Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights

By Doug Jones

The story of the decades-long fight to bring justice to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, culminating in Sen. Doug Jones' prosecution of the last living bombers.

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. The blast killed four young girls and injured twenty-two others. The FBI suspected four particularly radical Ku Klux Klan members. Yet due to reluctant witnesses, a lack of physical evidence, and pervasive racial prejudice the case was closed without any indictments.

But as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously expressed it, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Years later, Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the case, ultimately convicting one of the bombers in 1977. Another suspect passed away in 1994, and US Attorney Doug Jones tried and convicted the final two in 2001 and 2002, representing the correction of an outrageous miscarriage of justice nearly forty years in the making. Jones himself went on to win election as Alabama’s first Democratic Senator since 1992 in a dramatic race against Republican challenger Roy Moore.

Bending Toward Justice is a dramatic and compulsively readable account of a key moment in our long national struggle for equality, related by an author who played a major role in these events. A distinguished work of legal and personal history, the book is destined to take its place as a canonical civil rights history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781250201454

Doug Jones

Doug Jones grew up in Missouri riding a stick horse named Gravy. It was named after his favorite thing. Doug always liked to draw so he got a degree in commercial art. He was hired by a large publishing house in Nashville, TN, where he got to illustrate a variety of products. Doug left to start his freelance career and have been drawing his fun little images for folks for 30 years.

Book preview

PART

ONE

INTRODUCTION

THE ARC OF HISTORY

My father, Gordon Jones, was named after George Gordon Crawford, President of the Birmingham heavy industry behemoth the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI). Dad grew up in Ensley, a dot on the map, seven miles west of the city, and when he was not quite eighteen, anxious to do his bit for his country, he fudged his age by a few months to enlist in the United States Navy.

On home leave in 1949, he was set up on a blind date with a recent graduate of Minor High School, Gloria Wesson. I guess the date went pretty well. A mere two weeks later, much to the surprise of both families, they were married in the front room of my great-aunt and -uncle’s new home in Sylvan Springs, about seventeen semi-rural miles along Route 269 out of the city. The town was close enough to the mines and factories on the outskirts of Birmingham to offer just about every man in the family a manageable commute to work.

They headed to Texas where Dad was stationed, first in Corpus Christi, then Dallas. Toward the end of the four-year stint, Mother became pregnant with me. That propelled the couple back to the bosom of the family in Edgewater, a small mining town on Birmingham’s fringes.

I was born on May 4, 1954, thirteen days before the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

The decision was arguably the first nail in the coffin of the Jim Crow laws of the old South. It made state laws authorizing separate but equal black and white public schools unconstitutional, sparking overdue change and extreme racial anxiety, especially among whites.

Tumultuous transformation was in the wind, but my parents were too busy building the foundations of the family to get caught up in wider issues. After a few months of unemployment, Dad found a job with the biggest game in town, U.S. Steel, as had many other family members. At first, he toiled as a laborer at what was then the second-largest steelmaking plant in the country before he rose through the ranks to management. He ended up spending more than sixty-two years at that plant, either as an employee or heading up the local office of one of the company’s prime contractors, until retiring at the age of eighty.

In the forties and fifties, heavy industry wasn’t just an imposing presence on the outskirts of the city of Birmingham; it dominated the landscape, especially along Routes 80, 269, and 56, arteries that also connected us to relatives like the branches of a family tree.

U.S. Steel stretched as far as you could see this way and that, Dad recalled recently. It was very impressive. Twenty-five thousand people, all of them there every day, working three shifts, seven days a week.

The boosters had called Birmingham the Magic City since the late nineteenth century when industrial growth and its population exploded, but truckers in the postwar era knew better. For them, it was Smoke City, the metropolis regularly cocooned by a putrid aerial cocktail.

The billowing smokestacks produced plumes of beautiful filth that were the byproduct of progress, introducing a new level of stability, even prosperity, for the workers and generating lucre for the bold, brilliant, sometimes corrupt, rarely accountable captains of industry.

