He didn’t know any better.

Somewhere in the dim and fevered recess of an evil mind he feels right now that he has been a hero.  He is only guilty of murder.  He thinks he has pleased us.

We of the white South who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment.

We, who know better, created a climate for child-killing by those who don’t.

We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner.  We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner.  Let us see it straight, and look at the blood on it.  Let us compare it with the unworthy speeches of Southern public men who have traduced the Negro; match it with the spectacle of shrilling children whose parents and teachers turned them free to spit epithets at small huddles of Negro school children for a week before this Sunday in Birmingham; hold up the shoe and look beyond it to the state house in Montgomery where the official attitudes of Alabama have been spoken in heat and anger.

Let us not lay the blame on some brutal fool who didn’t know any better.

We know better.  We created the day.  We bear the judgment.  May God have mercy on the poor South that has so been led.  May what has happened hasten the day when the good South, which does live and has great being, will rise to this challenge of racial understanding and common humanity, and in the full power of its unasserted courage, assert itself.

The Sunday school play at Birmingham is ended.  With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe.  If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug.”[*]