Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.
Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.
Let us be dissatisfied, and men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.[58]
* * *
* * *
Later that day, we received confirmation of the sad news: he was dead.
I was deeply saddened by my president’s death. But I guess I wasn’t completely surprised. It seemed that whenever someone understood our plight, took a public stand, and made a promise to help us, he signed his death warrant. It had happened to Medgar Evers the past summer, and the list of Civil Rights martyrs was growing. There were some people who would do whatever it took to silence the voices that spoke out against injustice, even if it meant killing people.
I knew my history, and it scared me. But it didn’t shock me anymore. In my teenage mind, I was starting to see that it had become the “American way” to kill those who rejected the status quo. For all the fine speeches about equality, the actions of a powerful few spoke much louder.
It came to light later that President Kennedy wasn’t surprised by the threat of assassination, either. As the day to fly to Dallas approached, he kept repeating to George Smathers, “God, I hate to go out to Texas. I just hate to go. I have a terrible feeling about going. I wish I could get out of it.”[59] But even as he was advised not to make the trip, Kennedy also remarked to his friend Larry Newman, “If this is the way life is, if this is the way it’s going to end, this is the way it’s going to end.”[60]
John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas proved yet another heavy, heartbreaking tragedy in my young life. Another dashed hope.
Dr. King later said Kennedy’s death was caused “by a morally inclement climate” that arose from “our constant attempt to cure the cancer of racial injustice with the gasoline of graduation; our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim.”[61]
Those proved terrible, frightening months for our entire country. The United States had just undergone the failed Cuban Bay of Pigs drama, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Questions about Kennedy’s death abounded: Did the Communists kill Kennedy? Did assassin Harvey Lee Oswald act alone? Was JFK’s killing the work of a conspiracy? Was the Mafia involved? Chaos continued to rule in our country when, two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as police led him through the basement of the Dallas jail.
* * *
The president’s murder gave my teachers and parents and pastor the perfect opportunity to talk with us children about death and dying, about bombings and hatred. We needed to talk. We needed someone to help clear the air and bring some understanding to the turmoil happening all around us.
But no one talked. Black folk had been conditioned to look the other way when tragedy struck, especially if the victim was one of their own. Whenever my parents talked about bombings or death or sex or politics, they routinely, without fail, asked us children to leave the room.
Mr. Ralph Joseph, my math teacher, explained to my class how presidential succession took place and told us Lyndon Johnson had become our new president. But he left us on our own to wonder why Kennedy was murdered—and on our own to try to find solace in his sudden death.
I don’t remember Thanksgiving Day in 1963. I don’t remember Christmas that year either. I guess we put up a tree in our living room and decorated it, as we always did. Maybe we had Christmas dinner around our family table. I just can’t recall. My heart and mind were numb, and if we celebrated, it was all I could do to go through the motions.
When Mama Lessie was alive, my family would hop in the car on Christmas mornings and drive one hour south to Clanton, where we would celebrate the holidays with my grandparents. They would put a live tree in their front room, and all of us kids would decorate it with paper chains and stars that we’d made at school the week before. My grandmother always cooked turkey and dressing for Christmas dinner. For dessert she made an apple or peach cobbler and sometimes pound cake. We would gather chairs from all over the house and sit around the big dining room table to eat. During the day, Granddaddy would slip out of the house to take money or food to needy people in his church or to check on a sick member.
One Christmas my grandparents bought my brothers a Lionel train set. Mama told us it cost a whole fifty dollars—a lot of money in those days. Granddaddy had helped the boys put it together and play with it. Mama Lessie told me that Granddaddy had always wanted to buy that Lionel train set, but as the father of five daughters, he never got the chance. Now he had grandsons! Christmas had always brought good memories into my childhood—a bright light shining through the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
The year of the bombing, Mama Lessie was no longer around, so I know we didn’t go to Clanton. It’s possible Granddaddy drove up to our home on Christmas Day, but I honestly don’t remember. Those carefree Christmases of my childhood seemed like a lifetime ago.
In the years since, I’ve wondered about that Christmas of 1963 for the families of my four slain friends. The holidays are a time for families to get together, open gifts, and eat food that has been lovingly prepared. Did Denise’s family eat Christmas dinner staring at an empty chair at the table? Did Addie’s family set up and decorate a Christmas tree? Did Carole’s family pay off the dead girl’s Christmas gifts in department store layaways? Or did they just decide to leave the gifts there—half-paid and forever unclaimed? And what about the emptiness felt by Cynthia’s parents? Both Denise and Cynthia were only children. How in the world did their families survive the holidays without them?
