Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "robert-f-kennedy"
Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- Children's Crusade -- Crisis Conditions
Even with Bevel’s activist training, nothing could prepare the young people for their time in jail. “Jail was a totally different experience,” recalled Larry Russell. “I’d never been on the other side of the big wall before.”
Bull Connor ordered every demonstrator interrogated. Audrey Hendricks, who was 9-years-old at the time, recalled: “They were asking me a lot of questions about ‘Why did you march? Who told you to march? Did they force you to march?” By the end of the first day, one of the city jails had reached capacity. As a result of the overcrowding, other jails and the fairgrounds had to be used. Girls ages 13 to 18 were housed at the 4-H Club building, while the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail took in the young boys.
Police held those children younger than thirteen in the same cellblocks as the older children. “We was in there about two weeks. About two weeks, and we be singin’. Oh my God we be singin’,” said Mary Hardy Lykes. “When they put us in jail, the guys was in one side and the girls in another side, and you could hear them. And they would sing songs, then the girls would sing a song to answer them back.”
When a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of black girls at the Jefferson County Detention Home and asked if they wanted to go home they all replied, “Yes!” 12-year-old Anita Woods, however, added that she would do it all again. “I’ll keep marching till I get freedom.” The reporter then asked her what is freedom and she answered, “It’s equal rights. I want to go to any school and any store downtown and sit in the movies. And sit around in a cafeteria.” Freedom for her meant enjoying the same rights and privileges afforded whites.
Not every demonstrator remembered his or her time in jail fondly.
James W. Stewart recalled being in a cell with close to three hundred boys and deplorable toilet facilities. “You went to the bathroom in front of three or four hundred people. The only ventilation was a screen that ran across the ceiling, high up over the toilets, and the ceiling was very high.”
An article written in the Chicago Daily Defender reported that it took officers over four hours to serve a breakfast to grits, applesauce, and bacon to the demonstrators. “It took from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. to feed the 1,319 persons, which included 800 demonstrators, breakfast at [one particular] jail.” According to chief city jailer Robert Austin, one jail “ran out of food and had to provide a slim diet for breakfast.” When no more beds were available, prisoners, both male and female, slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the jailhouse floors.
Some of the children had the fortune of sleeping with a blanket, but others had only the clothes they wore, and the body heat of a nearby demonstrator to keep them warm.
When the jail cells reached maximum capacity, which meant the officers could not cram another soul into the space, they started putting children in isolation chambers. Miriam McClendon recalled being placed in a “sweat box” as a form of punishment. “The sweat box was a little small room, closet size and you had to step down into it. Just a few inches, not far and they had water at the bottom of it. It was like a steel coffin.”
McClendon was forced to stand in the “sweat-box” with a group of girls. It was so tightly packed, the warden and a guard had to use their own body weight to shut the door. She remembers feeling the heat from the other bodies and hearing the other girls cry and moan from discomfort and fear. A similar experience took place at the south side jail where officers placed male protesters into “The Pit,” a “three-story high room with a concrete floor where drunks usually dried out.”
“The ladies had a lot of stories of being mistreated – not abused necessarily, but just mistreated,” said Carolyn Maull McKinstry. “Many felt deprived, disrespected.” She recalled stories of imprisonment from a female classmate that included a young woman stationed at the state fairgrounds who shared with an officer her need for certain personal products but no one tended to her requests during the five days she spent in jail Reports of these types of conditions worried parents and others. Then again, filling up the jails strained the city’s financial and personnel resources. The jail-in put added pressure on the city to negotiate (Jeter-Bennett 155-158: 309-318).
Gloria Washington Lewis…recalled peanut butter sandwiches, and an attempted rape.
She had her own reasons for protesting. ''I wanted to know why I couldn't ride a train, why I couldn't see a duck in a park,'' she said. ''Those are wounds that don't ever heal.'' And her father, a coal miner afraid of risking his job, winked. ''He had a little look in his eyes: 'I can't go, but you can,' '' she said.
She was arrested at City Hall after sneaking through police lines and finally pulling a poster from her pants. ''Free at Last,'' it said. She had just turned 16, but gave her age as 15, hoping for more lenient treatment. She did not get it.
At the state fairgrounds where Ms. Lewis and hundreds of other girls were jailed and fed peanut butter sandwiches, she shared a bunk bed with one girl who arrived disheveled, ''a mess, her clothes torn off.''
The girl said the officer who arrested her had raped her in the back of a police wagon. That night, a man in uniform tried to attack the same girl, Ms. Lewis said. She and a few other girls fended him off, but the next day they were charged with attacking him and taken to the county jail.
She said she spent two weeks in the stifling ''sweat box,'' then waited even longer for someone to figure out where she was and get her. ''Every time somebody would get out, I'd say, 'Call my daddy,' '' she said. ''But the jail kept saying I wasn't there'” (Halbfinger 7).
The morning newspapers that landed on Kennedy’s breakfast table showed students braving the assaults on the front lines. In one shot, a uniformed officer in round shades and a narrow tie yanked on high school sophomore Walter Gadsden’s sweater while a German shepherd lunged toward the student’s stomach with mouth open, fangs bared.
Gazing at the images of water cannons and police dogs, Kennedy was disgusted. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later noted the students’ impact: “What Bull Connor did down there, and the dogs and the hoses and the pictures with the Negroes, is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done.”
It was then that the president and the attorney general began considering a path toward comprehensive civil rights legislation. Until students took to the streets, John Kennedy had failed to act; for two and a half years, he had been slow to recognize the plight of blacks in America. Throughout his brief term, he had been focused on other matters: foreign affairs, the national economy, the space program. But now his eyes had been opened (Levingston 5).
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington, D.C. anti-trust lawyer Burke Marshall to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Marshall’s task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham city officials and business leaders to facilitate attainment of a compromise settlement that would restore order to the city. Urged by Marshall, the opposing parties began negotiations.
On Sunday, May 5th, a mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church (Sixth Avenue and 10th Street South). The rally culminated with a march to the Southside jail and a massive demonstration in Memorial Park across from the jail.
Black adults became more involved in the campaign. A number of them joined youth marchers on the front lines, while others continued to stand on the sideline, showing support through their presence. … From behind the fence parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. Emma Smith Young remembers her granddaughter going to jail for marching without a permit. “One of my grandchildren was jailed at Fair Park. She started calling back to her mother, saying that she wanted to get out of that place. They had her in there in the rain. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them. They put them out there in that [jailhouse] yard with the high fence. Up so high, they couldn’t get over the fence.
Several [parents] had visited the fairgrounds where the police held more than 800 children in hog pens. Separated by high barbed wired fences, parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. As they stood yelling out to their children, it began to rain. Police officers walked to their cars and sat inside to stay dry. With nothing to keep the children from being rained upon, parents grew increasingly concerned about their children’s safety and demanded that the ACMHR-SCLC leaders address the situation (Jeter-Barrett 166-167; 322).
Freeman Hrabowski, previously arrested, was held for five days. When the jails became full, he and many other children were confined at the fairgrounds. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement officials visited the grounds outside where they were incarcerated.
I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand (Birmingham 5).
Works cited:
“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...
Halbfinger, David M. “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.” The New York Times. May 2, 2003. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us...
Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...
Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Bull Connor ordered every demonstrator interrogated. Audrey Hendricks, who was 9-years-old at the time, recalled: “They were asking me a lot of questions about ‘Why did you march? Who told you to march? Did they force you to march?” By the end of the first day, one of the city jails had reached capacity. As a result of the overcrowding, other jails and the fairgrounds had to be used. Girls ages 13 to 18 were housed at the 4-H Club building, while the Jefferson County Jail and the Bessemer Jail took in the young boys.
Police held those children younger than thirteen in the same cellblocks as the older children. “We was in there about two weeks. About two weeks, and we be singin’. Oh my God we be singin’,” said Mary Hardy Lykes. “When they put us in jail, the guys was in one side and the girls in another side, and you could hear them. And they would sing songs, then the girls would sing a song to answer them back.”
When a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of black girls at the Jefferson County Detention Home and asked if they wanted to go home they all replied, “Yes!” 12-year-old Anita Woods, however, added that she would do it all again. “I’ll keep marching till I get freedom.” The reporter then asked her what is freedom and she answered, “It’s equal rights. I want to go to any school and any store downtown and sit in the movies. And sit around in a cafeteria.” Freedom for her meant enjoying the same rights and privileges afforded whites.
Not every demonstrator remembered his or her time in jail fondly.
James W. Stewart recalled being in a cell with close to three hundred boys and deplorable toilet facilities. “You went to the bathroom in front of three or four hundred people. The only ventilation was a screen that ran across the ceiling, high up over the toilets, and the ceiling was very high.”
An article written in the Chicago Daily Defender reported that it took officers over four hours to serve a breakfast to grits, applesauce, and bacon to the demonstrators. “It took from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. to feed the 1,319 persons, which included 800 demonstrators, breakfast at [one particular] jail.” According to chief city jailer Robert Austin, one jail “ran out of food and had to provide a slim diet for breakfast.” When no more beds were available, prisoners, both male and female, slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the jailhouse floors.
Some of the children had the fortune of sleeping with a blanket, but others had only the clothes they wore, and the body heat of a nearby demonstrator to keep them warm.
When the jail cells reached maximum capacity, which meant the officers could not cram another soul into the space, they started putting children in isolation chambers. Miriam McClendon recalled being placed in a “sweat box” as a form of punishment. “The sweat box was a little small room, closet size and you had to step down into it. Just a few inches, not far and they had water at the bottom of it. It was like a steel coffin.”
McClendon was forced to stand in the “sweat-box” with a group of girls. It was so tightly packed, the warden and a guard had to use their own body weight to shut the door. She remembers feeling the heat from the other bodies and hearing the other girls cry and moan from discomfort and fear. A similar experience took place at the south side jail where officers placed male protesters into “The Pit,” a “three-story high room with a concrete floor where drunks usually dried out.”
“The ladies had a lot of stories of being mistreated – not abused necessarily, but just mistreated,” said Carolyn Maull McKinstry. “Many felt deprived, disrespected.” She recalled stories of imprisonment from a female classmate that included a young woman stationed at the state fairgrounds who shared with an officer her need for certain personal products but no one tended to her requests during the five days she spent in jail Reports of these types of conditions worried parents and others. Then again, filling up the jails strained the city’s financial and personnel resources. The jail-in put added pressure on the city to negotiate (Jeter-Bennett 155-158: 309-318).
Gloria Washington Lewis…recalled peanut butter sandwiches, and an attempted rape.
She had her own reasons for protesting. ''I wanted to know why I couldn't ride a train, why I couldn't see a duck in a park,'' she said. ''Those are wounds that don't ever heal.'' And her father, a coal miner afraid of risking his job, winked. ''He had a little look in his eyes: 'I can't go, but you can,' '' she said.
She was arrested at City Hall after sneaking through police lines and finally pulling a poster from her pants. ''Free at Last,'' it said. She had just turned 16, but gave her age as 15, hoping for more lenient treatment. She did not get it.
At the state fairgrounds where Ms. Lewis and hundreds of other girls were jailed and fed peanut butter sandwiches, she shared a bunk bed with one girl who arrived disheveled, ''a mess, her clothes torn off.''
The girl said the officer who arrested her had raped her in the back of a police wagon. That night, a man in uniform tried to attack the same girl, Ms. Lewis said. She and a few other girls fended him off, but the next day they were charged with attacking him and taken to the county jail.
