Bombs Over Birmingham

“You have to vote like your lives depend on it because they literally do,” the preacher demanded. It is Sunday morning in Birmingham’s 16th street Baptist Church where 55 years ago, four little black girls were murdered when white supremacists bombed the church. The parishioner in front of me dutifully has her bible open and resting in lap; she flips through an Alabama voter guide that had been passed out by the ushers. I sit in the back with a small gaggle of confused looking white people who are not regulars but have heard the storied history of the site and come to pay their respects, each of us greeted with open arms to a place where so much sorrow shaped our collective history. The church had been targeted in the 60’s because of its centrality in local civil rights movement; organizers planned protests, marches, and demonstrations in the pews where we now sat. It is clear on this Memorial Day that the pulpit has not lost its political roots. Reverend Arthur Price Jr. opens in a long winded prayer, asking “grace for the president, for the Senate, for the Congress, for the governors, for the mayors and for all elected officials.” He decrees the irony of the NFL’s decision to force their players to stand during the National Anthem on a weekend we celebrate those who died to protect our first amendment rights. “They don’t get it. Rosa was not protesting the transportation system,” he jests. He prayers over the families of the 1,500 children that have been lost by immigration officials as mothers in their pews shake their bowed heads. When their prayers are done, he reminds those gathered of the upcoming election, “you have to vote. You just have to. Don’t we? Don’t we? Amen.” The day’s sermon centers on the Memorial Day holiday, “I am on the battlefield for my lord,” is played, I sway back and forth and hum along. He pauses, “there is a Balm in Gilead,” I am jolted as I think he says bomb. Maybe the history of the church is just weighing on my mind, but it brings me back to attention. We join hands for the benediction and then bid each other farewell.

The park across from the church has a prominent site of protest and confrontation in the civil rights movement, and today serves as a memorial to those foot soldiers. Water hoses, jail cells, and police dogs are emblazoned in steel throughout the park—a reminder of the harsh realities of the movement. I visited the Civil Rights Institute across the street which chronicles the movement as a whole, but also the bombing that defined this corner of the community.

“We started feeling the power of the idea whose time had come,” a wall reads. In the portion that highlights the conviction of the bombers, more than 20 years after the crime, a photo of a young Doug Jones appears as the prosecuting attorney. It is interesting to think about the evolution of the state even just around this singular figure, in his lifetime how the tables could turn so sharply. (Also, they included Not Ready to Make Nice by the Dixie Chicks in their curation of essential protest songs, and this fact is deeply deeply important to me and probably no one else.) I ask folks if this complicated history of the city has any effect on the politics of today. The elevator operator at the town’s scenic overlook (also a UT grad, Hook ‘em) notes that the unrest of the 60’s and pollution of the industrial town segregated the city early on, with many white families moving into the hills. The segregation remains intact today. The host of my Airbnb, says she doesn’t ever really think about the history of the city, it wasn’t something she was ever taught. “I haven’t done my research, I guess. We were taught about Rosa and Montgomery but nothing about Birmingham.” I drove south towards Montgomery to tour the Equal Justice Initiatives newly opened monument and museum. The museum is the first of its kind, remember those who perished due to lynching. There is a column for each county in which a lynching occurred and the names of those who were murdered, the platform steeps down, and the columns then hover over you like the bodies of those they represent. They have identified 4400 racial terror lynching’s that occurred between 1877 and 1950It is profoundly moving and profoundly sad. Surrounding the monument is a park that features copies of the columns that hang, columns to be claimed by the communities they represent. I find the column for Travis County, Texas where I live; it notes the three unknown men lynched on August 14, 1894. I pause and feel the heat radiating off its hot steel. The accompanying Legacy Museum is just as gut-wrenching, drawing a clear line between slavery, lynching, and our current system of mass incarceration. “You are standing on a site where enslaved peoples were warehoused,” it reads on the exposed brick as you turn the corner to jail cells. Videos create ghosts of slaves in each cell, intimately recounting their tragic stories. The language throughout the museum was the most effective and honest of any museum I have ever walked through, listing banks and insurance companies as complicit, describing the slave trade as a massive human trafficking ring. “Many families that owned slaves remain wealthy today,” one video narrates. The museum argues in terms that are hard to rebut, that the system of white supremacy that built the country lingers today and is keeping too many men behind bars. “slavery did not end, it evolved,” one plaque reads, over the statistic that 1 in 3 black men can expect to spend time behind bars during their lifetime. I pause to sit in their reflection room, surrounded by the portraits of iconic leaders who have fought for racial justice. An African-American woman sharing the bench with me broke down, Stevie Wonder songs playing overhead, scoring her tears. “Must be hard to work here,” I note to one of the employees as we look over the jars of dirt collected from lynching sites. “It is sometimes,” she replies, “But you focus on the hope. You focus on the purpose.”