Remembering the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and Virgil Ware

This year, 38 years ago, two events shaped history in the goal of equal rights and liberty for all in America. They were events that showed the ugly that festered inside of America, an ugliness based on a terroristic hate and race supremacy. These events were the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and the murder and lynching of Virgil Lamar Ware. The common element was that the both occurred on killed Sept. 15, 1963 and both involved children.

On that Sunday, a white man was seen placing a box under the stairs outside of the church, which had become a meeting-place for civil efforts to register African Americans to vote in Birmingham.

A few minutes before 10:30 am., the bomb exploded killing four girls who were in the church attending Sunday School: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). In addition, twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

A witness identified a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Chambliss, as the man who placed the bomb at the but found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

On the same day the 13 year-old Ware was found lynched and mutilated in Birmingham. Virgil Ware had just entered the eighth grade at the all-black Sandusky Elementary School near his home in suburban Pratt City. While working on a paper route with his two brothers. Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, both 16, had attended a segregationist rally that day drove by the brother firing two bullets hit Virgil in the chest and cheek, making Virgil Ware the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday.

Although African Americans can applauded some overt change with the election of Barack Obama and the erection of a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C., we must recognize the disservice we actually do ourselves by forgetting about those who gave blood for what we supposedly have currently. To forget in memory yet celebrate in symbols is a defeatist mantra that serves no proactive or productive utility. For it will always be as Dwight David Eisenhower stated, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

Our privileges have us more knowledgeable of celebrity and avarice than education and self-determination. Thus if such is the case, the principals symbolized in the actions of those before us and the words of Dr. King are long gone and may be never to return.

Like screaming fire in a theater

One thing about America, a racist or supremacist is not that far away. Maybe a keystroke away, or maybe a channel away. Bu they are always around. Over the past week, I was in dialogue with such a person. But that is all I will say to that extreme. However, I can deal with the aforementioned since his audience is not that Large.

On February 19, 2008, during his radio talk show, FOX news host Bill O'Reilly took a call from a program listener regarding the wife of Senator Barack Obama. The caller said that according to a close friend of Michelle Obama, that she was “a very angry,” and “militant woman."

The segment of the show of course was focused on her comments regarding being proud to be an American for the first time in her adult life. I wouldn’t expect Billy, or the average white band, i mean listener to understand what she meant. But I do and did; I mean folk here saw national guards on his street telling him he couldn’t play outside. I’m certain that it is out of left field for Billy or his caller to understand that some folks do remember segregation (albeit) I don’t, and taught it to their children. They may remember their parents having dogs set on them, or water hoses unleashed on them with there full fury, or how whites acted when the first school buses transported black kids to predominantly white Boston schools, or Bombing of the 16th street avenue church.

Some whites may not remember that their parents may have taught them that they couldn’t vote and had to ride in the back of buses for he same fair, or having to have separate waiting rooms, entering the back of establishments or drinking out of different water fountains. Maybe they think that folks of my persuasion ethnically should be proud of that as an American – nope, we are not. I mean, to my recollection, we never enslaved whites, or set dogs on them, or bombed their churches when maybe some felt that they needed to be bombed

In his response, O'Reilly opined: "I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down. "

I don’t know why I listen to him, but I think it is because I feel he is intrinsically divisive for America, and the enemy of mine, my folk and America. Last I heard it was illegal to lynch or assert that one would do such to a person in America. In fact, the House passed anti-lynching legislation three times in the first half of the 20th century. Dang, it wasn’t until 2005 that America manned up and apologized for the historic acts of lynching on its shores

I would like to suggest that if yawl can, please contact Bill O'Reilly, your congresspersons, senators and local law enforcements and hold him accountable for his words, I’m down for free speech, but saying lynching is ok with evidence, is like saying fire in a crowded movie theater to me. So why do you expect her to forget her lessons, God knows I don't and won't. All-Mi-T