She said she spent two weeks in the stifling ''sweat box,'' then waited even longer for someone to figure out where she was and get her. ''Every time somebody would get out, I'd say, 'Call my daddy,' '' she said. ''But the jail kept saying I wasn't there'” (Halbfinger 7).
The morning newspapers that landed on Kennedy’s breakfast table showed students braving the assaults on the front lines. In one shot, a uniformed officer in round shades and a narrow tie yanked on high school sophomore Walter Gadsden’s sweater while a German shepherd lunged toward the student’s stomach with mouth open, fangs bared.
Gazing at the images of water cannons and police dogs, Kennedy was disgusted. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy later noted the students’ impact: “What Bull Connor did down there, and the dogs and the hoses and the pictures with the Negroes, is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done.”
It was then that the president and the attorney general began considering a path toward comprehensive civil rights legislation. Until students took to the streets, John Kennedy had failed to act; for two and a half years, he had been slow to recognize the plight of blacks in America. Throughout his brief term, he had been focused on other matters: foreign affairs, the national economy, the space program. But now his eyes had been opened (Levingston 5).
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had appointed Washington, D.C. anti-trust lawyer Burke Marshall to lead the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Marshall’s task now was to meet with movement leaders and Birmingham city officials and business leaders to facilitate attainment of a compromise settlement that would restore order to the city. Urged by Marshall, the opposing parties began negotiations.
On Sunday, May 5th, a mass rally was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church (Sixth Avenue and 10th Street South). The rally culminated with a march to the Southside jail and a massive demonstration in Memorial Park across from the jail.
Black adults became more involved in the campaign. A number of them joined youth marchers on the front lines, while others continued to stand on the sideline, showing support through their presence. … From behind the fence parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. Emma Smith Young remembers her granddaughter going to jail for marching without a permit. “One of my grandchildren was jailed at Fair Park. She started calling back to her mother, saying that she wanted to get out of that place. They had her in there in the rain. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them. They put them out there in that [jailhouse] yard with the high fence. Up so high, they couldn’t get over the fence.
Several [parents] had visited the fairgrounds where the police held more than 800 children in hog pens. Separated by high barbed wired fences, parents tossed food, clothing, and blankets to the children. As they stood yelling out to their children, it began to rain. Police officers walked to their cars and sat inside to stay dry. With nothing to keep the children from being rained upon, parents grew increasingly concerned about their children’s safety and demanded that the ACMHR-SCLC leaders address the situation (Jeter-Barrett 166-167; 322).
Freeman Hrabowski, previously arrested, was held for five days. When the jails became full, he and many other children were confined at the fairgrounds. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement officials visited the grounds outside where they were incarcerated.
I will never forget, Dr. King came with our parents…outside of that awful place. We’re looking out at them, if you can imagine children encaged…it was, it was worse than prison. It was like being treated like little animals, it was awful, crowded, just awful. And he said, what you do this day will have an impact on children who’ve not been born and parents were crying, and we were crying, and we knew the statement was profound, but we didn’t fully understand (Birmingham 5).
Works cited:
“Birmingham and the Children’s March.” R&E: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. April 26, 2013. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande...
Halbfinger, David M. “Birmingham Recalls a Time When Children Led the Fight.” The New York Times. May 2, 2003. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/us...
Jeter-Bennett, Gisell. “’We’re Going Too!’ The Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” The Ohio State University. 2016. Web. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fi...
Levingston, Steven. “Children have changed America before, braving fire hoses and police dogs for civil rights.” The Washington Post. March 23, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing -- Aftermath
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, after a federal court order had come down mandating the integration of Alabama’s school system.
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).
Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.
At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.
…
City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he said (Six Dead 2-3).
Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.
City police shot a 16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).
Virgil Ware, aged 13, was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15 miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice, reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).
Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals" (The 16th Street 4).
Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street 5).
King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).
President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being rushed in (Six Dead 6).
Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit (The 16th Street 5).
Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th Street 6).
On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street 6).
In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.
The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.
In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street 7).
Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown 4).
Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. [Chambliss died in prison on October 29, 1985] In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. His boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send Cherry to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls (16th Street 8).
What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of the slain? Several have bared the souls to the media.
Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham, never wanted to live in Birmingham again. I wanted to get away from those painful memories,” he says. “The biggest struggle I had going on back then [was], Why did we live there? I thought it was the most god-awful place to live.”
Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”
Cross says she forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies. “I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who don’t know any better.”
They went back to school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that day. (Waxman 5-6).
Sarah and Janie Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."
Janie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.
"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."
(She now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).
She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."
What most concerns Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening, "like an open sore to us" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 8-9).
Carolyn McKinstry: When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at 10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because there was nothing we could do about it.
The first thing that stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham. The mood of the community was such that they did not think white people were going to convict one of their own for the death of black children. But the truth was, in Birmingham, no one thought that black life was important. It didn’t matter that blacks were killed, that little girls were killed in Sunday school.
It [the bombing] gave us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends. That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.
It softened the heart of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham, Alabama, but for the rest of the world. We may yet see something very horrible become a force for good. And I think that is what we saw to a large extent. The following year we saw the signing of the civil-rights legislation (Joiner 5-6).
Sources cited:
“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...
“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN Library. September 7, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/196...
“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...
Brown, Deneen L. “Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The Wasnington Post. December 12, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...
Longman, Martin. “Remember the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Washington Monthly. September 15, 2017. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09...
“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United Press International. September 16, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
“The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Modern American Poetry. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).
Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.
At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.
…
City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he said (Six Dead 2-3).
Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.
City police shot a 16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).
Virgil Ware, aged 13, was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15 miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice, reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).
Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals" (The 16th Street 4).
Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street 5).
King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).
President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being rushed in (Six Dead 6).
Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit (The 16th Street 5).
Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th Street 6).
On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street 6).
In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.
The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.
In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street 7).
Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown 4).
Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. [Chambliss died in prison on October 29, 1985] In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. His boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send Cherry to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls (16th Street 8).
What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of the slain? Several have bared the souls to the media.
Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham, never wanted to live in Birmingham again. I wanted to get away from those painful memories,” he says. “The biggest struggle I had going on back then [was], Why did we live there? I thought it was the most god-awful place to live.”
Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”
Cross says she forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies. “I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who don’t know any better.”
They went back to school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that day. (Waxman 5-6).
Sarah and Janie Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."
Janie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.
"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."
(She now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).
She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."
What most concerns Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening, "like an open sore to us" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 8-9).
Carolyn McKinstry: When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at 10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because there was nothing we could do about it.
The first thing that stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham. The mood of the community was such that they did not think white people were going to convict one of their own for the death of black children. But the truth was, in Birmingham, no one thought that black life was important. It didn’t matter that blacks were killed, that little girls were killed in Sunday school.
It [the bombing] gave us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends. That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.
It softened the heart of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham, Alabama, but for the rest of the world. We may yet see something very horrible become a force for good. And I think that is what we saw to a large extent. The following year we saw the signing of the civil-rights legislation (Joiner 5-6).
Sources cited:
“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...
“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN Library. September 7, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/196...
“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...
Brown, Deneen L. “Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The Wasnington Post. December 12, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...
Longman, Martin. “Remember the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Washington Monthly. September 15, 2017. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09...
“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United Press International. September 16, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
“The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Modern American Poetry. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...
Civil Rights Events -- RFK Visits Mississippi Delta
Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination … still reverberates in American life. One reason his standing as a political leader endures is the genuineness of his concern for the most disadvantaged Americans. A child of privilege, Bobby Kennedy was a perhaps unexpected champion of the poor and the marginalized. But living out his strong Catholic faith, he was determined to go to the margins of society—and was always empathetic with the people he met there.
Through 1967 and 1968, in the runup and course of his campaign for president, Robert Kennedy traveled to some of the places in the United States hardest hit by poverty and racism. In the midst of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, the U.S. senator from New York wanted to see how change was playing out and what still remained to be done.
Over the course of what became known as his “poverty tour,” Kennedy visited the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley and the Mississippi Delta. Among whites, blacks and Latinos alike, Kennedy found a nation within our nation in need of aid and wrongs that needed righting (De Loera-Brust 1).
Robert Kennedy consistently related to the underdog. He made a point of witnessing first-hand the hunger of children in the Mississippi Delta as well as the hardship of those living in urban ghettos and on Native American reservations. He was relentless in his efforts to provide for improved circumstances for those who were hungry and poor.
…
After a visit [in 1996] to Harlem in New York City, RFK described the experience: “I have been in tenements in Harlem (New York) in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks…”
Robert Kennedy believed that the best way to help the poor was not have them rely on government bureaucracy, rather to give them the means by which they could work their own way out of poverty. After touring a highly run-down area of New York City known as Bedford-Stuyvesant – riddled with crime, unemployment and deteriorated housing – Kennedy was challenged to find a way to help the community to rebuild itself. He met with community activists, who were cynical of his interest. They claimed that he was just another ‘white politician who was out visiting for the day and would never be heard from again’. But Kennedy was a man of action. His response was to launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a joint venture between residents and businesses. The project was designed to revitalize and rebuild businesses within the community and, in doing so, restore hope for its residents (Baldes, Gould, and Marien (1-3).
Robert F. Kennedy was two years into his first term as a U.S. senator from New York when [in 1967] he visited the Mississippi Delta. At the time, many were already eying him as a presidential candidate, someone who could carry on his brother’s political legacy. But at that moment, Kennedy was trying to carve out his own political identity. Still grieving over his brother’s assassination, he threw himself into trying to make a change in issues that he cared about.
Although many accounts hold that Kennedy’s interest in poverty arose after his brother’s death, former aides link it to work he did as attorney general on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s. Kennedy believed delinquency was a product of economic inequality, linked in part to the racial tension that was beginning to erupt all over the nation.
…
Though the local officials he traveled with had planned where to take him, Kennedy often ordered the entourage to pull over for unscheduled stops so that he could talk to families at random. He didn’t simply want to rely on what his tour guides wanted to show him. “It was more like a fact-finding mission,” [Ellen] Meacham [a University of Mississippi journalism professor accompanying the tour] said. “He was much more interested in finding the truth of the matter and connecting with people than creating a photo op.”
For hours, Kennedy and his entourage traveled by car from one dusty town to another, visiting families who lived in terrible conditions. The senator peeked in refrigerators and cupboards, often finding them empty. He quizzed adults on whether they had heard of any of the government assistance programs created as part of the War on Poverty — and many had not. But it was the children he was most moved by.
In Cleveland, he asked the television people to wait outside while he, [NAACP activist Marian] Wright and [longtime aid Peter] Edelman went into a darkened home. Inside, they found a small baby on the dirty floor, listlessly picking at scattered pieces of rice and cornbread — the day’s meal. As Meacham recounts in her book [Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi], Kennedy became fixated on the child, who wasn’t much younger than his son Max, who had just turned 2. Kennedy ignored the stench of the open toilet in one corner of the room and despite the sores on the baby’s arms and legs crouched on the dusty floor, trying to coax a response from the dazed child, whose belly was swollen from malnourishment. Kennedy touched the boy’s face and cheeks again and again, softly saying, “Baby … hi, baby.”
According to Edelman, Kennedy tried for at least five minutes to get some reaction from the child, but the baby never acknowledged him or made a sound. “It was an incredibly awful but powerful moment,” he said (Bailey 1-4).
A reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs, witnessed part of the first morning of Kennedy’s tour. His observations were printed in 2002 in American Heritage.
Kennedy decided he wanted to see how bad things really were in the Delta, and he asked [Marian] Wright to find a pocket of poverty that the entire subcommittee could visit the next day.
He may not have realized that finding pockets of poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the late spring of 1967 was as easy as finding pockets in a pool hall.
…
At about 10:00 A.M. we reached a black community lost in a sea of cotton fields. The few average-income whites and better-off blacks had separated their houses from the much poorer blacks we were visiting with a cyclone fence. The poorer people had outhouses and used big tanks for water storage. There were some indoor bathrooms but very few phones or television sets.
The houses were probably 40 years old, unpainted and sparsely furnished but in good repair. They were bunched together higgledy-piggledy in what anyone raised in Mississippi would have recognized as “quarters,” around a central tamped-earth court where women washed their clothes in huge pots of boiling water, stirring the laundry with short paddles just as they had in the 1850s.
I introduced myself to Kennedy, who was shorter than I had imagined and seemed frail. His nose was more hooked than it appeared in photographs, he was deeply tanned, and he kept trying to brush his thick, longish hair out of his face when the wind kicked up. His blue suit didn’t look much better than mine. He spoke in a low, breathy voice, and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves upon had to strain to hear him. Most of all, he just looked terribly, terribly tired. I knew that he had played football for Harvard and still played touch football with his family. I knew he didn’t smoke or drink. But he seemed worn out, chastened, by something that had to be more than fatigue.
Then we began moving through the houses. The people in the small crowd we had attracted ranged in age from 3 to 63, yet none appeared to be between 15 and about 50. When you saw Third World population distribution like that, you knew that those in the middle, the employables, had gone off to the cities—the ones that had burned that year and the year before. No one here had a job, and very few had decent clothes.
The first house we walked into had a refrigerator in a big room. Kennedy opened it. The only item inside was a jar of peanut butter. There was no bread. We walked outside, and he held out his hand to a bunch of young, filthy, ragged but thrilled kids. In a minute or two he was stopped by a short, aging, very heavy black woman in old, baggy clothes. I regret to say that I’d become inured to poverty by a childhood and young adulthood in the Delta, but this poor woman was in awful shape even for Mississippi.
She thanked Senator Kennedy for coming to see them and said that she was too old to be helped by any new program but she hoped the children might be. Kennedy, moved, softly asked her how old she was. “I’m 33,” she said. Both he and I recoiled.
We moved into the central courtyard, where the local weekly editor interrogated Kennedy almost belly to belly, lighting into liberals of every stripe. Kennedy would patiently reply and then touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.
I had my deadline to meet, so after a while I thanked Kennedy and drove to a pay phone to call in my story. I never saw him again… (RFK 2-5).
It’s been a long time since Charlie Dillard went to bed hungry, but he still chokes up thinking about it. Growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, there were days when he and his eight brothers and sisters had only a slice of cornbread or a spoonful of syrup apiece, and that was it.
Sometimes there was no food at all, and he would go to bed face down on the dusty floor of his grandparents’ old shotgun house pressing his hollow belly into the wood hoping it would somehow ease the sharp pains of hunger that pulsed through his skinny body and kept him up at night.
...
Dillard’s mother was a farm worker. She picked cotton, soybeans and vegetables, depending on the season. And like many black children in the Delta at the time, Dillard was often with her, working 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for five dollars a day. He only sporadically attended school. When he wasn’t in the fields, he and his siblings were doing odd jobs — mowing lawns or raking leaves for white families on the other side of town — anything to help make ends meet. His father was out of the picture, so it was up to the whole family to work to survive.
But in 1967, jobs were hard to find in the Delta, especially for blacks. Farmers were increasingly turning to machines to harvest and process their crops, eliminating the need for manual labor. Dillard’s mother had gone to Florida in search of work, leaving her children behind in circumstances that seemed to grow more desperate by the day. His grandparents didn’t have enough money or food to take care of all the kids, a group that had grown to include some of his cousins. On any given night, there were 15 people or more, mostly children, crammed into a tiny three-room shack where there was no heat or air conditioning.
One Tuesday afternoon in April 1967, when Dillard was just 9, he was playing outside with his siblings when he saw a crowd of people walking up the street. He stopped and stared. He had never seen anything like it. There were men with giant television cameras on their shoulders, and while there were a couple of blacks, most in the group were white, which was unusual because white people rarely came to their blighted part of town with its unpaved streets and decrepit homes.
Suddenly, a white man in a dark suit emerged from the crowd and made a beeline for Dillard and his siblings. To the boy’s surprise, the man walked up and offered his hand — an unusual gesture at the time in racially charged Mississippi. The man introduced himself as Robert Kennedy — a name that didn’t mean much to Dillard, who didn’t have a television. Only later did he learn that the man was the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York.
“He was the first white person I ever shook hands with,” Dillard recalled.
Glancing over the kids, who were filthy and dressed in tattered, ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Kennedy had a somber air about him. He spoke quietly, asking Dillard why he wasn’t in school. The child explained that he wasn’t enrolled. Looking distressed, Kennedy asked the boy what he had eaten that day. “Molasses,” Dillard replied.
As Dillard walked up the wooden steps of the house to go inside and tell his grandmother about their visitors, Kennedy and his entourage followed. Inside the house, the senator questioned the woman about what she had fed the kids that day. Just bread and syrup, she replied. And they wouldn’t eat again until the evening because there just wasn’t enough food. The cupboards were empty. “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day,” the woman told Kennedy, who could not conceal his shock.
As he turned to go, Kennedy, a father of 10 at the time, including a boy just three weeks old, smiled sadly at Dillard and his siblings. He touched their heads and gently caressed their cheeks. They looked up at him with sad, worried eyes. “It wasn’t like a politician kissing babies,” said Ellen Meacham … He touched those children as if they were his own.”