Chapter 15
Bombingham
* * *
The deaths of the children followed by the loss of President Kennedy two months later gave birth to a tide of grief and anger—a surge of emotional momentum that helped ensure the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
U.S. National Park Service[62]
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.
Martin Luther King Jr.
When 1964 dawned, I wondered, Will the new year bring relief from bombings and some much-needed peace to my city? Will Kennedy’s wish of national desegregation ever come true now that he’s dead?
The bombings and killings didn’t stop after the calendar page turned. Birmingham’s nickname still fit: not much had changed in “Bombingham.” With all the mining operations around the area, dynamite was easy to come by and hard to trace. And so was hatred.
Every black family in my neighborhood knew the familiar sound of a bomb exploding. On any given day or night, we’d be in the house or sitting on the front porch and hear the distinctive boom. In an instant, everything would grow still and quiet. We would look at one another and wait for the phone to ring. Within minutes, someone would call us and say, “They just bombed attorney Shores’s home [or the Gaston Motel or A. D. King’s house or another location]!” We would hang our heads and say a silent prayer.
Spring 1964 came to Birmingham, Alabama, as usual. Turmoil and questions about John F. Kennedy’s killer kept the nation in a state of unrest. I was still reeling from the assassination of my president and the deaths of my four friends. I felt miserable and depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I thought a lot about death and dying. The cloud still followed me everywhere I w
ent.
At three o’clock one morning in April 1964, we heard an unmistakable boom. The bomb’s bright light lit up the sky above our street, and for a few seconds night became day. The force of the blast knocked my brothers Wendell and Kirk out of their top bunk beds with a loud thud. I was asleep in my room and shot up in bed when I heard the shattering glass. What in the world? I thought. In my grogginess, it took a moment for me to understand what was going on, but this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Almost immediately I heard Mrs. Crowell screaming—she was trying to wake up her family and get them out of the house in case another bomb exploded. I can’t believe it’s happening again.
I looked out through the hole where my now-shattered bedroom window had been, and I saw smoke coming from the house across the street. The Crowells’ home!
Please, Lord, let the Crowells be alive and unhurt! I jumped out of bed and slipped on my clothes. I had the sinking sensation that sooner or later a bomb would go off that I wouldn’t live to talk about. I felt as if it were only a matter of time.
* * *
I liked Mrs. Crowell. She was a big woman, about five feet ten and big boned. Her skin was so fair—a sort of reddish yellow—that she almost looked white. Her hair reminded me of actress/singer Diana Ross’s, except Diana’s was reddish brown. I often wondered whether she was a person of mixed parentage.
Mrs. Crowell was different from the other black women who lived in my neighborhood. She marched to a different beat. She pulled her long, thick hair back into a ponytail and wore unusual dresses and skirts with colorful printed patterns. She didn’t talk like any of us, either. Someone told me, with a smirk, that she was “cultured.” An artist by profession, Mrs. Crowell taught music and art. She had traveled the world and collected art from France and Africa. Her house was decorated in a sort of European way—I especially remember all the nude wood statues from Africa she had placed in almost every room.
I spent lots of time at the Crowell home, and I enjoyed being around Mrs. Crowell even though most all the women in our neighborhood kept their distance. I became like a daughter to her. Sometimes we went shopping together, and sometimes she would sit at the beautiful white baby grand piano in her living room and play her heart out. She shared things with me too—recipes, memories from her time abroad, hot dogs cooked on the outside grill. She never fried chicken and cooked greens like my mother did; instead, she collected and made recipes from France. Sometimes white friends of hers came all the way from Paris to eat dinner and spend time with her and her family. She often invited me over to eat with her foreign friends, and I always looked forward to meeting all the interesting guests.
After the explosion, my family and all our neighbors ran out into the street. Mrs. Crowell stood in her front yard in her nightgown, screaming as loud as she could. “My husband and sons are still in the house!” she cried.
Everyone tried to figure out exactly what had happened. It didn’t take long. The Klan. A bomb. At first the neighbors stayed in the street, a safe distance from the house. We worried that the Klan might have planted a second, deadlier bomb to explode after a crowd had gathered.
Someone called the Birmingham police. The officers took their time getting there, but they finally arrived. Mr. Crowell and their sons, George and Weymoth, came out the front door, terrified but not hurt. Somehow, inexplicably, they had managed to sleep through the whole thing.
