A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

Just five months after the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, the usually quiet Sunday routine was broken by a powerful explosion. A six-feet-wide hole in the church’s rear wall was torn open, several of the stained-glass windows were blown out, cars that were parked closest to the church were completely destroyed, and the windows in the buildings in the nearby neighborhood shook so violently that many were shattered. After the dust had settled, twenty injured people were found in and around the church. Survivors searched the church’s basement, and there they found the burned, broken bodies of four young girls. Before the sun went down, two more black children were murdered. Riots broke out. Birmingham burned. The Ku Klux Klan had carried out the bombing, part of their mission to spread death and terror among African Americans throughout the entire nation. The bomb attack on Sunday, September 15, 1963, is a permanent fixture in the people of Birmingham’s consciousness and in the collective memory of the United States. I find it hard to imagine the chaos of the bombing as I stand in front of the church, more than a half century later.