In Memory of Four Little Girls: Birmingham Church Bombing 1963
Posted: Sep 15, 2009On this the 46th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four little girls, I am reposting an piece I wrote over a year ago.
Here are the opening lines of the New York Times article on that dreadful day.
Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 15--A bomb severely damaged a Negro church today during Sunday school services, killing four Negro girls and setting off racial rioting and other violence in which two Negro boys were shot to death.
Fourteen Negroes were injured in the explosion. One Negro and five whites were hurt in the disorders that followed.(Claude Sitton for the New York Times)
Sena Jeter Naslund and Growing up in the Segregated South
Four Spirits, a novel by Birmingham native Sena Jeter Naslund based on the aftermath of the1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls, made its world premiere as a theatrical production at the University of Alabama--Huntsville this past weekend. The stage play was the result of a collaboration between Naslund and her friend and colleague Dr. Elaine Hughes of Montevallo University. Four Spirits opened on Thursday, February 7, and ran through February 10.
In an on-line interview Naslund discussed the emotional difficulty of writing a book like Four Spirits. “Four Spirits was certainly a painful book to write,” says Naslund. “The research was painful in itself because I discovered a number of atrocities that I had not been aware of when I was young -- the castration of Judge Aaron, for example. I did participate to some extent in the civil rights struggle, but looking back, of course I wish I had done more. In a way, writing this book is an attempt ‘to do more.’ It also fulfills the promise I made to myself almost forty years ago -- that if I ever did become a writer, I would write about those times. Ultimately the civil rights movement is a triumphant story: though the transformation is not complete, I feel we live in a more just society now. Some of the pain of that time is partially mitigated by writing, also, about the courage, kindness, and love that existed then.”
In his review of the novel Four Spirits, Will Blythe of the New York Times observes that by “cutting back and forth from one character to another, she (Naslund) achieves what might be called six degrees of integration – a panoramic and even mysterious view of the way diverse citizens immersed in their daily struggles affect one another.” Blythe goes on to comment that “All of the characters here, white and black, are profoundly influenced by three actual events: the demonstrations of May 1963, when Sheriff Bull Connor turned police dogs and fire hoses on the predominantly black protesters; the Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in September of the same year; and the assassination of President Kennedy that November.” He praises Naslund’s “fine feel for the nearly inaudible drama of the psyche” saying “it is as if Virginia Woolf went down to Birmingham to cover the civil rights struggle for The Bloomsbury Times.”
---Penne J. Laubenthal
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