Remembering Four Little Girls
Written by: Linda Leigh Hargrove
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
One Sunday morning in Birmingham 46 years ago a bomb took the lives of four little girls. It was September 15, 1963. The girls, all under the age of 15, were part of a church youth day celebration at Sixteenth Street Baptist. The sermon that morning: The Love That Forgives.
The blast shook the community, the nation, and the world. It took more than 14 years for the dusts of justice to start to settle around those from the Ku Klux Klan that perpetrated the deed. Meant to douse the fires of the civil rights movement, the bombing only made it spread quicker.
Less than a year later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (July 2, 1964).
The law had changed but hearts had not. Many were still heavy with the hate and the sadness of loss.
In the years since that tragic event, many authors, poets, composers, and playwrights have sought to remember the girls through art. To find a healing place, perhaps.
There’s Joan Baez’s Birmingham Sunday, Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls, Langston Hughes’s poem Birmingham Sunday, Dudley Randall’s Ballad of Birmingham, and the Sins of the Father docudrama by Robert Dornhelm.
Why do we do this? Why do we write and sing about racial tragedy? To commemorate the lives lost? To cleanse our minds and souls? To educate future generations? To raise awareness? To punish the wrongdoers? Why?
What do you think?
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