Montgomery voting rights march.

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He adopted a line from the protest song that had become synonymous with the civil rights movement as he took a stand against discrimination in the most public way that a president can. On that evening, Johnson said, "Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

My mother was active in the Human Relations Council in my hometown in Arkansas when I was growing up, and I know from speaking with many of the black members in those days that they were deeply moved and inspired to hear the president of the United States use a phrase that was so closely linked to "the struggle," as they called it. That was one of the last things that most of them had ever expected to see in their lifetimes.

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Language has power. It isn't always how much you know but how you express it that makes the impression. And, in Johnson's case, what he knew (which was the moral and ethical thing to do) and the best way to express it came together at a crossroads in American history.

There is no denying that there was plenty of deception and trickery from the Johnson administration when it came to its policy on Vietnam. But, on March 15, 1965, he spoke to — and, perhaps, with the assistance of — what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

It may have been the shining moment of Johnson's life and presidency.

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