National Affairs: Birmingham and Baghdad: The South In 1963 and the United States in 2007

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: