Two Men, Four Little Girls, and the inability to accept justice denied(f

Forwarded from Nicole..

Mine

>" I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish
brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been
gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the
regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his
stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to
justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a
positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I
agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods
of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable
for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who
constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than
absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is
much more bewildering than outright rejection. "  - Martin Luther King,
Jr. 


>TWO MEN, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS
(Friday, May 19th, Newark Star Ledger editorial excerpt)

>A jury will determine the guilt of the two men just indicted for the 1963 
church bombing that killed four young African-American girls in Birmingham, 
Ala.

>But the investigation and prosecution of this crime, and the amount of 
stubborn energy behind the effort, offer some measure of what society will 
not tolerate.  That is the importance of these two indictments.

>The indictments and arrests come 37 years late, but they declare that
things 
have changed in this country from the days when white men could kill black 
people, brag about it and expect the law to leave them alone.

>Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robinson and Cythnia
Wesley, 
all 14, were victims of one of the most horrendous crimes of the civil 
rights 
era.  There had been other bombings, enough to earn  Birmingham the 
nickname 
Bombingham, enough for one section of the black neighborhood to be called 
Dynamite Hill.

>But this one was different. Set off a bomb in a Baptist church at 10a.m.
on a 
Sunday, and the intent to kill innocent people, en masse, is clear.  That 
is 
church time, Sunday school time, and that is when the bomb went off in the 
basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church.  It was a massive bomb, built 
with 15 sticks of explosives, and the four girls were near ground zero.  
They 
were caught in a blast so powerful that it turned the wall before them into 
flying shards of concrete and flattened cars on the street outside.  
Another 
22 people were injured.

>The horror of that day was amplified by the horror of the official apathy 
that followed.  This act took place in the kind of community where secrets 
were not easily kept, at a time in our history when those who committed 
such 
crimes usually felt no need to hold the secret close.  These suspects were 
identified early on.  But while the mayor of Birmingham cried over the 
victims, local authorities never mustered an investigation worthy of his 
tears.  And without explanation, J. Edgar Hoover, called off the FBI.

>That's the way things were.

>But things do change.  In 1977, Robert, "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, one of
the 
original suspects, was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He 
died in 1985 in jail, where he belonged, because the new white state 
attorney 
general would no longer give racism immunity.

>Even so, the FBI closed its investigation and nothing happened until
1996.  
That's when Joseph Lewis, now the FBI special agent in charge of New 
Jersey, 
was running the FBI office in Birmingham. Lewis reopened the case, a 
decision 
that led to the indictment of two or more of the original suspects, Thomas 
E. 
Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry.  Lewis is black, which may not fit with 
Hoover's idea of the FBI. But as we said, the country has changed.

>Some of the people may say that the prosecution of two aging men simply
opens 
old wounds and serves no purpose.  The truth is the racism that swallowed 
up 
four girls in 1963 is a fissure that has never really closed and cannot be 
closed until justice is done for its victims.


****
>"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to
favor 
freedom and yet depreciate agitation … want crops without plowing up the 
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean 
without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a 
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will 
quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and 
wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they 
are 
resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants 
are 
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." 
Fredrick Douglass - 1857