Sankofa Day 2 Reflections
On Saturday night we drove to
Birmingham and spent the night there. We woke up on Sunday morning and went to 16th Street Baptist Church. On Sunday morning, September 16, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church killing four girls. Addie Mae Collins (aged 14), Denise McNair (aged 11), Carole Robertson (aged 14), and Cynthia Wesley (aged 14) where all killed while they where in Sunday School.
The deaths of the children followed by the killing 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.
From there we had lunch down the street at Ms B’s., a great little local place to grab some of the best fried chicken, mac and cheese, greens, meat loaf, black eye peas and all kinds of good soul food. We got your food to go and talked back to Kelly Ingram Park to eat lunch and view of the violence that took place in that park. It was here, during the first week of May 1963, that Birmingham police and firemen, under orders from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, confronted demonstrators, many of them children, first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images from those confrontations, broadcast nationwide, spurred a public outcry which turned the nation’s attention to the struggle for racial equality. The demonstrations in Birmingham brought city leaders to agree to an end of public segregation. In addition, they helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Civil Rights laws.
After spending some time in the park we went across the street to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institution. It was filled with some much great info but my mind and heart where still back at the church and the park. Walking in a place where such great violence had taken place messes with you. I also was finding it hard at this time to be fully engaged with the content of the trip and still be the team leader with all those details.
Looking back now this day mostly leaves me with questions. Questions like…
What makes a grown man turn a firehose on a child?
What makes a grown man plant a bomb to kill children while they are in Sunday school?
What makes people set off so many bombs that their city becomes known as bombingham?
What makes a “safety commissioner” drive around their town in a tank?
What kind of hate is in a person’s heart that they would tell a pastor they had better leave town or their family would end up like the 4 girls that where killed?
What kind of pathology leads a person to say that African-Americans who lived in Birmingham at that time where happy with the way things where?
Every time I go to Birmingham I ask some soul searching questions, questions that we have to ask if we are going to be a people who redeem our past and live a different future. If we don’t ask these questions I believe that our past will continue to haunt us and negatively influence the way we live.
