September marks two seminal episodes in American history. Separated by four days, the collective embrace of each event could not be starker. We have, and rightly so, committed ourselves never to forget the four coordinated terrorist attacks on 9/11 that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, mostly Americans. September 11, 2001, has been enshrined along side Pearl Harbor Day (December 7, 1941) and the JFK assassination (November 22, 1963), but what about September 15, 1963? Sunday September 15, 1963 was Youth Day at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Founded in 1873, it was the first organized black Baptist church in Birmingham. It also served as the epicenter for the Birmingham civil rights campaign, which had been conducted several months earlier. At approximately 10:22 AM, …
September marks two seminal episodes in American history. Separated by four days, the collective embrace of each event could not be starker.
We have, and rightly so, committed ourselves never to forget the four coordinated terrorist attacks on 9/11 that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, mostly Americans.
September 11, 2001, has been enshrined along side Pearl Harbor Day (December 7, 1941) and the JFK assassination (November 22, 1963), but what about September 15, 1963?
Sunday September 15, 1963 was Youth Day at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Founded in 1873, it was the first organized black Baptist church in Birmingham. It also served as the epicenter for the Birmingham civil rights campaign, which had been conducted several months earlier. At approximately 10:22 AM, the 19 sticks of dynamite exploded just outside the basement, killing four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair. It also injured 22 others.
Later that day, Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old Negro, was shot in the back and killed by a policeman with a shotgun and Virgil Wade, a 13-year-old Negro, was also shot and killed just outside Birmingham while riding a bicycle — six children dead, in the year that I define in my book as one of hope and hostility.
To further the irony, exactly three weeks after Martin Luther King had electrified the nation with his “Dream,” he was eulogizing three of the four girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Though separated by 38 years, I suspect there are other differences in the manner we acknowledge both events.
The number of casualties alone (2,977 to 6) makes for a different reaction, along with the number of years since the two events occurred (14 years to 52 years).
The television coverage of both events is part of the difference. In 1963, television’s news had just expanded to 30 minutes, and for a brief moment provided round the clock coverage with the assassination of President Kennedy. Conversely, the second jet exploding into the World Trade Center tower was carried live. Moreover, the Kennedy assassination took all the oxygen from everything else that occurred in that momentous year of 1963.
But there was something that the late ABC broadcaster Peter Jennings said during the 9/11 tragedies that may also provide some insight to the difference. Jennings naively stated September 11 was the worst case of domestic terrorism in our history. An understandable comment given the circumstances, but for those aware of the legacy of black Americans, this was an absurd statement — one that suggested black suffering had not occurred in America that could be characterized as domestic terrorism.
Absurdity has marred the black experience since the nation’s inception. Did not 9/11 suggest a similar type of absurdity that has been part of the black experience, only truncated into a 24-hour period?
Any attempts to parse absurdity is by definition absurd. Four girls killed by a bomb while preparing for Sunday morning worship is no less absurd than the innocent victims who died on 9/11 because they boarded a plane, went to work or lost their lives in attempt to save victims of this tragedy.
Perhaps the largest difference in the two events lies in the perpetrators. While 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a nation that could be best described as an ostensible American ally, the terrorists who plotted the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church were all Americans.
The 9/11 terrorists are easier to comprehend, they wanted to cause harm to America. But the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was based on Americans who wanted to cause harm on other Americans who simply wanted what America had promised to all of its citizens, but were systematically denied.
Both events so close in terms of the actual dates, yet far apart in terms of our remembrance, yet they share a common absurdity.
This by no means should be an either or proposition, we shouldn’t forget what occurred on September 11. But September 15 also warrants our collective commemoration.
The death of the four girls more than a half-century later is a haunting reminder of the gulf between what we would like to be and what we are. It revealed the incongruity between what America prophetically put on paper and how those practices played themselves out in reality.
For this reason alone, we should never forget September 15, 1963.
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