Colors …
This is a Voyage into Sound
inst. of change [ELECTRIC GUITAR]
the players
THE INSTRUMENTS OF NOISE.
the bridge
POMPANO BEACH, FLORIDA (2015)
The 21st Century Freedom Riders
@ The Pompano Beach Community Center
Pompano Beach, Florida
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
January 18, 2015
Allan Harris tells the story of Paul McCartney writing “Blackbird” after seeing violent (civil rights) protests on television during the Beatles’ first tour of America.
((( Mourning In America )))
The most vicious and tragic crime ever perpetrated on humanity.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Four young girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama by an unrepentant klansman, September 15, 1963.
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carole Robertson
Cynthia Wesley
“Summertime”
((( 1.)))
“The World Is A Ghetto”
((( 2.)))
“On Broadway” (Pt1)
((( 3A.)))
“On Broadway” (Pt2)
((( 3B.)))
“Blackbird”
((( 4.)))
“Blue Was Angry”
((( 5.)))
“What’s Going On?”
((( 6.)))
Allan Harris (guitar, vocals, narration)
Doug Wimbish (bass guitar)
Jesse Jones Jr. (alto saxophone)
Michel Ferré (piano)
Dave Chiverton (drums)
“Summertime” — George Gershwin‘s aria, “Porgy and Bess” sets the stage from which Allan tells the story of the Gullah, a community of free black people who, in the 1850s, settled on the islands off the South Carolina, Georgia, and North Florida coast. Many were called “Black Seminoles,” as they had earlier fought alongside the native Floridians, in three “Seminole Wars.” The Wars, were the Floridians defending themselves against Andrew Jackson, the ruthless American president, whose mission it was to round up the “Indians” [Osceola], and drive them like cattle [“Trail of Tears”] onto “Reservations” America’s Midwestern Plains.
“The World Is A Ghetto” — Allan describes his growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York (Brooklyn), and the day in 1969 when he saw a life-size poster of Jimi Hendrix hanging in the front window of Mr. Cook’s barber shop. Mr. Cook’s was the neighborhood place, where the elders told stories of the neighborhood’s past, and spread their words of experienced wisdom.
“On Broadway” — New York City was a popular Underground Railroad destination, especially Uptown, where the Harlem Renaissance was born. One hundred years later (1960s), groups called the Freedom Riders headed back to the segregationist south to continued their life-long (generational) fight for Civil Rights. Many white, liberal, social activists in the Northeast joined the cause, and rode alongside African Americans who were (peacefully) protesting the defiant and deeply rooted racism in the South. The Greyhound Bus, prominently mentioned in the song [“ON BROADWAY”] was the ride on which the Freedom Riders rode.
“Blackbird” — Paul McCartney’s call for Civil Rights in America. After seeing news reports of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, he wrote the song released on the Beatles’ White Album.
“Blue Was Angry” — Blue, an 1850’s slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation is the lead character in Cross That River, Allan’s story (novella, album, stage production). In it, Blue escapes across the Red River, into Texas, where he works as a cowboy, a free man, with all equal rights to financial and racial justice.
“What’s Going On” — Marvin Gaye’s R&B call for peace, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Released in 1969, defying Motown president, Barry Gordy. Gordy objected to the label involving itself
The Bridge (Live)
• CROSS THAT RIVER (1850-2020)
• HARLEM RENAISSANCE (ESCAPING SLAVERY)
• LIVE (2014) @ WLRN MIAMI
• LIVE (2014) @ OCEAN DRIVE
• LIVE (2015) @ OCEAN DRIVE
• LIVE (2015) @ POMPANO BEACH
• LIVE (2016) @ HARTFORD
“Blackbird”
16th Street Baptist Church — Many of the civil rights protest marches taking place in Birmingham during the 1960s began at the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers, including Martin Luther King Jr.
The KKK routinely made bomb threats, in an effort to disrupt both civil rights meetings and regular church services.
10:22 a.m. — On the morning of September 15, 1963, some 200 church members were in the 16th Street Church — many attending Sunday school classes before the start of the 11 am service — when the bomb detonated on the church’s east side, spraying mortar and bricks from the front wall, and setting the interior on fire.
Most parishioners were able to evacuate as the church filled with smoke, but the bodies of four young girls:
Addie Mae Collins, 14
Cynthia Wesley, 14
Carole Robertson, 14
Denise McNair, 11
were found beneath the rubble in a basement restroom.
Sarah Collins, 10, who was also in the restroom, lost her right eye in the explosion, and 21 others were injured.
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, after a federal court order had come down mandating the integration of Alabama’s school system.In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order.
King later spoke before 8,000 people at the funeral for three of the girls (the family of the fourth girl held a smaller private service), fueling the public outrage now mounting across the country.
Though Birmingham’s white supremacists (and even certain individuals) were immediately suspected in the bombing, repeated calls for the perpetrators to be brought to justice went unanswered for more than a decade. It was later revealed that the FBI had information concerning the identity of the bombers by 1965 and did nothing. (J. Edgar Hoover, then-head of the FBI, disapproved of the civil rights movement.)
In 1977, Alabama Attorney General Bob Baxley reopened the investigation and Klan leader Robert E. Chambliss was brought to trial for the bombings and convicted of murder. Continuing to maintain his innocence, Chambliss died in prison in 1985.
The case was again reopened in 1980, 1988 and 1997, when two other former Klan members, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were finally brought to trial; Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be brought to trial.
MLK wrote much of the Civil Rights movement’s seminal text while in solitary confinement. The first writings were on the margins of a newspaper. It was five months later that local Klansmen, led by Herman Cash, bombed the 16th Street Church.