So enamored of heavy industry was Birmingham that the Magic City had missed a major development opportunity in the forties when Atlanta, then a sister city of about the same size, won the affections of Delta Air Lines to become the company’s southern hub. We all know how that has turned out.

A company-built satellite city, Fairfield, was one of the better results of U.S. Steel’s efficiency in shaping the lives of its employees. My parents grabbed a chance to settle into the newest community in the vicinity, dubbed Glen Oaks, in 1955.

We were the first family to move into the subdivision. Our little house seemed enormous to me as a young boy, a conspicuous one-level castle on the corner of Rutledge and Glen Oaks Drives surrounded by scores of similar structures. Newly erected or still-under-construction homes lined recently plotted and paved streets, the smell of freshly laid asphalt often mixing with the invigorating scent drifting in from soon-to-be-leveled woods a few blocks away.

When he wasn’t working weekend or overnight shifts, Dad would take me up the hill behind the house where the roads had been cut but were still dirt, and on windy days we would fly kites. Mother was ever-present for me and my sister Terrie, who came along in 1957.

Reminiscing today with friends, it’s startling how many memories we share. While we thought our tight little community special, it became apparent in later life that the experience of many white families in Birmingham and scores of other towns in the South was similar.

We all seemed to enjoy the same foods, sports, music, and television shows. The vacation spot of choice was Panama City Beach. You’d complete the five-hour drive to the Gulf Coast, and it seemed the first person you’d see, either by arrangement or chance, would be a kid from Glen Oaks.

My other excursions out of the subdivision consisted of summer weeks at the house where my parents had married, with Aunt Laverne, Uncle Jimmy, and my cousins Deborah and Ricky. In the wilds of Sylvan Springs, a boy could wield a BB gun and fancy himself a direct descendant of Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. The occasional romp in a mudhole was a highlight.

The lack of an interstate highway system made a trip between Birmingham’s satellite towns seem like a grand journey. Heading from our suburban enclave into downtown Birmingham required extensive planning and was an all-day affair.

With everyone dressed in their best outfit, it would be lunch at Britling Cafeteria, punctuating Mother’s shopping at locally owned department stores such as Pizitz and Loveman’s. The highlight would be catching a movie at one of downtown’s handsome single-screen theaters—the Alabama, the Ritz, or the Empire. And of course, we ended up on the knees of various in-store Santas around Christmas, when the lights and window decorations added to the excitement and expectation.

Trumping even the movies, the Birmingham Zoo was a prized excursion, a chance to match a few animals to those I’d seen on Wild Kingdom, Marlin Perkins’s compelling wildlife television show.

The excitement on zoo days started with the drive from Fairfield, through Homewood and down Lakeshore Drive, where we’d cruise by a vision of barely fathomable opulence—a house with a private lake. Who lived like that, with their own lake? Certainly, no one we knew. (The house is gone now, razed to make way for office buildings, but the lake remains, although, through adult eyes, I have to concede it’s more like a pond.)

Trips to the zoo took a full day. The apes, giraffes, and big cats were first stops, and a ride on the Casey Jones Railroad, a miniature train that traversed parts of the more than one hundred acres, was a must.

Especially compelling was the site of the grave where Casey Jones, the fabled train engineer, was supposedly buried, his engineer’s cap and boots sticking out of the ground. They don’t make attractions like that anymore.

Sixty-Three

My tight circle of neighborhood friends and I had little if any idea that the Birmingham school system was poised to go through unprecedented change as the desegregation process commenced despite violent and widespread objections from whites.

All we knew was we had a brand-new elementary school in Glen Oaks that opened in the fall of 1962, my third-grade year, meaning no more busing to neighboring Forest Hills Elementary. This ensured a quicker and smoother transition between schoolyard sports rivalries and late-afternoon neighborhood pickup games.

Adult heads would shake ever so gently when there were glimpses on the evening news of trouble on the streets, usually in some faraway city, though occasionally we’d recognize a Southern landmark or two in footage of the latest bombing. Firemen and police would be depicted taming flames or involved in heated confrontations with black folks.

