Birmingham Sunday

Birmingham Sunday
Juvenile nonfiction
"Suddenly, a blast ripped through the building. Windows
shattered. And thirty-inch-thick stone and brick walls thundered.
Reverand John Cross, the church pastor, said, 'It sounded like the
whole world was shaking, and the building, I thought, was going to
collapse.'"
It was September 15, 1963. The church was the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dynamite had been set off.
Four innocent girls were dead. Before night two boys would also be
victims of racist violence.
Larry Dane Brimmer was inspired to write Birmingham Sunday by a
call for biographies of the children who died that day. "To write
biographies of children is an impossible task. They have only begun
to experience life. So I decided, instead, to include profiles of
them that would hint at their personalities and cloak them within the
events of September 15 and the unrest leading up to that horrendous
act of terrorism."
The book is a powerful read combining compelling narrative with
evocotive period photographs. Starting with with how the Supreme
Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision angered
segregationists in the Jim Crow South, it covers the actions of the
Civil Rights Movement and the racism and violence with which they were
met: the bus boycott inspired by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her
seat,the Freedom Riders, the children's crusade... Many of the
photographs are chilling: the bombed church, a burning bus, a dog
lunging at a black teen, a KKK rally with even Klanschildren dressed
in robes and hoods...
And then at the end of the book there are the child victims of
that day and their stories and the struggle it took to bring the
killers to justice.
Birmingham Sunday is a good way to introduce children to that
less than glorious chapter in America's history.
On a purrrsonal note, I think that of all the tragedies on the
television news and in the papers during that time that was the one
that shocked, saddened, and angered me the most. They were girls my
age who went to school, listened to music (maybe the same groups and
singers), quarelled with siblings, looked forward to Christmas...girls
I would have been friends with if they'd gone to my school.
A great big shout out goes out to the people who brought the killers
to justice.
jules hathaway



Sent from my iPod