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Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner write on Steady on Substack:
60 Years Ago in Birmingham
September 15, 1963 — 60 years ago today. An act of murderous cowardice in Birmingham, Alabama, shocked a nation. A bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church placed by Klansmen killed four girls as they attended Sunday school. Many others were wounded.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say in eulogy, “These children — unoffending, innocent, and beautiful — were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Let us pause in remembrance. Please say their names aloud. They deserve our recognition:
Denise McNair, age 11.
Carole Robertson, 14.
Addie Mae Collins, 14.
Cynthia Wesley, 14.
This horrific act is not ancient history. Some of you were of memory age at the time it happened. And it was not an isolated act of violence. Rather, it was part of a bloody, tragic, and unjust campaign of terror that stretches from before our country’s birth into our present age. It is a story of murder, torture, rape, lynching, and the tearing apart of families. It is a story of Jim Crow, redlining, and voter suppression. And now it is a story that powerful forces in our country would like us to forget, or at least sanitize from the unadulterated truth.
And yet, throughout our history, bigotry has not gone unanswered. Women and men of courage and fortitude have reminded us that we should walk a path toward equality and justice. Many have sacrificed greatly in service to our nation’s highest ideals.
This bombing was an act of domestic terrorism meant to stifle a growing Civil Rights Movement. It had the opposite effect. Less than a year later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act.
Progress has been made. However, we are reminded in our current age that the forces of white supremacy will never give up their privilege without a fight. We see more acts of racist violence, more denying of reality, more attempts to rewrite history. It is a cynically destructive ploy for power at the expense of our national unity and the truth.
All this was on the mind of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson this morning, when the first Black woman to serve on the court went to the 16th Street Baptist Church to commemorate the bombing’s anniversary. It was the justice’s first trip to Alabama, but she told those in the pews, “I felt in my spirit that I had to come.”
What she subsequently shared was an acknowledgement of the past and an admonition for our present and our future. We were moved by her words and want to include some of them here, as well as a video of the entire speech, should you wish to watch.
Justice Jackson began by contrasting the story of the Birmingham bombing and her own personal journey.
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Read the complete article, including Justice Jackson’s remarks and pictures of the murdered girls, at the link. Don’t let GOP extremists get away with rewriting our history to match their White Nationalist myths! It’s a key part of their scheme to “dumb down” American education and intellectual debate on all levels!
🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!
PWS
09-17-23