Download or read book The 5th Little Girl written by Tracy David Snipe and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once described by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as 'one of the most tragic and vicious crimes ever perpetrated against humanity,' the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama instantly killed Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robinson, and Cynthia Dionne Morris Wesley on September 15, 1963. This egregious act of domestic terrorism sparked the passage of landmark civil rights legislation. Orchestrated by white supremacists, the blast left twelve-year-old Sarah Collins temporarily blind. In this intimate first-hand account, Sarah imparts her views on topics such as the 50th year commemoration, restitution, and racial terrorism.
Download or read book The Birmingham Angels written by Tracy Lynn Meyers and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the morning of September 15th, 1963, four excited little girls were gathered in front of the mirror in the ladies' lounge of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, adjusting their dresses and busily preparing for their roles as ushers and choir members at the special 11 a.m. "Youth Day" service. Built in 1911, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was an important meeting place for black community leaders who planned peaceful protests there, and hoped not only to integrate Birmingham but to send a strong message to the rest of the country that blacks and whites deserved equal rights. At 10:22 a.m. on that fateful Sunday, a bomb planted under the front steps of the church by members of the Ku Klux Klan hate group exploded, blowing a seven foot whole in the bathroom wall and instantly killing 11-year-old Denise McNair, and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley. This shocking act of violence and tragic loss of innocence in one of the most segregated cities in the United States helped to unite blacks and whites not only in Birmingham, Alabama, but across the entire nation. On the 50th anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley received the Congressional Gold Medal for their roles as catalysts of change in the struggle for civil rights, and for the sacrifice of four young lives filled with endless promise. This book is aimed at third through fifth grade students. and filled with fascinating historical photos.
Download or read book While the World Watched written by Carolyn McKinstry and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 15, 1963, a Klan-planted bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn Maull was just a few feet away when the bomb exploded, killing four of her friends in the girl’s restroom she had just exited. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history . . . and the turning point in a young girl’s life. While the World Watched is a poignant and gripping eyewitness account of life in the Jim Crow South: from the bombings, riots, and assassinations to the historic marches and triumphs that characterized the Civil Rights movement. A uniquely moving exploration of how racial relations have evolved over the past 5 decades, While the World Watched is an incredible testament to how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.
Download or read book Bending Toward Justice written by Doug Jones and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Carry Me Home written by Diane McWhorter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-06-29 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.
Download or read book Birmingham 1963 written by Carole Boston Weatherford and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetic tribute to the victims of the racially motivated church bombing that served as a seminal event in the struggle for civil rights. In 1963, the eyes of the world were on Birmingham, Alabama, a flashpoint for the civil rights movement. Birmingham was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Civil rights demonstrators were met with police dogs and water cannons. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted sticks of dynamite at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which served as a meeting place for civil rights organizers. The explosion killed four little girls. Their murders shocked the nation and turned the tide in the struggle for equality. A Jane Addams Children's Honor Book, here is a book that captures the heartbreak of that day, as seen through the eyes of a fictional witness. Archival photographs with poignant text written in free verse offer a powerful tribute to the young victims.
Download or read book Until Justice Rolls Down written by Frank Sikora and published by Fire Ant Books. This book was released on 2005-10-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a time when Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders rallied black youth and adults to march for their civil rights, a time when the Ku Klux Klan was active in cities and throughout the countryside of the Deep South, employing 19th-century tactics to intimidate blacks to stay “in their place.” It was also the year that the worst act of terrorism in the entire civil rights movement occurred just as Birmingham, Alabama, was coming under close national scrutiny. This book tells the story of one grim Sunday in September 1963 when an intentionally planted cache of dynamite ripped through the walls of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and ended the dreams and the lives of four young black girls. Their deaths spurred the Kennedy administration to send an army of FBI agents to Alabama and led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. When the Justice Department was unable to bring anyone to trial for this heinous crime, a young Alabama attorney general named Bill Baxley began his own investigation to find the perpetrators. In 1977, 14 years after the bombing, Baxley brought one Klansman to trial and, in a courtroom only blocks from the bombed church (now a memorial to the victims), persuaded a jury to return a guilty verdict. More than 20 years later two other perpetrators were tried for the bombing, found guilty, and remanded to prison. Frank Sikora has used the court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts to weave a story of spellbinding proportions. A reporter by profession, Sikora tells this story compellingly, explaining why the civil rights movement had to be successful and how Birmingham had to change.
Download or read book Last Chance for Justice written by T. K. Thorne and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the morning of September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Thirty-two years later, stymied by a code of silence and an imperfect and often racist legal system, only one person, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, had been convicted in the murders, though a wider conspiracy was suspected. With many key witnesses and two suspects already dead, there seemed little hope of bringing anyone else to justice. But in 1995 the FBI and local law enforcement reopened the investigation in secret, led by detective Ben Herren of the Birmingham Police Department and special agent Bill Fleming of the FBI. For over a year, Herren and Fleming analyzed the original FBI files on the bombing and activities of the Ku Klux Klan, then began a search for new evidence. Their first interview—with Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry—broke open the case, but not in the way they expected. Told by a longtime officer of the Birmingham Police Department, Last Chance for Justice is the inside story of one of the most infamous crimes of the civil rights era. T. K. Thorne follows the ups and downs of the investigation, detailing how Herren and Fleming identified new witnesses and unearthed lost evidence. With tenacity, humor, dedication, and some luck, the pair encountered the worst and best in human nature on their journey to find justice, and perhaps closure, for the citizens of Birmingham.
