Trailblazer

Dian Murphy

Age

Intro Text


My maiden name is Diane Tucker and in 1963, in the spring of eighth grade, I was at Our Lady of Fatima Elementary School. I was so excited that I was rated as the number one student in the eighth grade with the highest grade average. I was a straight A student. I was a member of Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church. With all the racial unrest in Birmingham at the time, my church, my community and my family grounded me and made me feel safe. Then Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed and four young Black girls were killed, one of whom I knew. I felt like the world was ending. For the first time in my life, I was scared. (more…)

Were You There One September Morn?

1963 elicits a wave of memories. It was the year I turned “sweet 16.” Today, as I recall several significant events relating to Civil Rights of that year, I will share the utter isolation and lonely process of managing the aftermath of September 15th.

You see, in August, several weeks before the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, I accepted placement in the American Friends Service Committee’s program to finish high school in Connecticut.

I was the youth representative for my Sunday School at First Congregational Church on Center Street in Smithfield, 1.8 miles from the bombing. If I had been in Birmingham on September 15th, 1963, I would have been appointed to attend Youth Sunday at 16th Street Baptist Church. Four girls died in that bombing: Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. Of the four, I knew Denise and Carole, and was a close friend of Cynthia. On that Youth Day Sunday it is likely that I would have been in the bathroom with the four girls, chatting, giggling, and “primping” in the mirror, as they were doing when the bomb exploded. (more…)

Rocketed by the experience of growing up in Birmingham

Carol Edge

Age

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Everyone knows the history, knows that Birmingham was aka the most segregated city in the nation, knows that Birmingham was aka Bombingham, and if they don’t know the litany of events in 1963 — well, they ought to.

American history is yoked to civil rights history. It’s what we’re founded on, what we have grandly succeeded at and dismally failed at.

Birmingham is not just in the Heart of Dixie, it is smack at the heart of our Great American Paradox, a constant tug of war between civil rights and civil wrongs.

Birmingham was, as has been said, ground zero of the civil rights movement in 1963; it was also ground zero for my coming of age. (more…)

September 15, 1963: The Day our Driver Changed Course

Robert G. Williams

Age

Intro Text


Alert: This essay contains a racial slur used by some white people at that time to demean Black children as a group.

 

Our family lived on a wooded hilltop in the white suburb of Mountain Brook, protected from sleepless nights of bombings and police oppression plaguing Black families in the Magic City. My few glimpses of struggles for justice downtown were through safety glass windows of a 1959 Chevrolet station wagon that sported jet fins, a V-8 engine, and could haul up to a dozen kids.

On Mother’s Day 1961 when I was age twelve, Mama drove my siblings and me downtown to the Trailways station to pick up our cousin from Mississippi. There was no place to park out front. A crowd milled around, spilling out of the station. Mama noted how strange there were no officers or police cars anywhere. She double-parked. Leaving the engine running, she instructed my older brother, “Go in, find Stevie, grab his bags and bring him back immediately.” “Robert, climb in the back and open the tailgate window.” While my brother was inside, a half dozen white men toting tire irons, bats, and chains rushed toward the rear of the station, almost tripping over each other as if late for an event. Finally, my brother and Stevie emerged from the front of the station. I took Stevie’s suitcase, and the two of them piled in the middle seat. Mama scratched off before I could close the tailgate window.

The front page of the next day’s newspaper featured a circle of white men taking turns beating an unidentifiable victim on the floor. The article reported the Freedom Riders’ bus arrived at the station shortly after we had left. On the radio, Bull Connor told reporters he gave police officers the day off so they could visit their mothers on Mother’s Day.

In early May 1963, we picked up Stevie at the bus station with no problems. When Mama turned south toward home on a one-way street, police cars and firetrucks packed the avenue to our right. I looked through a gap in the blockade and hollered, “Mama, they’re shooting people down with firehoses.” (more…)

Back to Birmingham, 2023

Olivia Barton Ferriter

Age

Intro Text


September 11, 2023

In 1983, as a reporter for The Birmingham News, I wrote several stories looking back at the events of 1963. I worked with other reporters to track down many of the school children who had heeded Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to march in downtown Birmingham. Most of them, like Bernita Roberson Sawyer, had been jailed. She was 14 at the time, not much older than me, and had spent five days in jail. They described what it was like to be in jail as children and recalled how those events had shaped their lives as adults.  In June, I wrote a 20-year retrospective on Gov. George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama.  Most of the key figures of that day were still alive, including Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who was still angry 20 years later about being made to stand in the sweltering sun while Wallace made his stand in the shade.  Then in September, 20 years after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls, I had a front page interview with Chris McNair, the father of one of those girls, Denise. Still bitter about her loss, he talked about making sure her much younger sisters knew the truth of that day. These stories, written in 1983, came on the heels of a broader effort in 1979 by The Birmingham News to examine race relations in Alabama through an award-winning series. We travelled much of Alabama interviewing ordinary and extraordinary people. We wanted to know what had changed….. (more…)