That would be virtually our only glimpse of non-white faces, other than our maid, of course. Julia was always there for us, and loved our family like her own. She had a robust and enchanting personality that endeared her to everyone. We kids adored her, and we knew the feeling was mutual.

My family were good people, but like most white folks, they were immersed in the biases of the time. Segregation had been the way of the South for generations, and we were white Southerners. Race wasn’t discussed—not around kids—and there was never any ill will openly expressed toward any group. But some things were incontrovertible, even if the political environment was in transition.

There were hints of adult prejudices and preferences. For example, figurines depicting prominent characters didn’t come standard with Chevys, so the one perched near the back window of my grandfather’s car was conspicuous.

Who’s that? I remember asking my beloved grandfather, whom we called Paw-Paw.

Never you mind, it’s just a politician, he said, opting not to explain that it was Birmingham’s notorious Public Safety Commissioner, Eugene Bull Connor, the man responsible for enforcing segregation laws and mores. Connor, a former sports commentator, was a popular figure who had a penchant for riding around on the back of a white tank at the height of civil disturbances while barking instructions to law enforcement officers.

I didn’t mind too much that some questions went unanswered. That’s just the way things were.

The presidential election of 1960 is the first election I remember. I was all about JFK. He was young, charismatic, and intelligent—exactly what a six-year-old thought the country needed.

Hard to believe today, but JFK won with about sixty percent of the vote in Alabama. A Democrat would only carry Alabama one more time (1976, for Georgia neighbor Jimmy Carter) in the next thirteen presidential elections as race became a dominant factor in elections.

Kennedy’s support in Alabama gradually faded when it became clear his administration, with his Attorney General brother Bobby leading the charge, was leaning toward civil rights. Conservative Democrats—representatives of the old Solid South coalition of states and defenders of segregation—were a powerful constituency in Washington, even if times were changing.

In his first year of the presidency, JFK was focused predominantly on the imminent danger of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union flexing its considerable muscle on the world stage. However, civil rights protests had gained national momentum since December 1955, when Rosa Parks defied a local ordinance and refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Parks’s act of courage and resistance sparked a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to lead a thirteen-month-long boycott of the Montgomery bus system, establishing a template for peaceful demonstration that spread throughout the South.

The Kennedys knew the king-making power of the support of Southern Democrats and, reportedly at their father Joe’s instruction, avoided ruffling segregationists’ feathers. The new President and his Attorney General, tacitly at first, tolerated black activism. When the Freedom Riders rode into Alabama in May 1961, however, the federal administration could not avoid directly addressing the civil rights issue.

A multi-racial group of activists, the Freedom Riders had decided to test whether the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, outlawing segregation in restaurants and waiting rooms in bus and train terminals, was being enforced. They embarked on a trek from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, white and black together, with an African American toward the front of the bus to challenge local seating customs and laws.

On May 14, 1961, white supremacists firebombed a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama, and beat the travelers as they tried to escape the damaged vehicle. Later, a Trailways bus carrying another group of activists arrived in Birmingham. Despite the expectation of confrontation and violence, there were no police on hand as men armed with baseball bats, iron pipes, and chains assaulted the riders. Bull Connor, the city public safety czar, had alerted the Klansmen that they would have a quarter hour to coerce the activists into heading back to Washington. Publicly, Connor put a lack of swift police response down to it being Mother’s Day.

The nation was outraged, and there were widespread demands for federal action over the incidents. Bobby Kennedy, instead, called for a cooling off period. It was by no means an endorsement of the Freedom Riders, but his failure to condemn their provocative campaign infuriated many in the South who fumed about interference from outsiders. As the Kennedys got behind school integration in subsequent years, most of the support from Democrats in the South disappeared to the point that America’s youthful leaders were widely vilified.

I was blissfully ignorant of these and other incidents during the Kennedy administration. My admiration for the President stemmed mainly from his support for an ambitious space program. However, I could sense his popularity was waning and instinctively knew, even as an eight-year-old, any positive affirmation of JFK, at school or in social situations, was unlikely to meet with resounding support. Paw-Paw’s brusque assessment was he could not vote for him in the presidential election as Kennedy was Catholic. I didn’t allow myself to contemplate at length why that was an issue but assumed it was because we were Methodists. But for most, religion was simply a way to gloss over racial issues.

