Beyond the Margin

By Joe Spear

King went beyond “the dream”

The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, is a shrine of sorts.

Not a religious shrine for paying homage to spirits, saints or God, but a shrine to the struggle for civil rights. And the triumphs of four little girls.

The church is the site of a brutal bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan on Sept. 15, 1963, where four girls were killed as they attended worship and Sunday school. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the eulogy to a packed church and a shocked world.

While Jan. 16 marks the federal holiday honoring King and the focus is often on his “I have a dream” speech, his presence went so much further and the work he did and the places he graced are worth taking in. The 16th Street church is one such place.

The bombing there and the death of the girls showed the world the egregious violations of civil rights in a society that was heretofore considered free and just. The bombing and the death of innocent children and the subsequent television footage of Police Chief Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, with his dogs and his firehoses, brought the racist violence of Birmingham into the living rooms of those who had been unaware.

The girls — Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — were actually taking classes in civil disobedience, and the church had become a lightning rod of sorts for civil rights protests organized and led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth led those protests.

Last May the church Board of Trustees chairman and his wife granted our group of editors from around the country a tour of the church and its display of the events of 1963, including a short movie. They spoke to us from the church altar for a few minutes, mostly talking about the history of the church and how it was a community gathering place not just for worship but for the wave of justice that was growing in the South.

But they mostly talked of the spiritual strength of the church and about forgiveness. That’s always been a hard concept: that people who suffered great harm at the hands of evil people would somehow find it in their souls to forgive, no matter it be the bombing of churches and the murder of little girls or the Holocaust.

The 16th Street Baptist Church is an inspiring structure. Its dual steeples anchor the Romanesque Byzantine architecture. A stainedglass transom above the main doors announces its presence with authority.

A vast worship space is lighted by huge stained-glass windows on either side and benches are upholstered bright red. A huge pipe organ graces the space at the side of the altar with the towering pipes along the back wall. There’s a big balcony with all the modern video screens and sound systems.

A massive stained-glass depiction of a Black Jesus on a crucifix anchors the back wall above the balcony. The people of Wales offered it as a gift in memory of the little girls.

Kelly Ingram Park is across the street from the church. This was the location of the protests where Connor unleashed dogs and firehoses on teenagers. It now is the place of several monuments to those events.

The 16th Street Baptist Church, now on the National Register of Historic places, stands as a marker to not only a belief in Jesus but also a belief in justice.

That emphasis on forgiveness, King knew, would do more to awaken the peace in the hearts of all and for that we can celebrate the children, King and their widespread influence on justice and peace on his day.

Said King: “Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.”

Joe Spear is editor of Mankato Magazine. Contact him at jspear@mankatofreepress.com or 344-6382. Follow on Twitter @jfspear. The vicious dogs unleashed on protesters during Birmingham civil rights demonstrations are depicted in a park across the street from the church.