Traveling abroad, the senator had seen poverty and hunger first hand in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But as his… aide Peter Edelman recalled, Kennedy seemed more shaken by what he had seen in Mississippi. He was disturbed to see so many children suffering in a way they weren’t in other places stricken by poverty.
“I remember he came out of one of the houses, and he was just … he couldn’t believe it. He told me this was the worst poverty he had ever seen, worse than anything he’d ever seen in a Third World country,” Edelman recalled. “That might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but it was shocking to see that in the United States. He couldn’t stop thinking of those hungry kids, those children in rags and [with] swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that wouldn’t heal. It was horrific.”
…
Hours later, Kennedy arrived back at Hickory Hill, his family’s stately brick home in the rolling countryside of McLean, Va. It was his wife Ethel’s birthday, and she and the kids had stayed up late to welcome the senator back from Mississippi.
But as Kennedy crossed the threshold to the dining room, where his family awaited, his kids later recalled how their father had suddenly halted, looking anguished as he surveyed his opulent home and his happy, healthy children. It was a stark contrast to what he’d seen in Mississippi earlier in the day. “He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his oldest daughter, who would later serve as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, wrote in the New York Times. “‘I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he told me. ‘The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.’ He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.”
The senator slammed his fist on the table and looked around at his children, who sat stunned at their father’s outburst. “Do you know how lucky you are?” Kennedy asked them. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a great responsibility. Do something for these children. Do something for our country.”
In Clarksdale, Kennedy had stood atop a car, vowing he would not forget the people of the Mississippi Delta. And he did not. He moved quickly to make differences where he could, including getting meals to the struggling families. He called wealthy friends and charity organizations, soliciting help. Within hours of Kennedy’s visit, food showed up at his grandparents’ house, Dillard recalled. Not much later, after images of Kennedy’s visit had aired on national television, the city of Cleveland suddenly decided to pave the roads in his neighborhood and throughout the poor black section of town. “I think they were probably shamed or something,” Dillard said.
The morning after he arrived back in Washington, Kennedy and [Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S.] Clark began lobbying the Agriculture Department to get additional food aid into the Delta — a push that federal officials initially resisted. Among other things, he successfully argued for changes in the food stamp program, which was then operating as a pilot program. Under the old policy, individuals had been required to buy food stamps, but Kennedy successfully lobbied to expand the program to allow families with no income to qualify for assistance.
The senator petitioned private groups for help. The Field Foundation sent doctors to investigate medical conditions in the Delta and confirmed reports of malnourishment. Meanwhile, the Senate held fiery hearings on the plight of the Delta. Embarrassed by the revelations about the struggles of poor blacks in his state, Sen. John Stennis, who had initially suggested that Kennedy had exaggerated his interactions in the Delta, set up a $10 million emergency fund for food and medical help for impoverished residents in his state.
Eventually, the federal government would dramatically expand its aid programs into the region, including offering school lunches. But Kennedy saw the need for more transformative change. He didn’t believe the solution to the Delta’s problems could be solved by government alone. As he had in Brooklyn, he pressed for community partnerships and incentives that would help attract skilled jobs to the region, offering residents hope and opportunity. But those efforts ended with his death a little over a year later (Bailey 5-8).
Works Cited:
Baldes, Tricia, Gould, Katie, and Marien, Dr. Joanne. “Poverty.” RFK Legacy Education Project. Web. https://rfklegacycurriculum.wordpress...
Bailey, Holly. “Hunger 'Hurt So Bad': How Robert Kennedy Learned about Poverty from a Boy in the Delta.” Yahoo! May 30, 2018. Web. https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunger-hur...
De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/polit...
“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-...
Through 1967 and 1968, in the runup and course of his campaign for president, Robert Kennedy traveled to some of the places in the United States hardest hit by poverty and racism. In the midst of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, the U.S. senator from New York wanted to see how change was playing out and what still remained to be done.
Over the course of what became known as his “poverty tour,” Kennedy visited the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, California’s Central Valley and the Mississippi Delta. Among whites, blacks and Latinos alike, Kennedy found a nation within our nation in need of aid and wrongs that needed righting (De Loera-Brust 1).
Robert Kennedy consistently related to the underdog. He made a point of witnessing first-hand the hunger of children in the Mississippi Delta as well as the hardship of those living in urban ghettos and on Native American reservations. He was relentless in his efforts to provide for improved circumstances for those who were hungry and poor.
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After a visit [in 1996] to Harlem in New York City, RFK described the experience: “I have been in tenements in Harlem (New York) in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks…”
Robert Kennedy believed that the best way to help the poor was not have them rely on government bureaucracy, rather to give them the means by which they could work their own way out of poverty. After touring a highly run-down area of New York City known as Bedford-Stuyvesant – riddled with crime, unemployment and deteriorated housing – Kennedy was challenged to find a way to help the community to rebuild itself. He met with community activists, who were cynical of his interest. They claimed that he was just another ‘white politician who was out visiting for the day and would never be heard from again’. But Kennedy was a man of action. His response was to launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a joint venture between residents and businesses. The project was designed to revitalize and rebuild businesses within the community and, in doing so, restore hope for its residents (Baldes, Gould, and Marien (1-3).
Robert F. Kennedy was two years into his first term as a U.S. senator from New York when [in 1967] he visited the Mississippi Delta. At the time, many were already eying him as a presidential candidate, someone who could carry on his brother’s political legacy. But at that moment, Kennedy was trying to carve out his own political identity. Still grieving over his brother’s assassination, he threw himself into trying to make a change in issues that he cared about.
Although many accounts hold that Kennedy’s interest in poverty arose after his brother’s death, former aides link it to work he did as attorney general on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s. Kennedy believed delinquency was a product of economic inequality, linked in part to the racial tension that was beginning to erupt all over the nation.
