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“The most vicious and tragic crime ever perpetrated on humanity.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“Blackbird” b/ Allan Harris @ Pompano Beach Community Center
Martin Luther King Jr. Day (2015)
“Blackbird” — In early 1964, while touring America with the Beatles, Paul McCartney was moved by the racial tensions he saw on the news. It was memories of then, and knowing of the Birmingham bombing, that inspired him to write “Blackbird,” released in 1968 on the Beatles’ White Album.
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Has Come Again
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.
The Bridge
January 18, 2015
@ Pompano Beach Community Center
Pompano Beach, Florida
Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration
“Summertime”
“The World Is A Ghetto”
“On Broadway” (Pt1)
“On Broadway” (Pt2)
“Blackbird”
“Blue Was Angry”
“What’s Going On?”
21st Century Freedom Riders
Allan Harris (guitar, vocals, narration)
Doug Wimbish (bass guitar)
Jesse Jones Jr. (alto saxophone)
Michel Ferré (piano)
Dave Chiverton (drums)
September 15, 1963
History.com
Herman Cash, one of the four Ku Klux Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Church, and killed four young African American girls, was never charged, and showed nothing but white nationalist pride over his involvement until his death in 1994.
September 15, 1963 — When a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama — a church with a predominantly black congregation that also served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured. Outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the hard-fought, often-dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans.
The city of Birmingham, Alabama, was founded in 1871 and rapidly became the state’s most important industrial and commercial center. As late as the 1960s, however, it was also one of America’s most racially discriminatory and segregated cities.
Alabama Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
The city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was notorious for his willingness to use brutality in combating radical demonstrators, union members and blacks.
By 1963, homemade bombs set off in Birmingham’s black homes and churches were such common occurrences that the city had earned the nickname “Bombingham.”
Precisely because of its reputation as a stronghold for white supremacy, civil rights activists made Birmingham a major focus of their efforts to desegregate the Deep South.
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation. While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials.
His famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was published in the national press, along with shocking images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham that helped build widespread support for the civil rights cause.
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 in the blast.
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; he died in 1972.)
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.
Lasting Impact of the Birmingham Church Bombing
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.
@ The Pompano Beach Community Center
b/ Allan Harris, Doug Wimbish (The 21st Century Freedom Riders)
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2015
“Summertime” — George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” aria is a foundation on which Allan tells the story of the Gullah, a culture of free blacks who settled on the islands off the Carolina coast, many who were called “Black Seminoles,” who earlier had fought alongside the Florida Natives, against Andrew Jackson and America’s effort to oust them.
“The World Is A Ghetto” — Allan describes his being a kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn) New York, including his seeing a life-size poster of Jimi Hendrix, hanging in the front window of his neighborhood barber shop.
“On Broadway” — Following the migration out of the south and into the urban north.
“Blackbird” — Paul McCartney’s call for Civil Rights in America, after seeing the news reports of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
“Blue Was Angry” — Blue was a slave on an 1850 cotton plantation near Shreeveport, Louisiana, is the lead character in Cross That River, Allan’s album (and stage production) who escapes across the Red River, into Texas where he works as a (free) cowboy, becomes a Buffalo Soldier, and helps create what becomes known as “The Black West.”
“What’s Going On” — Marvin Gaye’s (1969) R&B call for peace.
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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.
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