No subject was banned from discussion, probably because my family never really needed to invoke restrictions on me. I knew what not to say—a talent I have tried to exercise judiciously during my professional life.

But there was something mildly discombobulating about 1963. I don’t know how noticeable it was at the time—I may just be projecting what I know now onto my memory of those usually languid days—but hints of unrest in Birmingham did seep through.

Of course, Fairfield, like Birmingham and every other Alabama community, had long been segregated: the neighborhoods, churches, schools, and restaurants. It had been that way for generations, and we accepted it without question. Whites lived in Glen Oaks, Forest Hills, Bellwood, and later Fair Oaks, while the black community lived on The Hill—the area that circled Miles College, an all-black college founded in 1898 by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Bishop William H. Miles.

In postwar years, the city of Birmingham also had a hill neighborhood. The Fountain Heights area became known as Dynamite Hill, as white supremacists launched a campaign of terror to protest the growth of the black population there.

According to police records, the Ku Klux Klan detonated dozens of bombs in churches, houses, and black businesses from 1947 to 1963 and infamously helped earn Birmingham the moniker of Bombingham.

The KKK-led terrorist attacks in black neighborhoods went up a notch in 1963. As the civil rights movement gathered steam, Klan violence intensified. Nevertheless, media outlets, owned and staffed for the most part by whites, weren’t awash with news reports on the incidents. As my father reflected recently, you’d be lucky to hear about protests.

But the swell of unrest in the streets of downtown Birmingham made confronting a few ugly truths inevitable as the civil rights movement’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and the nationally famous Dr. King drew attention to the city’s apartheid-like laws in unique nonviolent protests.

On Good Friday 1963, King and his close friend Reverend Ralph Abernathy were handcuffed and incarcerated in the Birmingham jail. Eight white ministers termed King’s involvement as unwise and untimely and implored him to wait and give the city’s newly elected administration (that would not include Bull Connor) a chance to act and quell tensions. In response, MLK penned his legendary Letter from Birmingham Jail.

On release, King, following suggestions from Bevel, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s brilliant strategist, agreed to expand the involvement of local children in protests. Kids had already been taking part in the community effort, but Bevel and others believed Birmingham’s youth was the best way to deliver the message to the nation about multi-generational injustice in Birmingham and the rest of the South.

Black adults also had special challenges protesting, as their participation often ensured they’d lose their jobs, especially if arrest was a possibility. (It was a probability in Connor’s Birmingham.) Youth faced no such retribution.

Reluctantly, and in the face of considerable opposition and notable condemnation, the leaders conspired to stage large-scale children’s rallies. Thousands, aged six to eighteen, would be involved, transported from the suburbs into the city any way they could. What originally had been dubbed Project C for Confrontation became the Children’s Crusade.

Taking their organizational cues from popular radio disc jockeys Tall Paul White and Shelley The Playboy Stewart, the kids gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the pastor, Reverend John Cross, had agreed they could meet to pray and plan the peaceful demonstrations.

Police wasted no time arresting the children when they hit the streets, herding them into school buses for a trip to jail. Nevertheless, the protests persisted, with children breaking into groups of fifty or so to march through town, sending the authorities in different directions.

Initially the protests were conducted and controlled relatively peacefully (although dumping schoolchildren in jail cells with real convicts wasn’t an experience they would get over easily). Nine hundred and fifty-nine children had been arrested by the end of the day, May 2.

The following day, a thousand more crowded around 16th Street Baptist Church and spilled across the road to Kelly Ingram Park. Connor, knowing his 900-capacity jails already had more than 1,200 inmates (a makeshift holding center had to be set up at the state fairgrounds), decided he was finished with the kid-glove treatment and ordered his troops to take a more menacing approach to crowd control.

