Exploring Alabama’s Complex Past: Teaching the Legacy of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing5/7/2024
Alabama has a rich and complex history, one that is marked by moments of both triumph and tragedy. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that happened on September 15, 1963, remains one of the city’s most devastating events. The 16th Street Baptist Church was a prominent African American church in Birmingham that was known for its role in the civil rights movement. It served as a rallying point for activists and hosted meetings advocating for desegregation and equal rights. On the morning of September 15, 1963, a powerful bomb exploded underneath the steps of the church, causing a portion of the building to collapse. The explosion occurred just before Sunday services were set to begin, resulting in the deaths of four young girls and injuring over twenty others. The victims of the bombing were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair, all of whom were attending Sunday school at the time of the explosion. The tragic event of this day is something that every young child from Alabama, or in the neighboring states, comes to learn about.
On Tuesday, August 25, 2020, multiple cities across Jefferson County, Alabama, held their municipal elections. Voters in vital economic centers such as Hoover, Homewood, Irondale, and Vestavia Hills all went to the polls to choose who would lead the further development of their city for the next four years. But no city in Jefferson County had an election quite like that of Pleasant Grove. What happened in Pleasant Grove on this election day was historic—the city elected its first Black city council members. The election marked the victory of four Black councilors—Kevin Dunn, Yolanda Lawson, Eric Calhoun, and Ray Lassiter. This milestone was achieved partly due to a lawsuit filed in 2018 by the NAACP. This lawsuit alleged that Pleasant Grove’s at-large voting system was racially discriminatory and was the reason why a city that had a population that was majority African American, had never elected a Black city councilor. The lawsuit succeeded, and an agreement was reached between the NAACP and the City of Pleasant Grove that resulted in a new voting system: voters would be able to cast five votes, which could be spread across five different candidates, or all five votes could be used on one candidate. This, however, was not the first time that the history of Pleasant Grove had been altered by a court decision.
On March 25, 1931, two white women accused nine black men of raping them in the town of Paint Rock, Alabama. Taking place in the segregated South, this claim caused outrage to spread all throughout Alabama and the South, and the nine black men immediately became scapegoats. An important figure of these trials that is often forgotten is Judge James Horton from Athens, Alabama, who was the presiding judge at the retrial of Haywood Patterson. The nine black men were all found guilty upon completion of their trials in Scottsboro; however, the Supreme Court agreed that they could not be tried fairly in Scottsboro and moved the trials to Decatur. This is how the trials ended up taking place in Judge Horton’s court. When making the choice to attend the University of Alabama, I recalled an image from my first-grade social studies book: George Wallace’s Stand at the Schoolhouse Door. Although at six years old I didn’t understand all of the complexities regarding the legacy of colonialism, the European Slave Trade, and Jim Crow-era politics, I never forgot that image. Still, this challenging history did not sway me from attending. Instead, I viewed it as a chance to face some relics and demons from another time—another world—head on.
In June 1964 civil rights activists mobilized a ten-week crusade to register African American voters in Mississippi, garnering support from more than 800 university students, the majority of whom were white. While fact-checking the details of the Freedom Summer for Stephen Goldfarb’s upcoming book review, I encountered numerous references to songs and spirituals and their essential role in the events of this particular campaign as well as the entire arc of the civil rights movement. |
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