39 Years: Why I Went to Birmingham
Why did I go to Alabama for the Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones special election earlier this month after never in my life having been involved in a political campaign? Why did I travel to a region of the country that makes me nervous in the rural areas, especially at night, as if I was an African-American in my former life? Was I going because I couldn’t reconcile what the Ku Klux Klansmen could have done — or what would I have done — had my family lived in a society and community that acted violently against African-American parents and children who wanted to go to the same school as me and my family members?
It didn’t have an answer right away. It was all just a feeling up until the point where I walked up and stood looking at The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four girls were killed by the Ku Klux Klan on September 15, 1963.
That’s when I found my answer.
It wasn’t a sentence.
It’s a number.
Thirty-nine.
Thirty-nine years.
That’s how long it took to bring terrorists — most but allegedly not all of them — to justice. The terrorists in this case lived within a small American community where it was clear who ran on what side of the tracks. They knew who was in the Ku Klux Klan, and those who owned explosives. People overheard men including “Dynamite Bob,” as they met down by the Cahaba River like rats at night, all getting high off their plans to bomb children and families in a church.
Yet it still took 39 years to find the men who murdered four girls under the age of 14.
Prior to my trip to Alabama, I knew only the basic info on Doug Jones, who seems like a decent, fair and accomplished man. All those at his headquarters repeated that he’s the “unity” candidate, steering clear of liberal issues that hit too many nerves in the south. What got me there was not Doug Jones and the fact that he tried the second case against these klansmen. It was in the proof that our country was in no hurry to make sure what happened to those girls never happened again.
Thirty-nine years.
This is the response that I will offer when any American sheds any doubt on why Black Lives Matter exists, or when I hear why people are outraged with the intentionally broken and profit-driven state of the criminal justice system, or why it takes some women so long to come forward against the epidemic of cases involving abuse, assault, rape and harassment. It took 39 years to bring justice in a world of no justice for the people of color in Alabama. And it looks like we have to keep saying what our history books in schools don’t always tell in full.
Americans born with darker skin than other Americans were routinely beaten, abused, hung, raped, and burned alive at worst, and, for others — if they were lucky — they were bullied, intimidated, wrongfully convinced and held back for decades with no hope of justice, fairness, or upward mobility. Juries were all white. Freedom riders had been dragged from their bus and beaten to the point of being hospitalized. And when women and girls in particular who knew the killers spoke up, our own FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t listen or care enough to do anything more than slap the men on the wrist. To teach them a lesson. It didn’t. Not even close. Law enforcement or the KKK — or both — silenced and ignored the women who knew the truth until Doug Jones picked up the case in 1997 the day after the release of Spike Lee’s film, “Four Little Girls.”
The names of those four girls: Denise McNair, age 11; Carole Robertson, Addie May Collins, and Cynthia Wesley, all age 14. They were in the basement putting on their choir clothes when at least 15-sticks of dynamite under the church steps went off on a timer. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed several cars parked near the site, and blew one passing motorist out of his car. The first rescuer found them in the rubble all in one pile together, “as if they were hugging each other.”
And it didn’t end there. That same afternoon, Virgil Ware, called “Peanut” by his family, was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by his older brother. Suddenly he collapsed. He had been struck by two bullets. His killer was Larry Sims, a 16-year old white boy, who was riding with a friend on a red motor scooter. An Eagle Scout and straight-A student, Sims served only six-months in a juvenile detention center for his crime.
Sixteen year-old Johnnie Robinson was shot in the back by a policeman the same day. His crime? Allegedly throwing rocks at a car.
Shot in the back by police.
He was sixteen years old.
And now in 2017, riding on his horse, wearing a cowboy hat, our nation meets a man named Roy Moore and we’re leaving it up to the citizens of Alabama to decide his fate and our reputation. Again. After a week of being taken off the campaign trail in fear he’d say something that would hurt his chances of winning, good ol’ Roy seemed to be as proud of his Wild West apparel as his anti-gay and anti-Muslim stances. For weeks he’s tried to step over and on the women who started to come forward because their consciences said that a man of his type — a child abuser — should not move on to higher office knowing what he had done to them. Roy Moore did not only have four victims as originally reported. He had nine at least, as was later reported (and one of the accusers had her house set on fire, alleging that it was because she came forward). Pedophiles and child abusers never count or stop counting or they just lose track because they can’t keep up, and their damaged minds give them no reason to.
