Growing up on Dynamite Hill

I grew up in the College Hills neighborhood (commonly known as “Dynamite Hill” for the rash of bombings in the 1950s and 60s). Attorney Arthur Shores lived three blocks from me on Center Street. Our home would shake every time a bomb exploded in the neighborhood. One night a window broke in our home. My friends and I would walk through the neighborhood the next day to see whose home was hit. My parents never discussed the bombings. I remember one Sunday a bomb was found outside the church on Center Street (Queen of the Universe). Two of my childhood friends were in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church when it was bombed (Dale & Ken). I remember my father, brother and I driving by the church a couple of weeks later and seeing the destruction, still vivid to me.

Strength to pursue our ideals

In 1963, I was a senior at Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Alabama. That was the year, a bright, intensely idealistic, not very savvy girl learned to retreat.

Put me in context. My parents were immigrants who left Europe with my brother during World War II to escape persecution because their ethnic background was Jewish. I was born in New York, and after years there and in Boston, my parents moved to Birmingham in 1953. I was seven.

My father felt he had behaved in less than courageous fashion in Europe on occasion, and he decided he would not hide his progressive views in Birmingham. He helped start the Alabama Council on Human Relations so that blacks and whites could meet together and communicate, a simple enough proposition which at the time was illegal according to Birmingham city ordinances. (more…)