The Birmingham 16th street Baptist Church bombing, 50 years on.

by liberal japonicus

I'm back and in the process of writing a post about my travels, but this guest post on LGM by Robert Widdell caught my eye as I was catching up. It discusses the 50th anniversary of the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and specifically, it was this passage:

In this context, then, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church is less the story of an event that would further galvanize white support for the national movement and more a cruel reminder that, on the local level, Jim Crow was alive and well. In fact, Birmingham’s well-deserved reputation as a particularly violent defender of white supremacy – garnering the city the name “Bombingham” – meant that from a local perspective the bombing was in many ways business as usual.

Widdell is correct that we often think of the bombing as just a threat that hung over the black community in the whole of the deep south, but it was actually a tactic. This is from a transcript of an Amy Goodman interview of Angela Davis

But I’ve often pointed out that some of my very earliest childhood memories, are the sounds of dynamite exploding. Homes across the street from where I grew up were bombed when they were purchased by black people who were moving into a neighborhood that had been zoned for whites. So many bombings took place in the neighborhood where I grew up. And we know now that Chambliss was probably responsible. That the neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill”. And of course as you know, the city of Birmingham was known as “Bombingham”. In fact on September 4, 1963, less than two weeks before the 16th Street church bombing, the home of the leading civil rights attorney in Birmingham, Arthur Shores was bombed. And that house was right down the street from our house.

This reminded me of the Kathy Ainsworth and Thomas Tarrents case. I learned about the Ainsworth case (which is notable because she was a kindergarten school teacher by day and a bomber by night) from a professor's book (Outside the Southern Myth) about his reminiscences of growing up in my hometown, but when I looked for a link to the story, the only one was to the Metapedia, a right wing nationalist version of the Wikipedia.

However, it seems like bombing was a tactic. Elsewhere in the book, my professor notes Hattiesburg, which makes an appearance in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, there was 'plenty of racial turmoil in the 60's=some murders, at least one racial rape, some bombings'. More digging reveals it was tactic rather than threat.

In this age of data crunching, rather than treat the Church bombing as an isolated incident, a better memorial might be to go thru the records and create a map showing the locations of all the bombings, not just in Birmingham, but across the south. 

Comments

[Countme-In]

See, if you wait for a very short time in today's fast-moving world, the triple threads of who's cleaning the toilets, irresponsible gun ownership, and Capitol Hill efforts to starve the toilet cleaners get tied into one very neat news bundle:

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/today-in-responsible-gun-ownership-092413

[russell]

From the count's link:

The incident report states that the gun "was fully loaded with one round in the chamber and six rounds in the magazine." Capitol police returned the gun to Evans after Jones' secretary Lisa Bondurant called to report that it was misplaced.

My druthers, if you leave a loaded pistol with one in the chamber on top of the toilet in a public loo, you forfeit your concealed carry license.

That's just the way I roll. Call me crazy.

Since we seem to be injecting every other topic of conversation into this thread, I just thought I'd chime in on that as well.

[bobbyp]

Just looking for places where bobbyp and I might not be in so violent a disagreement.

Ethanol subsidies appear to have gone off the rails as an effective policy, so sure, that's an ax I would consider, but you absolutely must let me divide by zero or I get off my game. That or give me strokes.

[Countme-In]

I'd favor confiscating their right to use the toilet, even in their homes, as well, but I'm afraid the NRA and the National Potty Council would merely outfit their members with concealed colostomy bags and diapers, amid some Sturm and Drang rhetoric declaring that the Second Amendment absolutely secures the right to poop.

Although given the sh*t that comes out of Ted Cruz's mouth, I think the First Amendment would be a better claim in the Supreme Court, despite the fact that Justice Thomas has only hit the head once during his Court tenure.

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