I would know because I grew up around male pedophiles. They were in my community, in the sports world, in my family, always on the perimeter. It was an uncle. More than one. A coach. More than one. And it was not just one coach who crossed the line while several others looked the other way, including adults, and kids who had no idea what to say or do. It was another coach who then went on to repeat the same performance. It was the older boy down the street who babysat me and my brother one night, and decided to cozy up to me, age 8, while I sat watching cartoons on the couch one night in my pink nightgown. I remember the color and texture of the couch and light from the cartoon flickering in the window behind me. He gave me a kiss on the neck, breathed and rubbed his cheek against mine, then stuck his hands up my nightgown and into my underwear. I squirmed away from him and crawled over my brother, and hid behind him. My brother, two years my senior, had no idea that he was my shield. I told my brother what happened this past Thanksgiving, and he stared at me blankly, lost for words. I told him that the molester for some reason decided to move on, and did not strike me again. I knew that he targeted at least three other girls in the neighborhood late at night during those fun sleepover parties that were supposed to be so much fun.
I could go on and on about the strong women in my life who wrote to me unsolicited, and confirmed terrible things that happened to them with Roy Moores being in their homes, in their communities, in their schools and sports worlds. But it’s not about us and what happened to my black and white friends and friends of friends north or west or in any direction. It’s about the bigger picture and the patterns of behavior. It’s the patterns of these men that we now are being forced to accept and talk about. They abuse, beat, bully, humiliate (mostly minorities, women and girls), no matter the state or region or religion that is allegedly running their lives as stated by the Moore fans, who said, “It’s between him and God,” which are probably the words that got me on the phone to book my flight. Would it have mattered if it were men who came forward? No one exposed The Catholic Church for abusing girls and women as it has been doing for as long as it’s been in existence, as if females never counted. We didn’t have to start hiding priests in the Vatican or in poor parishes in remote parts of the world until it was men abusing boys. Would abuse against boys have changed the race in Birmingham?
We will never know. So let’s go with what we do know about a place that was once known as “Bombingham” due to the 20 bombings in the eight years prior to the bombing at the 16th Baptist Church. Twenty bombings by white terrorists because they were committing heinous acts in the name of their religion. They resulted in no fatalities, and they were against black Americans, so apparently that made it okay. American terrorists bombed their neighbors — American citizens — because they wanted to go to school with their white children. Reverend Fred Shuttleworth took his two children to enroll in an all-white high school and was met by 200 protesters, who resisted and/or attacked him. The biggest offender? A man named Bobby Cherry, who 39 years later, was prosecuted for killing the girls of the 16th Baptist Church. Cherry had assaulted Reverend Fred Shuttleworth with brass knuckles in plain view during the day, and got away with it. Days later Cherry also got away with the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
How?
J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, had his back.
Hoover put 36 agents on the case for about 4–6 months, but they couldn’t find the obvious even with statements and witnesses — mostly women — in plain view. In 1968, the FBI reported that as a department, they had intimidated the clan, so apparently to them, that was enough. Their work was done. Even with people telling the FBI exactly where to find the evil — again, mostly women were coming forward — the FBI closed the case.
Hoover had the documents sealed.
The proud killers he left behind were free to live their lives, which included these highlights:
• Thomas Blanton Jr, a KKK member who was often seen with Chambliss, assaulted a federal officer during an interview on October 4, 1963. Apparently he was hiding nothing, and just mad at the officer for taking up his time.
• Chambliss, an active member of the KKK, had a long history of violence against blacks, including the time he punched Reverend Shuttleworth with brass knuckles in front of a mob of 200.
• Bobby Frank Cherry, also a KKK member, admitted to firing guns at black people. Polygraph tests indicated past involvement with a bombing and knowledge of who bombed the church. Cherry was jailed for molestation in 1971. He was arrested on April 26 (in 2000, I believe) in Texas for molesting a step daughter. Cherry had five wives.
• At the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, there are images of the bombed Freedom Riders’ bus, and the nooses around the necks of blacks hanging from trees, and the white people staring up at them as if they were enjoying the show. And there are testimonies taken by the FBI’s public records in the wake of the church bombing.
