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Retracing the footsteps of the civil rights movement
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Riverside Church
LIKE A PRAYER
“In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor male and female.”
(Galatians 3:28)
CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
Embracing religion and the wider religious community fosters in African Americans a sense of belonging that they would otherwise never experience back then.
Religion plays a large role in the lives of African Americans, and can be traced back to the early days of colonialism as their enslaved ancestors looked to God for guidance, strength and freedom in difficult times - just as they are doing even until today.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another."
(John 13:34)
The Places
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The 16th Street Baptist Church served as the site of mass meetings for prominent civil rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, as well as Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader James Bevel. It was a key location in Alabama during the civil rights movement, and was also the unfortunate site of a horrific bombing that shook the nation to its core.
On September 15th 1963, Ku Klux Klan members planted at least 15 dynamite sticks in the basement of the church, all of which went off - killing 4 African American girls (aged 10-14) and injuring 23 others during the Sunday morning service.
The bombings were third in a string of attacks in response to the desegregation of schools in the state.
The force of the explosion was so great that it left a crater in the floor of the church, while windows on nearby shophouses were blown out and several cars parked outside were also destroyed.
The only stained glass window in the church that remained in its frame showed Christ leading a group of little children, but the face of Christ had been blown out.
One of the girls who was killed had also been decapitated in the explosion.
Four suspects were identified by the FBI, but no charges were brought at the time, though one, Robert Chambliss, was sentenced for holding the dynamite without a permit. Chambliss was convicted when the case was revived in 1977, Thomas Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002. Herman Frank Cash, the fourth suspect, died in 1994.
This horrific act brought nationwide attention to the terror and inequalities experienced by the blacks in the South, forcing the public to acknowledge the seriousness of the issues being brought up by the Civil Rights Movement.
This event, coupled with others, resulted in increased sympathy and awareness of the civil rights cause.
“The blood of four little children ... is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder."
From 1956 to 1961, the Bethel Baptist Church served as the headquarters of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), led by pastor and civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth. The ACMHR were instrumental in coordinating boycotts and also sponsored federal lawsuits aimed at dismantling segregation in Birmingham and Alabama during the civil rights movement.
The organization’s goal was to fill a void left after Alabama Attorney General John Patterson banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from operating in the state in the same year.
The church, ACMHR as well as Fred Shuttlesworth played a pivotal role in the organization and success of the Freedom Rides in 1961. The Freedom Riders were a group comprising of both black and white activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated South in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the law that stated segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Freedom Riders encountered much violence on their journey, and particularly in Alabama, where a mob of Klansmen attacked and succeeded in killing some of them.
With many being refused treatment in the hospitals, Fred Shuttlesworth took in the Freedom Riders at the Bethel Baptist Church, allowing them to recuperate.
Due to its strong influence on the black community and the civil rights movement, the church was bombed on 3 separate occasions.
Fred Shuttlesworth himself survived multiple murder attempts by segregationalists but remained completely undeterred, serving as the embodiment of strength and determination in the fight against injustice.
“We're determined to either kill segregation or be killed by it.''
Led by civil rights activist and pastor Ralph Abernathy, a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., from 1952 to 1961, the First Baptist Church became closely associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides of May 1961.
Abernathy worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., Edgar Nixon, and a group of black community leaders to form the Montgomery Improvement Association, which went on to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.
In May 1961, while acting as a refuge for some 1500 activists and Freedom Riders who had met with violence earlier on at the Greyhound Bus station, the church was besieged by a violent white mob three times their size.
The black activists and churchgoers were stoned, firebombed, and had tear gas thrown at them, but local law enforcement were making no effort to respond to calls for protection of those in the church.
The situation almost reached its tipping point, and King, with the other leaders, had to make a direct phone call to United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, appealing for federal protection.
With his and President Kennedy's intervention, then Governor of Alabama John Patterson, a staunch supporter of segregation, was ultimately persuaded into mobilizing the Alabama National Guard into dispersing the crowd and protecting the activists.
Years later in an article published by the New York Times, civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette recounted King's commitment to non-violence despite the increasingly tense situation.
After learning that armed black taxi drivers were attempting a rescue, he and 10 volunteers marched out through the white mob to get to the drivers before convincing them to lay down their weapons and disperse peacefully in order to prevent even more brutality.
King and his escorts managed to return unscathed, a testament to the power of a non-violent approach.
“Bring on your tear gas, bring on your grenades, your new supplies of Mace, your state troopers and even your national guards. But let the record show we ain't going to be turned around."
Ebenezer Baptist Church was the place Martin Luther King Jr. grew up and baptized in. His father was a pastor there, and years later King would end up serving the same role. Family involvement with the church meant that King spent his childhood in the centre of the black community.
Being completed funded by African Americans, the church served as the hub of black social, religious and cultural life, offering a temporary shelter from the discriminatory, segregationalist world that lay beyond.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference began here in 1957 through a meeting between 60 black ministers and leaders, as orchestrated by King. Initially named “Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration", the original goal was to create an organization that would achieve desegregation through nonviolent resistance, starting with public transport.
The SCLC played a major part in the civil rights movement, organizing and supporting numerous protest and voter-registration efforts, all of which eventually help spur the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend"
It was in this humble church in Cleveland, Ohio where human rights activist Malcolm X gave his iconic "The Ballot or The Bullet" speech, urging the African American community to put aside its religious differences and exercise their right to vote and help shape the future that they want.
The most controversial part of the speech came when he cautioned that if the government continued preventing the rights of suffrage of the African American community, it may be necessary for them to resort to violence.
In a period when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference influenced most of Black America to protest peacefully, Malcolm X had a provocative message that blood may have to be shed if the needs of African Americans continued to not be met.
“It's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet."
One of the most controversial speeches civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave took place within the halls of the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967 - exactly a year before he was assassinated.
Written by activist and historian Vincent Harding, and titled "Beyond Vietnam", this explosive speech expressed King's strong anti-Vietnam war sentiments, marking a step away from his usual focus on domestic civil rights issues.
In it, King brazenly criticized the United States' role in the war as nothing more than an act of colonialism, questioning the morals of his own nation and comparing American tactics to those of the Nazis.
The decision to give this speech was bold move on King's part, and a mistake in the eyes of many others as it cost him several allies - most notably President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“...and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