Download or read book A Time to Speak written by Charles Morgan and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With a new foreword by former Alabama senator Doug Jones, the key figure in the successful prosecution of two of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombers in 2001 and 2002, this new edition of A Time to Speak brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march towards racial justice in the South, and the nation"--
Download or read book Behind the Stained Glass written by Christopher M. Hamlin and published by Crane Hill Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps the most infamous incident of the Civil Rights Movement occurred on 15 September, 1963. Four young black girls, planning to serve as worship leaders for Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, were killed in a massive dynamite explosion shortly before the Sunday service. Hamlin, the current pastor, provides a detailed history of the church as it approaches its 125th anniversary. This history differs little from that of other urban Southern black churches, and it would thus hold limited interest were it not for the tragic incident. The congregation had little involvement in social issues before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned the church into a staging area for his Birmingham protests. Much of the history involves a frequent turnover of pastors because of continuously disgruntled minority factions. The Reverend Hamlin has remained nine years and apparently has set the church on a positive path. This book is of interest to social historians.
Download or read book The Grace of Silence written by Michele Norris and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star. A profoundly moving and deeply personal memoir by the co-host of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered. While exploring the hidden conversation on race unfolding throughout America in the wake of President Obama’s election, Michele Norris discovered that there were painful secrets within her own family that had been willfully withheld. These revelations—from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer to her maternal grandmother’s job as an itinerant Aunt Jemima in the Midwest—inspired a bracing journey into her family’s past, from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South. The result is a rich and extraordinary family memoir—filled with stories that elegantly explore the power of silence and secrets—that boldly examines racial legacy and what it means to be an American.
Download or read book Long Time Coming written by Petric J. Smith and published by Crane Hill Publishers. This book was released on 1994 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's story of the Birmingham church bombing that rocked the world.
Download or read book But for Birmingham written by Glenn T. Eskew and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Birmingham served as the stage for some of the most dramatic and important moments in the history of the civil rights struggle. In this vivid narrative account, Glenn Eskew traces the evolution of nonviolent protest in the city, focusing particularly on the sometimes problematic intersection of the local and national movements. Eskew describes the changing face of Birmingham's civil rights campaign, from the politics of accommodation practiced by the city's black bourgeoisie in the 1950s to local pastor Fred L. Shuttlesworth's groundbreaking use of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1963, the national movement, in the person of Martin Luther King Jr., turned to Birmingham. The national uproar that followed on Police Commissioner Bull Connor's use of dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators provided the impetus behind passage of the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paradoxically, though, the larger victory won in the streets of Birmingham did little for many of the city's black citizens, argues Eskew. The cancellation of protest marches before any clear-cut gains had been made left Shuttlesworth feeling betrayed even as King claimed a personal victory. While African Americans were admitted to the leadership of the city, the way power was exercised--and for whom--remained fundamentally unchanged.
Download or read book The Most Segregated City in America written by Charles E. Connerly and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Planetizen’s Top Ten Books of 2006 "But for Birmingham," Fred Shuttleworth recalled President John F. Kennedy saying in June 1963 when he invited black leaders to meet with him, "we would not be here today." Birmingham is well known for its civil rights history, particularly for the violent white-on-black bombings that occurred there in the 1960s, resulting in the city’s nickname "Bombingham." What is less well known about Birmingham’s racial history, however, is the extent to which early city planning decisions influenced and prompted the city’s civil rights protests. The first book-length work to analyze this connection, "The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980 uncovers the impact of Birmingham’s urban planning decisions on its black communities and reveals how these decisions led directly to the civil rights movement. Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly’s study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning. The result of this obstruction was the South’s longest-standing racial zoning law, which lasted from 1926 to 1951, when it was redeclared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the fact that African Americans constituted at least 38 percent of Birmingham’s residents, they faced drastic limitations to their freedom to choose where to live. When in the1940s they rebelled by attempting to purchase homes in off-limit areas, their efforts were labeled as a challenge to city planning, resulting in government and court interventions that became violent. More than fifty bombings ensued between 1947 and 1966, becoming nationally publicized only in 1963, when four black girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Connerly effectively uses Birmingham’s history as an example to argue the importance of recognizing the link that exists between city planning and civil rights. His demonstration of how Birmingham’s race-based planning legacy led to the confrontations that culminated in the city’s struggle for civil rights provides a fresh lens on the history and future of urban planning, and its relation to race.
Download or read book Letter from Birmingham Jail written by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.
Download or read book Birmingham Revolutionaries written by Marjorie Longenecker White and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Back to Birmingham written by Jimmie Lewis Franklin and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging story of a man who demonstrated faith in his city, his region, and its people During the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama, became a major battleground in the struggle for human rights in the American South. As one of the most segregated cities in the United States, the city of Birmingham became known for its violence against blacks and the callous suppression of black civil rights. In October of 1979, the city that had once used dogs and fire hoses to crush protest demonstrations elected a black mayor, Richard Arrington Jr. A man of quiet demeanor, Arrington was born in the small rural town of Livingston, Alabama, and moved to Birmingham as a child. Although he did not play a direct part in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Arrington was destined to bring about some fundamental changes in a city that once defied racial progress. Professor Franklin's book is guided by the assumption that Americans everywhere can find satisfaction in understanding the dynamics of social and political change, and they can be buoyed by the individual triumph of a person who beat the odds. Ultimately, Back to Birmingham will, perhaps, enable the reader to measure the distance black southerners have traveled over the decades.
