Then of course there was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I think that the larger symbolic meaning of the deaths of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair, who were killed that Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, has to do with the snuffing out of the lives of Black girls, who thus never had an opportunity to grow into women committed to the struggle for freedom. And it’s interesting because some months before they were killed, there were the children’s marches. During the children’s marches in Birmingham, children who stood up to the
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