Police and fire officers used attack dogs and fire hoses in and around the park to control the crowd. The barely believable photos of German Shepherds being launched at defenseless kids and teenagers being repelled by dangerously powerful blasts of water quickly spread around the world. They even made the often protest-shy local papers (although not page one in the Birmingham News).

The effectiveness of the children’s marches as a protest tool was immediate and lasting. On May 10, King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth announced that they had reached an agreement with city officials to desegregate lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains. An unspecified number of black sales clerks would be employed in Birmingham stores. An uneasy truce was achieved.

Connor, who had refused to vacate his office after being defeated at the polls, erupted like a Klan bomb and predicted swift retaliation. That evening, Robert Shelton, the Imperial Wizard of the Klan, speculated that the settlement would be King’s epitaph. On the night of May 11, the residence of Dr. King’s brother, A. D. King, was bombed and, minutes before midnight, a bomb exploded at the A.G. Gaston Motel, in the heart of the black business district just a block from 16th Street Baptist Church. Fortunately, the bomb’s intended target, MLK, was already home in Atlanta.

Tensions had reached the breaking point, and over the ensuing days riots flared, resulting in injuries to dozens of people.

All the while, Governor George Wallace talked abrasively, generating a frenzy of fear and loathing in the white community. With a civil crisis in the making, President Kennedy relented to public demands and dispatched federal troops to Fort McClellan, near Anniston. Potentially violent intervention looked likely should civil unrest escalate.

But three weeks after fire hoses and dogs were turned on children, there was a circuit breaker for Birmingham that prevented civic breakdown: Connor was finally banished from office. Federal troops stood down. The historic agreement between the Dr. King–led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the city officials was modest but effective and fueled calls for change elsewhere in the South.

The same month I turned nine, thousands of children, many the same age as me, turned the tide of the civil rights movement. If I knew about it at the time, it was secondhand knowledge. There were no discussions at home or deliberations in the playgrounds of white neighborhoods.

But the adults knew. The crisis, as my parents and many others still refer to it, generated an unrelenting tension. The pressure to take sides in an atmosphere so inimical to unity was clearly intense.

In your mind, you didn’t want to get involved. You were afraid to because you didn’t know which side would turn against you whatever you did. It was very nerve-racking, my mother said. There were a lot of mean white folks and a lot of mean black ones.

We didn’t have too many mean black folks in Glen Oaks. Truth be told, Mother wouldn’t have closely encountered many, if any, people of color while going about her daily rituals, except for one.

Julia, our gentle and jovial maid, was at the same time our sitter and my family’s main link to the other side. I particularly remember one day, at the height of the crisis, when she was uncommonly distressed.

Like many others at the time, she felt confused and put-upon. Societal change was underway and the pressure to know your mind and embrace or reject a specific vision of the future was intense. Clearly frightened by the heightened community tension, Julia had heard terrible, inaccurate rumors about the fate of the black community. She stunned my parents when she asked my father: Mr. Gordon, will you buy me if they put us up for sale?

My parents thought she was joking, but Jim Crow wasn’t just a vague memory in 1963, and the threat of slavery to folks like Julia was yet to be completely erased from nightmares.

I don’t want to go to Africa, she asserted, apparently in the belief she could be deported from the land of her birth. Desperate, she said she could live in a little shed in our backyard if my dad would buy her, if it came to that.

Mom and Dad assured her there would be no such insanity, no return to the inhumanity of previous generations, that things were going to be OK. In retrospect, though, perhaps her fears weren’t entirely unfounded, given the presence of white supremacist groups that wanted to subjugate blacks using tactics every bit as odious as those employed in years past. In fact, one of the darkest, most unbearably sad days for Alabama, the South, and the United States was only a few months away.

I can’t recall what I was doing Sunday, September 15, 1963.

I don’t really remember when I heard the news that the 16th Street Baptist Church had been bombed, killing four young black girls. I suspect, however, that I had just left my family’s regular Methodist Sunday School and church appointment where I am sure there were prayers for peaceful times in Birmingham. My guess, though, is my intense personal appeal for divine assistance would have likely focused on the Alabama-Georgia football game scheduled for the following