A Black man is given a choice, help load the mutilated body of the child onto a truck so the murderers, grown men, can take it to the Tallahatchie River for disposal. Or else" And the child? Emmett Till. Fourteen years old. Tortured in a Mississippi barn.
Despite bombings of homes and places of business, the Civil Rights Movement refuses to choose between fascism and democracy. Terrorism picks up steam. Majority Black towns become white overnight once Black residents, driven to run out of town, leave what they own behind. Others are murdered trying to escape torched homes.
By May 1963, democracy takes to the streets. Black children, singing and clapping as they march though Kelly Ingram Park near the 16 th Baptist Church, encounter the iron fist of police commissioner, Bull Conor, and his foot soldiers. Law enforcers and vigilantes are armed with dogs and fire hoses. Imagine the grin on Conor's face as he watches grown men tearing the skin of children who are simply demanding the right to make democracy more than a slogan.
On September 15, 1963, at the 16 th Baptist Church, Black children are in the basement, preparing for Sunday school. It's not long after the federal government orders the desegregation of Alabama's schools.
Right-winged politicians, Evangelical leaders, educators, judges, and a good many Americans would prefer the complete disappearance of an American history that suggest the country's likeness to that SS doctor in Sophie's Choice and his ideological principles. Even before the chanting and saluting at Madison Square Garden, keeping the ideology of white supremacy alive was very much a goal for the "patriotic"! And "patriots" such as Robert Chambliss, Thomas E. Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry carried out their role in the plan to keep white supremacy alive.
Fifteen sticks of dynamite! Not just to inflict injury or death but to terrify a whole people! To terrify enemies! Grown men, so childlike with their strange ideas! One of them calls, warning parishioner s: Fifteen minutes. Ten minutes. But how are the adults at the church to know?
At 10:19 am, the parishioners heard the blast. Some twenty are injured. Some experience life-changing injuries. In the basement, near where the bomb was set, the rescuers locate the bodies of four children. One had a concrete slab embedded in her head. Innocent and playful. Children.
Addie May Collins, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14, and Carol Denise McNair, 11.
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