Today is the 47th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four black girls were killed by white supremacists who planted dynamite at the steps of their church.
The bombing is one of the best known incidents in the history of the American civil rights movement. There are a few things about it, however, that most folks don’t know, but should.
First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small children. They were adolescents — three were fourteen years old, and the fourth, Denise McNair, was eleven. They were kids, but they weren’t the little kids of popular memory. Their lives were taken from them as they were on the verge of becoming young women.
Second, they weren’t the only black people killed in Birmingham that day. As tempers flared throughout the city a white police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Johnny Robinson. Robinson, who was shot in the back, had earlier thrown rocks at a car draped with a Confederate flag. Later that day, Virgil Ware, thirteen, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bike when he was shot by Larry Joe Sims, a white sixteen-year-old returning from an anti-integration rally.
The teen who killed Virgil Ware was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to two years probation. The officer who killed Johnny Robinson was never charged with a crime.
There is a mythology to our collective memory of the civil rights movement, a mythology in which the righteousness of the integrationist cause is sometimes misrepresented as innocence. Teenagers become — as in the title of Spike Lee’s magnificent documentary on the church bombing — “little girls.” A teenager driven by anger to throw rocks at racists disappears entirely.
We should remember Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — and Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, too. And we should do them the honor of remembering them as they were.
studentactivism.net 
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September 24, 2010 at 1:38 am
saida
thank you for this. my grandfather was pastor of 16th street baptist church from the early 1940s until his death in 1960s. My mother and her siblings’ childhood home was the parsonage and was in effect bombed with the church that day. the siblings who survived addie mae collins and carolyn robertson were permanent (and permanently scarred) fixtures at my every family holiday gathering (denise mcnair was an only child, though my family remained close with her parents until her father’s death. I do not know the wesley family).
my mother’s entire generation in birmingham grew up with PTSD it seems. Some of them quite literally afraid to be indoors for too long since “indoors” is where the bombs go off. Now in their 60s, the survivors are often still shells of their former selves. We still turn off the tv when knews about the 16th street bombers and their deathbed confessions, overdue convictions, etc come on the news. these were the vibrant preteen sisters and daughters of our closest friends. most are still not ready to talk about the horror.
thank you for this piece, as my mother has always reminded me of the murder of the ware and robinson boys. in the blur of international media on 16th street they were never given proper media attention and their murderers were never brought to any real justice. their families are still haunted, today, however. their families still pass the intersections where they were murdered and relive the screaming horror of it all even still. their families still suffer the same post-traumatc stress that every survivor of a slain civil rights movement victim shares. and it is past time we raise them up and share this burden with them.
September 24, 2010 at 10:53 am
Angus Johnston
Thank you so much for commenting. I’m really grateful to have your perspective on this.