FBI FILE: Elizabeth H. Hood on 10/12/1963 — advised that she was the niece of Robert E. Chambliss…She said she had grown up in the family with Chambliss being feared and distrusted by members of the family all of her life. She has come to expect the very worst of him and would not be surprised at anything he would do. She believes him to be capable of any acts of violence that she could imagine, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. She said she did not have positive information that he has been involved in any of the bombings but has over the last few years been convinced in her own mind that he was responsible for bombings that occurred in Birmingham. She based this belief on statements that she made before and after these bombings. These statements, although not significant in themselves, in many instances when compiled with other statements, his attitudes at the time of the statement, has convinced her beyond a reasonable doubt that he was involved. On one occasion approximately two years ago, he showed her what he said was dynamite and blasting caps. She did not know what dynamite looked like or caps. At about the time she was shown this reported explosive there was a bombing of a residence in the Fountain Heights area…”
After returning to New York post-election, I read online about Chambliss, and the testimony of Reverend Elizabeth Cobbs. (This Elizabeth may or may not be the same Elizabeth Hood. I’m sure the FBI would want it to be two different Elizabeths.)
In Cobb’s testimony she said that her uncle admitted to her that he had in his possession enough dynamite “to flatten half of Birmingham.”
And there’s more.
Bill Braxton, who opened the case up in 1971, told the story of how introverted Chambliss’s wife had become given the trial and pressure or so he thought. For most of it, in her home, she kept all the blinds down and she often wore a cloth over her head or eyes. In 1977, Chambliss was convicted of the crime, and while waiting sentencing, someone went to her home to tell her that her husband was not coming out of prison, that he’d likely die there. She got up, took the covering off her eyes, opened up all the windows and ran around crying out, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
Chambliss went to prison first for first-degree murder of one of the girls (why not for all four, I do not know). Thirty-four years after the bombing, Doug Jones, who had cut law school classes to watch Bill Braxton prosecute Chambliss in 1977, re-opened the case for the second time (in state court, considering the FBI felt they’d done enough again, by just scaring the clan).
“The FBI did a great job,” Doug Jones slipped this into his lecture that I found on YouTube earlier this week.
The FBI in this case was good at one thing. Good at leaving evidence lost in a box for 34 years.
On this one tape, Thomas Blanton Jr, admitted to his wife, three times, that he had done the bombing. Yet his wife was upset because after the bombing he fell asleep at the home of Blanton’s new mistress, a woman named Waylene Vaughn. What did Blanton’s wife do? She helped create the alibi for her husband, as a pro-life, good Christian woman, standing by her man, a terrorist who just bombed a church and killed four children.
Cherry told his third wife that he was responsible for the bombing. His third wife and others testified that he had said, “Nobody was supposed to get hurt…But at least they cannot breed.”
Right before the bombing, the testimonies state that the white children who heard the older men planning the attacks were petrified because they were young and trapped in the home of their families, which were all klansmen. Cherry’s granddaughter said that at family parties, “He bragged about it. He admitted it.”
Doug Jones said he could not believe the level of patience, faith and class the families of the victims showed for decades — decades — hoping, praying, believing that justice would be served.
On September 15, 1963, Reverend John Cross got up on what was left of the 16th Street Baptist Church after he realized that children had been killed and his oppressed and distraught people were suffering more and more with each passing hour.
From his bullhorn he continued with the Sunday sermon he had planned on giving. Ironically enough, it was entitled, “The Love That Forgives.”
And where are we now?
Over two-thirds of white voters in Alabama voted for Moore. A story said that 72 percent of white women voted for Moore mostly because they felt we need to protect unborn babies from the rational thoughts of those who feel a woman’s medical concerns are between her and her doctor only in a country that was founded on the principle of separation of church and state. These women voted to protect their Republican men to stand by their side. There is one more reason they voted for Moore, and history is our proof.
More than one Birmingham citizen told me, “Most white Alabama voters choose Republican because they view the Democratic Party is the party of black people.”
I spent only four days going door to door with mostly white citizens from Birmingham who helped with the campaign. We were in the black neighborhoods, hustling to reach as many people as we could to say vote for Doug Jones, vote for the good, vote for progress and hope and forgiveness all over again in spite of all the times our country disappointed you and your people.
And African-Americans, particularly black women, saved our country’s soul. I’m not sure how many times we can ask them to stand up when our country has betrayed them time and time again.
They said no Moore.
Thirty-nine years+ is enough.
Now it’s up to us.
Writer and author Maureen Holohan was a three-time All Big-Ten basketball player and journalism award winner at Northwestern University. After playing pro ball overseas briefly in Greece, Hungary and Israel, she served in various roles as a teacher, director, entrepreneur, volunteer and activist. For more info on Mo, go to her To the Rim — Storytelling, Truth & Leadership blog and website (totherim.com).