BIRMINGHAM : A half century ago in this deeply southern city, a racially motivated attack on a black church left four young girls dead and helped galvanise a civil rights movement that changed voting laws across the United States.

For those with ties to that deadly event, Wednesday’s shootings in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, another deeply southern city 644 km distant, echoed the tragedy and compounded the frustration that more progress has not been made.

“It definitely brought back memories,” said Lisa McNair, 50, the niece of one of the girls who died in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which happened before McNair was even born. “I just feel so sad this happened. Now these people in South Carolina are going through what my parents went through.” In the Birmingham attack by four Ku Klux Klansman, a bomb planted under the church steps killed four young girls as they changed into choir robes in the church basement. The Charleston shooting rampage targeted a Bible study group. Both attacks were racially motivated, and shocked a nation that was reeling with deeply entwined racial and societal tensions, lately focused on US gun violence and police-related shootings of unarmed black men in several US cities.

“Progress, what progress?” said Joanne Bland, 61, co-founder of a voting rights museum in Selma, Alabama. “It seems like we’re back right where we started and racism is still alive and well.” Donald Jones, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Miami who teaches classes on the role of the civil rights movement, said he hoped the Charleston attack would “jar us awake to the fact that we do not live in a post-racial society”. The Birmingham bombing is credited with serving as a major catalyst in the movement for racial equality and the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination.

Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Carry Me Home about the civil rights battle in Birmingham in 1963, said she does not know if the Charleston shooting will galvanize a new civil rights movement, but hopes it will at least lead to more gun control.

“The only good I can see coming out of it is some kind of gun sanity,” she said. “Maybe the historic suffering of black people in this country will enable us to see the gun issue in a new light ... But I’m not holding my breath.”

Key differences

Despite the parallels, the two attacks were met with starkly different responses by local authorities who reflected the political dynamics of their eras.

In 1963, Alabama was the centre of a non-violent civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others that was met with violence from the Ku Klux Klan and state and local officials, led by Governor George Wallace, trying to enforce racial segregation laws.

While it took decades to prosecute the Birmingham bombers, authorities in South Carolina quickly arrested the suspected perpetrator of the Charleston shooting who faced nine murder charges by Friday morning.

In Birmingham four Klansmen were identified early on, but none went on trial until 1977, as investigators ran into a wall of silence. One of the suspects was never charged and died in 1994, while two others were jailed for life, the last conviction not coming until 2002.

Contrast that to a parade of politicians who loudly denounced the atrocity in Charleston, including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, who was visibly moved to tears at a Thursday press conference.

“The southern states are not the same as 50 years ago,” said Daryl Scott, a professor of US history at Howard University, a historically black college.

The changes were monumental since the 1960s, said Priscilla Hancock Cooper, chief executive officer of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, across the street from the Baptist church where the 1963 bombing occurred in what the city now calls the Civil Rights District.

“Laws prevented blacks and whites from sitting together on a bus. They restricted blacks and whites from eating together in restaurants and even from playing games,” she said.

Birmingham today is a financially struggling city with distinct white and black neighbourhoods, but its politics have been turned on their head in recent decades. Its last white mayor left office in 1979, followed by seven successive black leaders.

Meanwhile, South Carolina has gone from being “one of the most recalcitrant southern states”, Scott said, to having not just a governor of colour, but in 2014 elected the south’s first black senator since Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War.

“It’s sometimes in these tragedies that people of goodwill find their voice, realise that silence is not an option, and are touched,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.—Reuters

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2015

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