Exactly 60 years ago, at 10:22 AM on a Sunday, 4 members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham Alabama.The blast was so powerful that it blew a hole in the church’s wall, shattered windows, and caused damage to buildings nearby. It killed 6 children and injured more than 20 people. But why that church and that city? Read on.
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Image: Color poster of the four little girls killed in the 16th Street, Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.
By the time in 1963 when a group of KKK members planted a bomb made of dynamite beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama had been was a hotspot of racial tension and civil rights activism for years. The city had earned a bitter nickname: “Bombingham,” owing to the numerous bombings targeted at black communities and civil rights activists.
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Image: Façade of a 16th Street, Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
These tensions were exacerbated by the aggressive stance of the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, a known segregationist who used violent means to quash civil rights protests and demonstrations.
This act of terrorism occurred on a Sunday, a day when the the bombers knew the church would be bustling with community members attending services.
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Image: Commissioner of Public Safety and antagonist, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor. Photo of Connor in early 20th century.
British Caribbean slavery, cornerstone of the British empire, was characterized by extreme & brutal exploitation. It yielded substantial wealth for a privileged few and the British government, but inflicted immense suffering on the majority of enslaved individuals, making them the most overworked & harshly treated people in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This history had enduring consequences.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon The point of that post was not to say that the British have not replicated oppression across the world, better or worse in some areas. The point was that the brutality of the enslavement in the Caribbean was far worse than any other known form of enslavement during that era or since. The scholarship is clear on that. There was a method to the plantation madness. It was to maximize profits and use human beings as disposable goods.