Black History Month Copyright © 2012 CrossRoadsNews, Inc.
February 18, 2012
www.crossroadsnews.com
Section B
Church bombing a vivid memory, still By Jennifer Ffrench Parker
Sept. 15, 1963, started off as a beautiful Sunday morning. It was clear and the sun was shining. Thirteen-year-old Barbara Cross and her friends were excited about the first Youth Sunday at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where her father, the Rev. John H. Cross, had been pastor for just over a year. After Sunday school ended in the church’s basement, Barbara was on the way to the restroom with her friends when her teacher, Ella Demand, stopped her. “She gave me a clerical assignment,” Barbara said. She asked her to write a list of students who were moving up to the next class. Her friends – Denise McNair, 11, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robinson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old – went on without her. Minutes later, there was a loud explosion. Forty-eight years after the attack, Cross, now 60 years old and living in Decatur, still tears up at the memory of that morning. “It was a horrible noise,” Cross said. “The building was shaking, and the lights went out.” She screamed and began running in the dark. “Children were running everywhere all panicky,” she said. “My heart was racing real fast.” Adults guided the children out of the darkened basement. Cross said she remembers thinking that maybe Russia or Cuba had bombed the United States. The truth was much more local, and the reason was sinister. It turned out that Ku Klux Klan members had planted 22 sticks of dynamite under the stairwell from the first floor sanctuary to the church basement, right next to the gas meter and the girls restroom. Cross said the KKK was angry about her father allowing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to hold meetings at the church; the integration of Alabama’s schools five days
Decatur resident Barbara Cross shows the display board she uses to teach students about the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four of her friends. Cross shares a message of forgiveness during Black History Month programs.
Jennifer Ffrench Parker / CrossRoadsNews
earlier; King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963; and desegregation of downtown Birmingham’s lunch counters and department store fitting rooms that April. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, one of Birmingham’s largest black churches, counted among its members the city’s black professionals. “We had architects, doctors, lawyers, educators and business owners,” Cross said. When her father dug through the rubble, he found the bodies of her friends. They were so mutilated that they had to be identified from the clothes they were wearing. The only survivor among the girls in the restroom was Addie Mae’s 11-year-old sister,
Origins of observance For the past 36 years, February has been celebrated as Black History Month. It’s four weeks a year when the spotlight focuses on African-American culture, heritage and achievements. Some people argue that one month a year is inadequate, but in 1976 – when the Washington, D.C.-based Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History Inc. expanded the former Negro History Week observances to a monthlong celebration – the contributions of African-Americans were largely ignored in this country. Harvard-educated Carter G. Woodson, who founded the association in 1915, initiated Negro History Week in 1926 to focus on the contributions of blacks in the development of America. At the time, the contributions of African-Americans had been largely left out of textbooks and the media. Woodson, who is called “the Father of Black History,” is the author of a number of books, including “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” published in 1933. That book outlines how poorly African-American children were being taught in school. It was Woodson’s hope that with the annual Black History observances, all Americans would be reminded of their ethnic roots and would develop mutual respect for each other. He picked February for the observances because it is the birth month of Frederick Douglass, who fought against slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves. In 2012, the theme of the month is “Black Women in American History and Culture.”
Sarah Collins, who was badly injured and lost her right eye. In addition to the deaths of the four girls, who were the subject of Spike Lee’s 1997 film “Four Little Girls,” 23 other children were injured that day. Cross later found out that she had been hit in the head by a falling light fixture. Her youngest sister Lynne, who was 4 years old, sustained a cut on her forehead, and Alma, 11, suffered a cut on her leg. Her brother Michael, who was 5, was also at church that day and had nightmares for a long time. Between 1947 and 1965, more than 50 bombings occurred in Birmingham, earning the city the nickname “Bombingham.” Among the 1963 bombings were the home
of King’s brother, A.D. William King, and the home and church of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The Cross family, who had received bomb threats before, didn’t spend that night at home. “We stayed with neighbors,” Cross remembers. The next day, King, his brother, Ralph David Abernathy and Dick Gregory came calling. “I opened the door, shook his hand and showed him to my parents,” Cross said, adding that it was the first time she had met the famed civil rights leader. Please see BOMBING, page B4
Woodson, the ‘Father of Black History’ Historian Carter G. Woodson was born to His first book, “The Education of the poor former slaves in New Canton, Va., on Negro Prior to 1861,” was published in 1915, the same year he co-founded the AsDec. 19, 1875. sociation for the Study of Negro Life and His parents, James and Eliza Riddle WoodHistory with Jesse E. Moorland. son, were so poor that he couldn’t attend He launched The Journal of Negro school regularly, but through self-instruction History, now The Journal of African he was able to master the fundamentals of comAmerican History, in 1916. His second mon school subjects by the time he was 17. book, “A Century of Negro Migration,” During the 1890s, Woodson hired himself out as a farm and manual laborer. He also was published in 1918. It was followed drove a garbage truck, worked in coal in 1921 by “The History of the Negro mines, and attended high school and Church” and in 1922 by the “The Negro college in Berea College, Ky. in Our History.” He earned a B.L. degree in 1903 and Carter G. Woodson At various times in his life, Woodson worked in the Philippines for the U.S. War Department taught school and was a principal. until early 1907. He also was the dean of Howard University’s School Woodson traveled to Africa, Asia and Europe and of Liberal Arts and West Virginia Collegiate Institute. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week, which briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris, France. He received an M.A. degree in history, Romance lan- was expanded to Black History Month in 1976. guages and literature from the University of Chicago in Woodson was a sought-after speaker at schools, 1908 and earned his doctorate in history from Harvard Negro History Week events, and HBCU graduation ceremonies. In February 1935, he addressed “more than University in 1912. A prolific writer, Woodson wrote, co-wrote or edited three thousand persons” in Detroit. more than 20 books. Woodson, who never married and had no chilHe also wrote hundreds of essays in leading black dren, died of a heart attack on April 3, 1950. newspapers and created the Negro History Bulletin for He is buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in children and schoolteachers. Suitland-Silver Hill, Md. His most famous and enduring book – “The MisHis Washington, D.C., home has been preserved as Education of the Negro” – was published in 1933. the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site.