“In Ourselves Our Future Lies”

Just three and a half years after surviving my unhappiest year, 1963, the Birmingham News interviewed four young adults to speak about changes in the New South. In its May 21, 1967 edition, while a student at Miles College, I was recorded saying, “the South is improving, but you learn that you must struggle to achieve something. You learn that nothing really comes easy.”

Indeed, life during the fall of 1963 was far from easy in one old, hateful southern city: Birmingham, Alabama. I was a senior at Ullman High School eagerly awaiting graduation in its winter class. Cynthia Wesley was a fourteen-year-old student at Ullman; I was two years older. We first exchanged flirting glances. Then, through our friends, we passed little innocent notes to each other. After these notes, our friendship blossomed. She was so smart, happy, and full of hope. I still remember her smile that melted away all my shy defenses. (more…)

The whole truth

Mom had a long list of values to instill in us. Probably at the top of the list was: “Always tell the truth.” Just as I entered fifth grade, we moved to Birmingham, where that rule was about to get more nuanced: there was “the truth” and there was “the whole truth.”

Dad moved Mom and us four kids to Birmingham so he could join the civil rights movement. He may have been the only white man in the state whose fulltime job was civil rights. Mom and Dad had cautioned us not to talk about Dad’s work. With our teachers, neighbors, and friends, that piece of the truth could mean trouble. We navigated a fine line, technically never telling a lie but holding back most of what mattered to us. (more…)

Remembering my four friends 50 years later

Even as the inspiring words of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech rang out from the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington in August of 1963 were still reverberating around the world, less than a month later, on September 15, an even louder sound rumbled through my life. The rumbling has never stopped for me.

A bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama – a church with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed, and many other people injured that day. (more…)

Denise smiling back at me

I remember seeing Denise in the hallway on Friday September 13, 1963 at Center Street Elementary where her mother taught. I had just been promoted to the 4th grade and would miss Mrs. McNair terribly since I would no longer be in her 3rd grade class anymore. That Sunday morning was the same as usual with us kids at the dining room table reading the funny pages of the newspaper while waiting for my grandmother to get ready for Sunday School. Hearing a blast was not unusual because of the various steam and steel plants surrounding us, (more…)

The school picture

When the bombing of the church occurred and those girls were killed, I was about 10 years old. Our family lived in what was then called Bluff Park (which is now part of Hoover) on Shades Mountain. I was born there, grew up there, attended Bluff Park Elementary school, was an active member of Bluff Park Baptist Church, and had what I thought was an idyllic life. Little did I know what was bubbling all around me.

Unbeknownst to me, my parents had become somewhat involved in the Civil Rights Movement. (more…)