When the situation was assessed, we discovered that the blast had ripped through many of the nearby homes, had broken most of the windows on the neighbors’ houses, and had dented cars that were parked on the street. The damage proved great because the homes in my neighborhood sat side by side or faced each other and had simple wooden foundations.
The word around the black community was that the Crowells were bombed because they had too many white people at their house—they needed to be reminded of who they were and the penalty for not obeying the rules. I guess the Klan wanted to teach the Crowells a lesson about mixing and socializing with whites.
When the sun came up that morning, the Crowells packed up their belongings and furniture and moved out of the damaged house. They never came back. They fully intended to leave this memory behind.
Later that morning, about an hour before lunchtime, Alabama governor George Wallace himself came to our neighborhood. Several security cars accompanied him—for protection, I reckon. I recognized him from the television news, the newspapers, and the Time magazine cover the past September.
Why is he here? I asked myself. With some pomp and circumstance, Wallace stood in front of the Crowell house and gave a brief speech to the crowd of black spectators, white reporters, photographers, and our neighbors.
“I apologize for this bombing,” I remember hearing him telling us. He said something about it being “a horrible act.” He promised, “We are going to get the perpetrators!” I think I recall his asking, “Is everybody okay?”
I felt confused. Why would Governor Wallace come to our neighborhood? I wondered. It’s obvious he doesn’t like us!
As I listened to him speak and strive to show some sense of sympathy, I couldn’t help but remember his famous inaugural words the year before: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
Surely that speech then made a more permanent impression on my young mind than his offer of apology now.
Did Wallace ever get the perpetrators, as he promised? No. This bombing turned out to be just one more “unsolved” explosion in Bombingham, Alabama.
Not long after the Crowell house bombing, another close neighbor, Mrs. Ryles, came home from teaching school one day and saw a mysterious brown paper bag lying in the bushes by her front porch. She bent down and tried to examine it. She thought it looked suspicious, so she called the police. They came, checked it out, and found fifteen sticks of dynamite in the bag.
* * *
Kirk, Wendell, and I had now experienced two bombings—two close calls in our lives. After the church bombing in September 1963, Kirk stopped speaking, except when he felt it absolutely necessary. The next April, after he and Wendell had been thrown from their beds, Kirk became even more withdrawn. What was going through his young mind? We never discussed it.
When Birmingham’s Phillips High School finally integrated in 1963, my brother Kirk enrolled as one of the school’s first black students. Although we never explicitly talked about it, I imagine this must have been a difficult experience for him, especially with his quiet nature. He was smart in math but came home with a C on his report card in math that year, so my mother went to school and asked the teacher about it. She was told that Kirk had sat in the wrong seat and was given the wrong grade by mistake. That experience seemed to diminish his faith in people, and he became even more quiet and withdrawn after that.
After school Kirk worked part-time at Birmingham’s Greyhound bus station. “I’ve never seen a person so quiet,” his employer once told my mother. “He just works. He never says a thing!”
Kirk eventually earned an MBA from Auburn University, became a seasoned chess player, a vegetarian, and a marathon runner. He never married. He never fathered children. He worked for the Department of Transportation in Atlanta, Georgia, for two decades. A devout Christian, he tried his best to follow God’s teachings all his life. My inclination is that he forgave the people who had wronged him, but I don’t know for sure. We never discussed it. My silent little brother, Kirk, died in November 2000.
* * *
During those weeks and months after the bombing, I kept on helping Pastor Cross while we waited for workers to complete the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church renovations. The pastor asked me to plan a church program based on Psalm 23. I had read this psalm of David’s many times, but now when I read it, the words spoke directly to my heart and brought me some comfort.
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet wat
ers,
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.
I found David’s psalm to be a great source of strength. I read it every night before I dressed for bed, and eventually I memorized it. But I still had questions and uncertainties about life and death.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Death proved to be no shadow in my life—it was real. And I walked near that valley every day!
Eventually another family bought the house, fixed it up, and lived there for many years. Still, even years later, no one spoke about the Crowell house bombing. As a black community, we tried hard to forget it. But there was no denying its shadow over our neighborhood.
Chapter 16
Will the Violence Ever End?
* * *
The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one third as much chance of completing college; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.
John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1963[63]
Racial violence, bombings, and murders continued during the summer of 1964. When will the violence stop? I asked myself again and again. I became physically sick to my stomach when I heard about three more Civil Rights workers killed in Mississippi.
While the World Watched Page 14
