Remembering Birmingham
This post originally appeared Sept. 15, 2015.
Eighteen days after Martin Luther King delivered his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech before tens of thousands at the March on Washington, four hundred parishioners gathered for Sunday services in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. At 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, dynamite planted by white extremists ripped through the basement, killing Sunday school students Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robinson, and Cynthia Wesley.
As grieving families and congregants mourned these young victims of racial hatred, civil rights activists assembled in Birmingham to attend the girls’ funeral. Among those present were Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders Julian Bond (second from left) and John Lewis (third from right), who were captured in this image by SNCC photographer Danny Lyon as they stood across the street from the bomb-blasted church.
Today is the fifty-second anniversary of this terrible and shocking hate crime. I love studying history, and while I find some events heartbreaking—like the killing of four innocent black girls—I think confronting difficult facts is a responsible act, a kind of collecting of knowledge that helps us grow, as a community, a culture, and a nation.
As I am visually oriented, I often find that notions of faith in the fight for equality are reflected in the commemorative landscape. And I take heart. I moved to Washington, D.C., after living in Montgomery, Alabama, where I taught courses in art history at Auburn University Montgomery. One of the courses I offered was on memorials, and perhaps the highlight of the semester for my students was when we took a field trip through downtown Montgomery to look at various sites of memory. Montgomery is a jewel-box of memorials, which reflect its rich—and complicated—history. I was thrilled to have such teaching resources at my fingertips.
On a gorgeous spring day we met at the Civil Rights Memorial, a strikingly contemplative space nestled into the Civil Rights Memorial Center’s entrance. Commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center and designed by renowned architect Maya Lin, the memorial tells of the sacrifice of lives during the most intensely violent period of the civil rights movement. For her design, Lin chose to use polished black granite, a material notably expressive in terms of its power to communicate feelings around mourning, memory, and death. She placed a large circular table, balanced on one point like a spinning top, near a curving wall. Water is a key feature in the design, running down the wall and pouring off the table.
Lin found her inspiration in the words “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” a paraphrase from the Book of Amos that Martin Luther King Jr. used in his “I Have a Dream” speech and also at the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. These words are engraved on the large wall that curves, like a hug, around the table.
Lin also felt that a chronology would best represent the unrelenting violence that activists confronted. The table bears forty engraved names, presenting both a timeline and a record of those killed during the civil rights movement.
The period represented is between May 17, 1954, the day the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, and April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The forty people include activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work; random victims of vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle. Included among the names are the four young girls who were victims of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Another youth’s name, Virgil Lamar Ware, appears next to theirs.
On the same day, September 15, 1963, at the age of thirteen, Ware was fatally shot by white teenagers while sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by his brother. The white youths had come from a segregationist rally held in the aftermath of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. The other names represent ages from eleven to sixty-six; eight victims were white, and thirty-two were black. They came from all walks of life—students, farmers, ministers, truck drivers, a homemaker, and a Nobel laureate. It is a strange feeling, to write about these deaths as if they are just historical facts. They aren’t. They were people’s lives, people’s children . . . the sisters and brother of someone.
Watching my students lose themselves in the act of reading the date, then the name, and then the very blunt description of their death, I was reminded of how art and design is so effective, because unlike the act of stationary reading, it creates an environment that allows for physical movement. Maya Lin is an eloquent designer because she finds ways to teach history through materials, yet her memorials are not didactic. They allow for reflection; they create a space through which to move, to process.
I have a big crush on Maya Lin, to be honest, because she creates spaces that encourage experience, contemplation, and the chance to feel the feelings. Through the act of visitation, of reading and of touching the object, viewers take part in a kind of collective healing. The Civil Rights Memorial draws more than 20,000 people from around the world annually. On one warm Thursday afternoon during the Alabama springtime, fifteen college students and I were part of a larger group, one that continues to have the courage to remember, contribute to, and support the movement for equality.
—Kate C. Lemay, Historian, National Portrait Gallery
