August 20, 1963, my mother and I went to the movie theater as we always did before I returned to college. Halfway through the film, a neighbor came to tell us that our house had been bombed. My heart was racing. I was filled with anxiety, fear, and anger. As we approached our house, outraged Blacks filled Center Street North. Police tried to control the crowd by firing guns is in the air. Windows had been blown out, drapes shredded, the garage doors destroyed. My dog Tasso had been killed in the bombing. I couldn’t stop crying. I grieved Tasso’s death for a long time.
Barbara Shores
Barbara Sylvia Shores was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Arthur and Theodora Shores. She is the mother of adult twins. Barbara has retired from her position as Executive Director of the Jefferson County Office of Senior Citizens Services. She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1968 with her Masters in Social Work. Barbara is a member of the First Congregational Christian Church, Birmingham, Alabama.
Barbara’s father, Arthur Shores, was a prominent civil rights attorney during the 1960s in Birmingham. Due to his work, he was frequently targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist group responsible for many of the bombings in Birmingham. Barbara barely survived a kidnapping attempt, and the family experienced two bombings of their home by the KKK, as she recounts in this story. The family’s home was in the Smithfield neighborhood of Birmingham, the scene of some 50 unsolved bombings between 1948 and 1963, meant to prevent Blacks from purchasing homes along Center Street, the dividing line between traditionally Black and white neighborhoods. The neighborhood earned the nickname “Dynamite Hill.”
In 2012, Barbara S. Shores and her sister Helen Shores Lee coauthored a book about their father, The Gentle Giant of Dynamite Hill: The Untold Story of Arthur Shores and His Family’s Fight for Civil Rights.
In 2022, Barbara Shores and Marjorie White coauthored a book for the Birmingham Historical Society, Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill.
Ms. Shores lives in Birmingham, in her childhood home.