Page 15 - WTP VOl. XII #1

sit at the comfortable lunch counters in the stores downtown. Janice came to realize how unfair her segregated situation was and, at age sixteen, she and many others decided to get involved. She emphasized to us the importance of the non-violence training they received—preparing them not to react when they were verbally taunted or physically attacked— and the meticulous organization that went into planning the march.
Janice was arrested and held for five days, initially in a jail cell and then at the local fairgrounds, which had an amusement park— “Kiddieland”—that she had never been allowed to go to before, because Black people could only attend after 10:00 PM on Satur- days. She smiled wryly when she told us this. “Finally, I was able to go.”
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Carolyn McKinstry had worked as the Sunday school secretary at the 16th Street Baptist Church starting when she was twelve years old. Before the church services began on Sunday, September 15, 1963,
four months after the Children’s Crusade marches, she had seen four girls that she knew in the bath- room in the church basement—Denise, Addie Mae, Carole, and Cynthia. After chatting with them, she ran upstairs to the office because the phone was ringing. When she picked it up, a man’s voice on the other end said, “Three minutes.” Several minutes later a blast shook the church, and the four young girls in the basement were murdered. As I listened to Ms. McKinstry tell this story, an anxious pit grew in my stomach, as I knew what was coming. By the end, I felt immense sadness for her and renewed horror at these unspeakable murders.
The clock behind the church pulpit stopped at 10:22, the moment of the blast. That clock is now part of the 16th Street Baptist Church Museum. Towards the end of our visit to the museum, I stood and stared at the clock for a while. It struck me what a powerful image
it was. Time should stop when something that heinous occurs, so that the world can take account. On my way out, I bought a refrigerator magnet with a picture of the clock—now a daily reminder in my home of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
Time did not stop for Carolyn, however. Children went back to school on Monday, and the bombing was not mentioned. Life just went on. Ms. McKinstry told us that she had lived in a kind of fog for more than twenty years after that incident, unable to speak about what had happened. She later testified in the successful 2002 prosecution of one of the two Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the bombing and, in 2011, in an effort to make sure that this history is not forgotten, Ms. McKin- stry wrote a memoir—While the World Watched. In 2017, Janice Kelsey, who also did not speak publicly for many years about her experiences, published hers—I Woke Up with My Mind on Freedom.
After I purchased an autographed copy of each of their books, I couldn’t help but think that if these books ended up in certain school libraries, they would be banned by those reactionary forces that would like us all to live in a collective fog about our country’s history. It reiterated for me that it’s time for the rest of us to speak up against this cloud of obfus- cation. I had brought with me a little notebook, and
I began to think about what I might write to capture the experiences from this trip.
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An awareness of race and racism has been a part of my life since I was a child. My parents died when I was very young, and in 1965, at the age of nine, I was sent to a residential school in upstate New York that the New York Times a year earlier had described as being for “dependent and neglected” children. Many of the children at the school were Black and Latino kids from New York City, whose parents were unable to take care of them for one reason or another. We were all vulnerable children, tossed together, with
a growing sense of what was going on in the larger world, including Martin Luther King’s assassina-
tion in 1968, which had a big impact on all of us. For my Black dormmates, it seemed to crystallize their understanding of what it meant to be Black in the United States. I was conscious of both the brutality of the murder itself and of my dormmates’ reactions to it—an early moment in my piecing together an understanding of the role of race in our country. My emerging understandings evolved over time, as I became politically active and learned more about our
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