Around 10:19 a.m. that Sunday, an anonymous caller told the church secretary, "Three minutes." At 10:22, a deafening blast tore the church apart, injuring two dozen and killing the four girls in the basement attending a Sunday school class.
When faced with large-scale evil — 16 sticks of Klan dynamite, hidden by white supremacists in a place of worship — it helps to drill down to small human details so ordinary they become points of reverence.
But who were they?
So this is who they were: Cynthia Wesley, 14, was adopted. An outgoing kid, she was involved with her school and church, and played in the school band. That morning, she met up with her friend Addie Mae Collins, also 14, and the two girls tossed a purse back and forth, laughing and talking as they headed for the church.
Addie Mae was a peacemaker. Warm and lovable, it was said, "To know Addie Mae was to love her." A school friend chatted with her that morning, but when they got to the fence, he turned and said, "I'll see you Monday," not realizing he'd never see her again. Her older sister was injured in the blast, with 21 shards of glass embedded in her face, rendering her blind in one eye.
Carole Robertson, 14, had been dropped off outside the church by her father, who watched her run inside before pulling away. She was a straight-A student involved with the Girl Scouts, marching band, and science club. She aspired to be a singer. At night she and her sister would listen to the radio, her favorite song being "In the Still of the Night," and she would gasp with disapproval when she saw her older siblings and their friends tossing popcorn from the black section of the movie theater at the white folks sitting below.
The youngest, Denise McNair, was only 11. Nicknamed "Niecie" by her friends, she never understood why she couldn't eat at the same lunch counter with the white kids. She was likely the poorest of the four, quiet and good-natured, active in Brownies, a kid who loved playing baseball and wanted to be a pediatrician.
Here's what I find so remarkable about Niecie: every year she organized a neighborhood fundraiser where the local kids would sing and dance on her family driveway for an audience that then donated pennies, nickels, and dimes — the proceeds going toward Niecie's favorite cause, muscular dystrophy. She was found with a piece of brick embedded in her head. Her mother screamed for days and had to be sedated, and last year CNN reported that Mrs. McNair, now afflicted with Alzheimer's, still remembers and grieves for the child she lost 50 years ago.
To know them individually is to never forget them — nor to remember them merely as "four little black girls," generalized into a sad footnote to our Civil Rights history. Not just four little black girls, but four vibrant individuals. Four potential women. I imagine Cynthia and Addie Mae going to college, maybe starting up a business together ... Carole singing in a blues club and looking over recording contracts ... and Niecie retiring from her medical practice, still championing victims of muscular dystrophy.
No arrests were made in 1963 but in 1970, Alabama's new attorney general, Bill Baxley, reopened the investigation and ultimately succeeded in convicting Klansman Robert Chambliss for murder. Not surprisingly, for doing so, Baxley received numerous death threats. Here's how he replied one of them.
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