“We lived in a bubble”

In 2011, I was driving up to Martha’s Vineyard to find out if perhaps I wanted to settle there. I stopped in Birmingham to see friends for a few days – Hank and Martha Black. Hank and I had been friends since the University of Alabama when he was a reporter. Coming home from work, he brought in a tiny advertisement from Weld for Birmingham, asking for sculptors to compete to create a memorial to the four girls who were in the bathroom when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1963. Excited, Hank asked me to read it and said that it was for me. Curious, I read it and agreed with him. Here in my hand was a piece that fit my philosophy of life and my small but constant battle for social justice wherever I happened to be. We noted that there were only four days left before the final due date. Usually it takes me and my web master a month or more to create a proposal for a particular competition. Instead, Martha helped me for four days and nights to run around getting details, photocopies, and leather-bound books for presentations. Usually I insert schematic drawings, elevations, site specific details, and of course, drawings of the potential piece, then load it all onto a flash drive or a CD.

Evelyn Allen, mother of our former Alabama First Lady Lori Allen Siegelman, my second Mom, let us spread out all our work on her living room floor in her home on top of Red Mountain, where we had a killer view of Jones Valley. So many people helped bring those bound proposals together. Southside UPS and the Birmingham Public Library’s Southside Branch helped often. They knew my name. I would come into the library and ask, “Where is the Spike Lee movie? I have to have the Spike Lee movie ‘4 Little Girls.’ I need it now, today. When is it coming back?” So, the librarians helped me with my research but I don’t think they really knew what I was doing. Kind. Martha and I drove the six bound proposals and a 3-foot by 2-foot presentation board with the glued-on design downtown to the appropriate address printed in the ad, with 20 minutes to spare. I think we double parked.

It was time to “come home,” because I had run from Birmingham, as soon as I could. (more…)

The school where I taught punished students for marching

In the spring of 1963, I was just completing my first year as a teacher in the Birmingham School System. During that year, I saw my career threatened as nearly ALL of the students at Ullman High (and other schools in the system) were arrested for demonstrating, jailed, and subsequently expelled from school. As a teacher, I was required to EXPEL most of my students.

The Birmingham schools were still segregated and our school was, of course, all African American. After the administration expelled most of the students, the next step was to lay off the teachers, as there were very few students left in the schools. Fortunately (for me and the students), a Federal court overturned the expulsions, and ordered the students back into the schools. (more…)

“Am I partly responsible for the death of those girls?”

Sunday, September 15, 1963…a time in history that is etched in my memory.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the beautiful fall morning began as any other Sunday morning in the Wesley household. Mama would get up early, fill the house with the aroma of bacon frying, biscuits baking and even dinner cooking.

It was not hard to get her brood of eight (plus three others) stirring when the house was filled with the smell of good food. The only one of the eight missing was my brother who had volunteered for the army. Two teenage girls who had experienced unfortunate family circumstances had joined our family and a five month old infant was also in the mix. (more…)

“I wonder what they’ve bombed now.”

When I heard the bomb go off on that Sunday morning in September 1963, I thought, “I wonder what they’ve bombed now.”

I soon learned that it was Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.  The most heartbreaking news came later that day. My friend, Cynthia Wesley, and my teacher’s daughter, Denise McNair, had both been killed. (more…)

In spite of segregation

My family and I moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1961. My father, Samuel Elliott Harris, M.D., had completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, MO. He and my mother, Dixie Gardner Harris, grew up in Birmingham. My mother was the youngest of fifteen children of Billy and Roberta (Carson) Gardner of Lowndes County, AL. My mother’s older sister was Minnie Gardner Gaston who was married to Birmingham entrepreneur A.G. Gaston. My mother moved in with them at the age of eight years old, and she remained with them until entering college. My father and his family lived across the street from my mother in Birmingham. My paternal grandfather, originally from Huntsville, AL, was a physician, Samuel Francis Harris, M.D., having graduated from Meharry Medical College in 1916 or 1918. He was one of five sons, all of whom were educated and successful. My grandmother, Florita Augusta Elliott, was one of eight children originally from Moundville, AL. She taught school until she married my grandfather, and each of her siblings was educated and successful, as well. Her brother, Eugene Elliott, Sr., had graduated from Meharry Dental College in the early 1900s. My mother graduated from Tuskegee Institute, and she received her Masters Degree from New York University in 1952. My family believed in education, and they had instilled in my siblings and me a strong work ethic.

After my father completed his residency program, my parents decided to move the family to Birmingham intending for my father to join my grandfather’s medical practice and ultimately assume it upon my grandfather’s retirement. I was in the third grade when we moved. While in St. Louis, I had heard of the awful treatment of Blacks in the Deep South, particularly Alabama. I remember being horrified at the thought of moving to Birmingham where they hung Black children. (more…)