April 12, 1963 — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and nearly 50 other protestors and civil rights leaders were arrested after leading a Good Friday demonstration as part of the Birmingham Campaign, designed to bring national attention to the brutal, racist treatment suffered by blacks in one of the most segregated cities in America—Birmingham, Alabama. For months, an organized boycott of the city’s white-owned businesses had failed to achieve any substantive results, leaving King and others convinced they had no other options but more direct actions, ignoring a recently passed ordinance that prohibited public gathering without an official permit.
For King, this arrest—his 13th—would become one of the most important of his career. Thrown into solitary confinement, King was initially denied access to his lawyers or allowed to contact his wife, until President John F. Kennedy was urged to intervene on his behalf. As previously agreed upon, King was not immediately bailed out of jail by his supporters, having instead agreed to a longer stay in jail to draw additional attention to the plight of black Americans.
Shortly after King’s arrest, a friend smuggled in a copy of an April 12 Birmingham newspaper which included an open letter, written by eight local Christian and Jewish religious leaders, which criticized both the demonstrations and King himself, whom they considered an outside agitator. Isolated in his cell, King began working on a response. Without notes or research materials, King drafted an impassioned defense of his use of nonviolent, but direct, actions.
MORE: About Martin Luther King Jr.
Over the course of the letter’s 7,000 words, he turned the criticism back upon both the nation’s religious leaders and more moderate-minded white Americans, castigating them for sitting passively on the sidelines while King and others risked everything agitating for change. King drew inspiration for his words from a long line of religious and political philosophers, quoting everyone from St. Augustine and Socrates to Thomas Jefferson and then-Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, who had overseen the Supreme Court’s landmark civil rights ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
For those, including the Birmingham religious leaders, who urged caution and remained convinced that time would solve the country’s racial issues, King reminded them of Warren’s own words on the need for desegregation, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” And for those who thought the Atlanta-based King had no right to interfere with issues in Alabama, King argued, in one of his most famous phrases, that he could not sit “idly by in Atlanta” because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Without writing papers, King initially began by jotting down notes in the margin of the newspaper itself, before writing out portions of the work on scraps of paper he gave his attorneys—allowing a King ally, Wyatt Walker, to begin compiling the letter, which eventually ran to 21 double-spaced, typed pages. Curiously, King never sent a copy to any of the eight Birmingham clergy to whom he had “responded,” leaving many to believe that he had intended it to have a much broader, national, audience all along.
King was finally released from jail on April 20, four days after penning the letter. Despite the harsh treatment he and his fellow protestors had received, King continued his work in Birmingham. Just two weeks later, more than 1,000 schoolchildren took part in the famed “Children’s Crusade,” skipping school to march through the city streets advocating for integration and racial equality. Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, who King had repeatedly criticized in his letter for his harsh treatment, ordered fire hoses and police dogs to be turned on the young protesters; more than 600 of them were jailed on the first day alone. The brutal and cruel police tactics on display in Alabama were broadcast on televisions around the world, horrifying many Americans.
With Birmingham in chaos and businesses shuttered, local officials were forced to meet with King and agree to some, but not all, of his demands. On June 11, with the horrific events in Birmingham still seared on the American consciousness, and following Governor George Wallace’s refusal to integrate the University of Alabama until the arrival of the U.S. National Guard, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing his plans to present sweeping civil rights legislation to the U.S. Congress. Kennedy’s announcement, however, did little to quell the unrest in Birmingham and on September 15, 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church left four young African American girls dead.
By this time, King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail had begun to appear in publications across the country. Months earlier, Harvey Shapiro, an editor at The New York Times, had urged King to use his frequent jailing as an opportunity to write a longer defense of his use of nonviolent tactics, and though King did so, The New York Times chose not to publish it. Others did, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Century, one of the most prominent Protestant magazines in the nation. In the weeks leading up to the March on Washington, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference used the letter as part of its fundraising efforts, and King himself used it as a basis for a book, Why We Can’t Wait, which looked back upon the successes and failures of the Birmingham Campaign. The book was released in July 1964, the same month President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act into law.
credit
—30—
•UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (Alt. 1)
•UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (Alt. 2)
•FREDERICK DOUGLASS (FIRST TO BE FREE)
•W.E.B. DU BOIS
•JOHN BROWN (HARPER’S FERRY)
•MANY RIVERS TO CROSS: THE AFRICAN AMERICANS (PBS)
Lasting Impact
Even though the legal system was slow to provide justice, the effect of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was immediate and significant.
Outrage over the death of the four young girls helped build increased support behind the continuing struggle to end segregation—support that would help lead to the passage of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In that important sense, the bombing’s impact was exactly the opposite of what its perpetrators had intended.
September 15, 1963 — Four young girls were killed and 22 others were injured in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “ONE OF THE MOST VICIOUS AND TRAGIC CRIMES EVER PERPETRATED AGAINST HUMANITY.”
Although the FBI had concluded in 1965 that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had been committed by four well known Ku Klux Klansmen and segregationists (Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry) no prosecutions were made until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried and convicted of the first degree murder of one of the victims, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair. Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Cherry were both convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 and 2002, and Herman Cash, who died in 1994, was never charged for his alleged involvement in the bombing.
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
—30—
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (Sunday, September 15, 1963) Four young girls were killed and 22 others were injured in what Martin Luther King Jr. described as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Although the FBI had concluded in 1965 that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had been committed by four well known Ku Klux Klansmen and segregationists (Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry) no prosecutions were made until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried and convicted of the first degree murder of one of the victims, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair. Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Cherry were both convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 and 2002, and Herman Cash, who died in 1994, was never charged for his alleged involvement in the bombing.
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
—30—
