Poynter.org - On the Road to Civil Rights: Birmingham

he corner of 16th Street and 6th Avenue in Birmingham is awash in rich, abiding contradictions: the glorious and the grotesque, yesterday surrounded by today, conflict in the midst of reconciliation. The pieces are logically, masterfully, historically juxtaposed.

There's the blooming red and white tulips of Kelly Ingram Park where steel sculptures sprout along the walkways, recreating scenes from the May 3, 1963, melee when Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed dogs and high-powered fire hoses on boycott-bound schoolchildren.

There's the magnificence of 16th Street Baptist Church, with a sanctuary that holds 1,600 people, enough to launch Birmingham's children's movement. Its place in history was secured on Sept. 15, 1963, when a racist's bomb bloodied the church basement, killing four girls as they prepared to lead a Sunday school lesson on "The love that forgives."

There's the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which shares the corner and houses its memories. Its domed foyer opens to a museum that offers to its visitors depth, reverence, and unapologetic truth.

My children and I drove the 88 miles from Selma to Birmingham in time to see them all before nightfall.

Just that morning we had watched film footage of these places in a Selma museum. After four days of driving through history, from Atlanta to Tuskegee to Montomery to Selma and now Birmingham, the pieces of our past were starting to overlap like folds of skin on an old face.

Kelly Ingram Park declares itself "A place of revolution and reconciliation." We walked between the walls of one of the park's towering sculptures, and Keith the actor recoiled in fear as snarling dogs, frozen in mid-lunge, threatened him from either side. We walked past water-soaked steel teenagers, no taller than Nikki, who brace against the imminent burst from a powerful steel firehose.

We paused before the statue that captured the ugly moment when a Birmingham policeman seized a teenager by the shirt and slackened the leash on his police dog just enough for the animal to sink its teeth into the boy's chest. America cringed when it saw a photograph of that moment. Birmingham cringed when Mayor Richard Arrington Jr. dedicated the angry statue.

I didn't cringe at all. I thought how remarkable a city this must be that it could so publicly admit its sins.

We crossed 16th Street and met the Rev. Christopher Hamlin, the church's pastor and too young of a man to remember the things he would tell us. He showed us the massive sanctuary, the beautiful stained glass window -- an ebony Christ with arms outstretched -- donated by the children of Wales when they learned of the tragedy that unfolded in the basement.

In the basement, Keith scribbled down the names of the four girls, whose photographs hang in a tiny, picture-filled room. He lingered near their images, asked questions about their ages, begged his sister and I to take pictures, since he was out of film.

Why, I asked him later, was this piece of history so important?

"They were little kids like me," he said.

The Civil Rights Museum tells those stories in artistically beautiful and historically graphic ways. Its self-guided tour began with an introductory video about Birmingham's beginnings. Then the wall rose, and we were looking at segregated water fountains.

Keith, a child who must touch his world to experience it, tried to get a drink. The Whites Only fountain sent up a strong stream of cool water. When he tried the Colored Only faucet, it offered an inferior dribble that barely cleared the corroded spigot.

Keith stood there blinking. Thinking.

Details make the wonderfully interactive young museum a national treasure. The creaky floor in the "shotgun house" exhibit. The old Bible in the "Black Church" exhibit, turned to Isaiah, Chapter 57, Verse 21: "There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."

Nikki did more writing in her journal there than anywhere:

"Some displays point out the fact that many black people owned their own businesses and churches," she wrote. "Some even have very elegant houses and cars. Some people probably think we had no kind of businessmen or women in the community."

She noted the caricatures of black mammies and watermelon-eating sambos in an exhibit of early, racist advertising. She copied snatches of Sect. 369: "Separation of Races," from a reproduction of Birmingham's racial segregation ordinances: "If blacks and whites were in the same restaurant," she wrote to herself, "there had to be a wall at least 7 feet separating the two."

I considered the messages behind those observations as we walked. How would this immersion into a hateful past of legislated inferiority affect her; she who was already trying to figure out whether the smug superiority of the white teenage boys in her high school honors classes is about race or gender or if it's just about screwed-up personality?

Like her brother, she talks very little about such things, releasing occasional clues about her feelings, sunk deep in a question, floating unseen on an inflection, telegraphed in a glance. She and Keith long ago learned to see through my veiled expeditions into their inner thoughts, stopping my angled inquiries with one of their own: "Why do you want to know?"

When we arrived at the cell door behind which King secretly wrote his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," the past reached out and gave me perspective, understanding, words.

In excerpts from that letter, printed boldly next to the mock prison cell, I found a father who struggled to talk to his children about racism and worried about the scars it would leave behind.

"...When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television ... and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'....then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

King's 1963 letter to white clergy who had criticized the impatience of the movement captured the angst I felt in Selma as I tried to explain why a white woman's death was considered more outrageous than that of hundreds of black people.

I knew, as I read King's words, that what silenced me in Selma, what made me squirm as Nikki and I talked about her white classmates, was the daunting realization that so much -- and, yet, so little -- has changed in this country.

We drove through the sparkling hills of Birmingham that night to catch a movie and relax. We saw Steve Martin in Sgt. Bilko. It was a time for silliness.

In the newspaper that day was a story about a small Alabama town nearby, where civil rights leaders gathered to discuss five torchings of black churches since December.

NEXT:
On the road, driven to judgment.
History instructs, but it also bends, colors, distorts. Seldom is that convolution more pronounced than when a black man meets a white police officer on an all-but-deserted highway.

Memphis

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Keith Woods teaches at The Poynter Institute.
For more information about Mr. Woods, see his Faculty Bio page or contact him at kwoods@poynter.org.

Family photographs provided by Keith Woods.
Historic photographs courtesy of the Associated Press,
which holds the copyrights and reproduction rights to the images.
Design, illustration, and HTML programming by Mary Morales.