I shall once again
quote a long passage from The Race Beat, by Gene Roberts and
Hank Klibanoff. This time the quote is of a quote that they quoted.
It is a column written by Gene Patterson, then the Editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, after four little girls were killed in the bombing
of a Birmingham church in mid-September, 1963. The bombing occurred
in the midst of a long run of violence by white Southerners. The
violence occurred in good part because the "respectable"
people of the South let it happen - and at times encouraged it, either
tacitly or more openly.
Patterson's column
was so powerful and moving that, after it was published, an Atlanta
CBS station filmed him reading it and used the whole piece. Walter
Cronkite likewise ran the whole piece on national television on CBS.
Patterson, who normally would get no more than 20 letters about a
column, received 1,200 about this one.
My purpose in "running"
Patterson's nearly 44-year-old column is this: If you substitute
the words "United States" for the word "South”, the
word "American" for the word "Southerner”, the name
"Iraq" for the name "Birmingham", and make some
other necessary verbal substitutions, and if you remember that Howard
Zinn has very rightly called our leaders thugs in suits - I would
place the emphasis on the word "thugs" and would include
lots of Senators and Representatives - then what Patterson wrote is,
in many unfortunate respects, as applicable to the entire United States
today as it was to the South in 1963.
Here is what Patterson
wrote:
"A Negro
mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church
in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot
of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.
Every one of
us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.
It is too late
to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and
the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple.
They killed four children.
Only we can trace
the truth, Southerner - you and I. We broke those children's bodies.
We watched the
stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred.
We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.
We - who go on
electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.
We - who raise
no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.
We - who stand
aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every
society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.
We - the heirs
of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition
- we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable,
caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the
unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would
die.
This is no time
to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in
dynamite of our own manufacture.
He didn't know
any better.
Somewhere in
the dim and fevered recess of an evil mind he feels right now that
he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has
pleased us.
We of the white
South who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment.
We, who know
better, created a climate for child-killing by those who don't.
We hold that
shoe in our hand, Southerner. We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner.
Let us see it straight, and look at the blood on it. Let us compare
it with the unworthy speeches of Southern public men who have traduced
the Negro; match it with the spectacle of shrilling children whose
parents and teachers turned them free to spit epithets at small huddles
of Negro school children for a week before this Sunday in Birmingham;
hold up the shoe and look beyond it to the state house in Montgomery
where the official attitudes of Alabama have been spoken in heat and
anger.
Let us not lay
the blame on some brutal fool who didn't know.
We know better.
We created the day. We bear the judgment. May God have mercy on the
poor South that has so been led. May what has happened hasten the
day when the good South, which does live and has great being, will
rise to this challenge of racial understanding and common humanity,
and in the full power of its unasserted courage, assert itself.
The Sunday school play at Birmingham
is ended. With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke
and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to
be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon
these four small graves that we dug."