Abstract
This chapter tells the story of the day of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It was a confrontation over school integration that brought out the rage of many whites in Birmingham and emboldened Ku Klux Klansmen to bomb a church and kill four little girls in Sunday school. After the bombing, whites and blacks confronted one another in the streets. Whites shot two black boys. Virgil Ware was killed by classmates of the twenty men and women Gill interviews. Police killed Johnny Robinson two blocks from their school. For the interviewees, it is the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by strangers and not the killing of a black boy by classmates that stands out in memory.
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Notes
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The signs I saw at the time lead me to suspect that the word on the car was not ‘Negro’; however, that is what is recorded in the police file.
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Gill, S.K. (2017). Introduction. In: Whites Recall the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47136-5_1
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