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| Condoleezza Rice and Eric Holder speak at Alabama memorial | |
| (about 7 hours later) | |
| Fifty years after a bomb ripped through a Sunday school, killing four girls and rocking a racially divided nation, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, spent Sunday commemorating the tragedy that led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. | |
| US attorney general Eric Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, a childhood playmate of one of the victims, and former congressman and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young spoke at an afternoon ceremony. The ceremony focused on the progress made in race relations in the decades since the bombing and looked at the challenges that remain. | |
| "It is a sad story, but there is a joy that came out of it," said Sarah Collins Rudolph, who survived the blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Her 14-year-old sister, Addie Mae Collins, was among the victims of the bomb planted by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Rudolph lost an eye and was partially blinded in her other eye when the bomb went off, while she and four other girls were in a church restroom. | |
| "I will never forget walking over their dead bodies," she said. Rudolph, who testified against the Klansmen convicted years later in the bombing, added: "God spared me to live and tell just what happened on that day." | |
| On Sunday, at 10.22am CT, the time of the blast, the church's bell tolled in remembrance of Collins, 11-year-old Denise McNair and Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, both 14. The bell and a church service in which the Gospel text included the exhortation to "love your enemies" – the same verses that were read 50 years ago – started a day of activities throughout the city, remembering the tragedy and celebrating the 1964 act that resulted from it. | |
| During the sermon, the Reverend Julius Scruggs of Huntsville, president of the National Baptist Convention USA, said: "God said you may murder four little girls, but you won't murder the dream of justice and liberty for all." The 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or gender also brought an end to the Jim Crow laws that had enforced rigid segregation practices across much of the southeastern United States. | |
| Rice, who was an eight-year-old playmate of McNair at the time of the bombing, on Saturday recalled the fear that followed the blasts, which she said influenced her work as secretary of state. "I know what it is like for a Palestinian mother who has to tell her child they can't go somewhere, and how it is for an Israeli mother who puts her child to bed and wonders if the child will be alive in the morning," Rice said. | |
| Two young men, both black, were shot to death in Birmingham in the chaos that followed the bombing, which occurred as city schools were being racially integrated for the first time. The all-black 16th Street Baptist Church was a gathering spot for civil rights demonstrations for months before the blast. | |
| During Sunday's commemoration, an honor guard of black and white officers and firefighters watched over ceremonies attended by the mixed-race crowd. Reverend Bernice King, a daughter of the late civil rights leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, noted the changed city in a prayer. | |
| "We thank you father for the tremendous progress we have made in 50 years, that we can sit in the safe confines of this sanctuary being protected by the city of Birmingham when 50 years ago the city turned its eye and its ears away from us," she said. | |
| Of the Klansmen convicted years later, one remains imprisoned. Two others who were convicted died in prison. The last surviving bomber, 83-year-old Thomas Blanton, now sits alone in a prison cell not far from Birmingham. Since his 2001 conviction, his list of visitors has dropped to his daughter and a few other infrequent visitors, said Brian Corbett, spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections. Blanton spends his days reading. "He could socialize more, but he pretty much stays to himself, by choice," Corbett said. | |
| Blanton still shows no remorse, said Doug Jones, the US attorney who prosecuted Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry years after the bombings. | |
| "What would you do if you could get your hands on that Blanton dude who bombed the church?" asked Pastor Arthur Price at the church's Sunday school class. The Christian answer, he said, was to practice "the love that forgives". Celebrated as martyrs in the history of civil rights, the four bombing victims were honored earlier in the week with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on civilians. On Thursday, the families were given replicas of the medal, which pictures the four girls, the church and their names. Rosie Rios, treasurer of the United States, said the center the medal read: "Pivotal in the struggle for equality." | |
| A sculpture honoring the four girls was unveiled on Saturday in Birmingham. | |
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