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Though the local officials he traveled with had planned where to take him, Kennedy often ordered the entourage to pull over for unscheduled stops so that he could talk to families at random. He didn’t simply want to rely on what his tour guides wanted to show him. “It was more like a fact-finding mission,” [Ellen] Meacham [a University of Mississippi journalism professor accompanying the tour] said. “He was much more interested in finding the truth of the matter and connecting with people than creating a photo op.”
For hours, Kennedy and his entourage traveled by car from one dusty town to another, visiting families who lived in terrible conditions. The senator peeked in refrigerators and cupboards, often finding them empty. He quizzed adults on whether they had heard of any of the government assistance programs created as part of the War on Poverty — and many had not. But it was the children he was most moved by.
In Cleveland, he asked the television people to wait outside while he, [NAACP activist Marian] Wright and [longtime aid Peter] Edelman went into a darkened home. Inside, they found a small baby on the dirty floor, listlessly picking at scattered pieces of rice and cornbread — the day’s meal. As Meacham recounts in her book [Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi], Kennedy became fixated on the child, who wasn’t much younger than his son Max, who had just turned 2. Kennedy ignored the stench of the open toilet in one corner of the room and despite the sores on the baby’s arms and legs crouched on the dusty floor, trying to coax a response from the dazed child, whose belly was swollen from malnourishment. Kennedy touched the boy’s face and cheeks again and again, softly saying, “Baby … hi, baby.”
According to Edelman, Kennedy tried for at least five minutes to get some reaction from the child, but the baby never acknowledged him or made a sound. “It was an incredibly awful but powerful moment,” he said (Bailey 1-4).
A reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs, witnessed part of the first morning of Kennedy’s tour. His observations were printed in 2002 in American Heritage.
Kennedy decided he wanted to see how bad things really were in the Delta, and he asked [Marian] Wright to find a pocket of poverty that the entire subcommittee could visit the next day.
He may not have realized that finding pockets of poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the late spring of 1967 was as easy as finding pockets in a pool hall.
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At about 10:00 A.M. we reached a black community lost in a sea of cotton fields. The few average-income whites and better-off blacks had separated their houses from the much poorer blacks we were visiting with a cyclone fence. The poorer people had outhouses and used big tanks for water storage. There were some indoor bathrooms but very few phones or television sets.
The houses were probably 40 years old, unpainted and sparsely furnished but in good repair. They were bunched together higgledy-piggledy in what anyone raised in Mississippi would have recognized as “quarters,” around a central tamped-earth court where women washed their clothes in huge pots of boiling water, stirring the laundry with short paddles just as they had in the 1850s.
I introduced myself to Kennedy, who was shorter than I had imagined and seemed frail. His nose was more hooked than it appeared in photographs, he was deeply tanned, and he kept trying to brush his thick, longish hair out of his face when the wind kicked up. His blue suit didn’t look much better than mine. He spoke in a low, breathy voice, and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves upon had to strain to hear him. Most of all, he just looked terribly, terribly tired. I knew that he had played football for Harvard and still played touch football with his family. I knew he didn’t smoke or drink. But he seemed worn out, chastened, by something that had to be more than fatigue.
Then we began moving through the houses. The people in the small crowd we had attracted ranged in age from 3 to 63, yet none appeared to be between 15 and about 50. When you saw Third World population distribution like that, you knew that those in the middle, the employables, had gone off to the cities—the ones that had burned that year and the year before. No one here had a job, and very few had decent clothes.
The first house we walked into had a refrigerator in a big room. Kennedy opened it. The only item inside was a jar of peanut butter. There was no bread. We walked outside, and he held out his hand to a bunch of young, filthy, ragged but thrilled kids. In a minute or two he was stopped by a short, aging, very heavy black woman in old, baggy clothes. I regret to say that I’d become inured to poverty by a childhood and young adulthood in the Delta, but this poor woman was in awful shape even for Mississippi.
She thanked Senator Kennedy for coming to see them and said that she was too old to be helped by any new program but she hoped the children might be. Kennedy, moved, softly asked her how old she was. “I’m 33,” she said. Both he and I recoiled.
We moved into the central courtyard, where the local weekly editor interrogated Kennedy almost belly to belly, lighting into liberals of every stripe. Kennedy would patiently reply and then touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.
I had my deadline to meet, so after a while I thanked Kennedy and drove to a pay phone to call in my story. I never saw him again… (RFK 2-5).
It’s been a long time since Charlie Dillard went to bed hungry, but he still chokes up thinking about it. Growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, there were days when he and his eight brothers and sisters had only a slice of cornbread or a spoonful of syrup apiece, and that was it.
Sometimes there was no food at all, and he would go to bed face down on the dusty floor of his grandparents’ old shotgun house pressing his hollow belly into the wood hoping it would somehow ease the sharp pains of hunger that pulsed through his skinny body and kept him up at night.
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Dillard’s mother was a farm worker. She picked cotton, soybeans and vegetables, depending on the season. And like many black children in the Delta at the time, Dillard was often with her, working 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., for five dollars a day. He only sporadically attended school. When he wasn’t in the fields, he and his siblings were doing odd jobs — mowing lawns or raking leaves for white families on the other side of town — anything to help make ends meet. His father was out of the picture, so it was up to the whole family to work to survive.
But in 1967, jobs were hard to find in the Delta, especially for blacks. Farmers were increasingly turning to machines to harvest and process their crops, eliminating the need for manual labor. Dillard’s mother had gone to Florida in search of work, leaving her children behind in circumstances that seemed to grow more desperate by the day. His grandparents didn’t have enough money or food to take care of all the kids, a group that had grown to include some of his cousins. On any given night, there were 15 people or more, mostly children, crammed into a tiny three-room shack where there was no heat or air conditioning.
One Tuesday afternoon in April 1967, when Dillard was just 9, he was playing outside with his siblings when he saw a crowd of people walking up the street. He stopped and stared. He had never seen anything like it. There were men with giant television cameras on their shoulders, and while there were a couple of blacks, most in the group were white, which was unusual because white people rarely came to their blighted part of town with its unpaved streets and decrepit homes.
Suddenly, a white man in a dark suit emerged from the crowd and made a beeline for Dillard and his siblings. To the boy’s surprise, the man walked up and offered his hand — an unusual gesture at the time in racially charged Mississippi. The man introduced himself as Robert Kennedy — a name that didn’t mean much to Dillard, who didn’t have a television. Only later did he learn that the man was the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a U.S. senator from New York.
“He was the first white person I ever shook hands with,” Dillard recalled.
Glancing over the kids, who were filthy and dressed in tattered, ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Kennedy had a somber air about him. He spoke quietly, asking Dillard why he wasn’t in school. The child explained that he wasn’t enrolled. Looking distressed, Kennedy asked the boy what he had eaten that day. “Molasses,” Dillard replied.
As Dillard walked up the wooden steps of the house to go inside and tell his grandmother about their visitors, Kennedy and his entourage followed. Inside the house, the senator questioned the woman about what she had fed the kids that day. Just bread and syrup, she replied. And they wouldn’t eat again until the evening because there just wasn’t enough food. The cupboards were empty. “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day,” the woman told Kennedy, who could not conceal his shock.
As he turned to go, Kennedy, a father of 10 at the time, including a boy just three weeks old, smiled sadly at Dillard and his siblings. He touched their heads and gently caressed their cheeks. They looked up at him with sad, worried eyes. “It wasn’t like a politician kissing babies,” said Ellen Meacham … He touched those children as if they were his own.”
Traveling abroad, the senator had seen poverty and hunger first hand in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But as his… aide Peter Edelman recalled, Kennedy seemed more shaken by what he had seen in Mississippi. He was disturbed to see so many children suffering in a way they weren’t in other places stricken by poverty.
“I remember he came out of one of the houses, and he was just … he couldn’t believe it. He told me this was the worst poverty he had ever seen, worse than anything he’d ever seen in a Third World country,” Edelman recalled. “That might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but it was shocking to see that in the United States. He couldn’t stop thinking of those hungry kids, those children in rags and [with] swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that wouldn’t heal. It was horrific.”
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Hours later, Kennedy arrived back at Hickory Hill, his family’s stately brick home in the rolling countryside of McLean, Va. It was his wife Ethel’s birthday, and she and the kids had stayed up late to welcome the senator back from Mississippi.
But as Kennedy crossed the threshold to the dining room, where his family awaited, his kids later recalled how their father had suddenly halted, looking anguished as he surveyed his opulent home and his happy, healthy children. It was a stark contrast to what he’d seen in Mississippi earlier in the day. “He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his oldest daughter, who would later serve as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, wrote in the New York Times. “‘I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he told me. ‘The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.’ He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.”
The senator slammed his fist on the table and looked around at his children, who sat stunned at their father’s outburst. “Do you know how lucky you are?” Kennedy asked them. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a great responsibility. Do something for these children. Do something for our country.”
In Clarksdale, Kennedy had stood atop a car, vowing he would not forget the people of the Mississippi Delta. And he did not. He moved quickly to make differences where he could, including getting meals to the struggling families. He called wealthy friends and charity organizations, soliciting help. Within hours of Kennedy’s visit, food showed up at his grandparents’ house, Dillard recalled. Not much later, after images of Kennedy’s visit had aired on national television, the city of Cleveland suddenly decided to pave the roads in his neighborhood and throughout the poor black section of town. “I think they were probably shamed or something,” Dillard said.
The morning after he arrived back in Washington, Kennedy and [Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S.] Clark began lobbying the Agriculture Department to get additional food aid into the Delta — a push that federal officials initially resisted. Among other things, he successfully argued for changes in the food stamp program, which was then operating as a pilot program. Under the old policy, individuals had been required to buy food stamps, but Kennedy successfully lobbied to expand the program to allow families with no income to qualify for assistance.
The senator petitioned private groups for help. The Field Foundation sent doctors to investigate medical conditions in the Delta and confirmed reports of malnourishment. Meanwhile, the Senate held fiery hearings on the plight of the Delta. Embarrassed by the revelations about the struggles of poor blacks in his state, Sen. John Stennis, who had initially suggested that Kennedy had exaggerated his interactions in the Delta, set up a $10 million emergency fund for food and medical help for impoverished residents in his state.
Eventually, the federal government would dramatically expand its aid programs into the region, including offering school lunches. But Kennedy saw the need for more transformative change. He didn’t believe the solution to the Delta’s problems could be solved by government alone. As he had in Brooklyn, he pressed for community partnerships and incentives that would help attract skilled jobs to the region, offering residents hope and opportunity. But those efforts ended with his death a little over a year later (Bailey 5-8).
Works Cited:
Baldes, Tricia, Gould, Katie, and Marien, Dr. Joanne. “Poverty.” RFK Legacy Education Project. Web. https://rfklegacycurriculum.wordpress...
Bailey, Holly. “Hunger 'Hurt So Bad': How Robert Kennedy Learned about Poverty from a Boy in the Delta.” Yahoo! May 30, 2018. Web. https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunger-hur...
De Loera-Brust, Antonio. “Infographic: Revisiting R.F.K.’s Poverty Tour.” America: The Jesuit Review. June 1, 2018. Web. https://www.americamagazine.org/polit...
“With RFK in the Delta.” American Heritage. Volume 53, Issue 2, 2002. Web. https://www.americanheritage.com/rfk-...
