Friday, April 9, 2010

We Are Seeing History Repeat Itself With The Dull & Dim Witted Teabaggers

I thought that I would pass this story on and in doing so, show how the Teabaggers are just repeating history of the same when the 1963 Civil Rights Act was the issue.

A good friend and I went out to eat at the Texas Road House in Seaford, DE. and we struck up a conversation with the server. When she spoke, I noted an accent and asked where she was originally from. She replied Birmingham, Alabama. I then asked her if they had taught Birmingham’s history when she was going to school of the “Bombing in Birmingham.” on the Sunday of September 15, 1963. She just got a puzzled look on her face and asked, “What was the Bomb?” I just stated that the “Bomb” was a real bomb that went off on a Sunday in 1963 at a church killing four little girls. Her face just glazed over and I let the subject drop.

I was not really surprised by this young lady being clueless of her own history. The point that I want to pass is how important it is to have this subject taught to the students so that maybe those like the uneducated, dull, and dim witted Teabaggers can be seen for what they really are. It is too easy to repeat the mistakes of the past when people do not even learn the lessons of their own history.

Birmingham, Alabama, and the Civil Rights
Movement in 1963


The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions became high when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a campaign to register African American to vote in Birmingham.

On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected attorney general of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the organization had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss that had not been used in the original trial.

In November, 1977 Chambliss was tried once again for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Now aged 73, Chambliss was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Chambliss died in an Alabama prison on 29th October, 1985.
On 17th May, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group, the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime. Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested and Blanton has since been tried and convicted.

By passing on this historical example which many of us have lived through and learned from, I am pointing out the conclusion of the Ku Klux Klan of 1963 Biringham, AL and recent acts of Tea Party Members, are nothing more than the same people doing the exact same thing yet once again.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for recounting the time line of the attrocity and the time it took to investigate and prosecute the perps....
    I have been reading about Birmingham lately as the backdrop to the formation of the Space/Jazz Visionary, Herman Sonny Blount, the man known to us mere earthlings as Sun Ra.
    He was born in Birmingham and was a genius, who was permantly marked by his experiences as a black man in a racially divided city.
    He spent most of his life denying that he was from Birmingham, indeed even the planet Earth, but when the Birmingham Church Bombing occurred, he was forced to confront his real roots....
    At that point, his band was said to have become a force of nature, a maelstrom of anger and energy that either grapbbed you or sent you running in panic...and Sun Ra became an angry Alabaman again....
    Very good post Engineer, I hope I haven't digressed too much, I have been listening to a lot of Herman Sunny Blounts music lately, so this all conected.

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  2. Ignorance really is bliss. And 'history?' Well, that's so-yesterday! Can't be bothered with that.

    Both Engineer and Microdot posted photos of the ugly history of America- the history that so many Americans don't want to know. And as such, they will repeat [are repeating] the same mistakes of the past decades.

    Such a mindless tragedy- literally!

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  3. Last week, when I was having my seemingly insurmountable problems with the internet, I wanted to do a post on the anniversary of Martin Luther Kings Assasination.
    I may still do it...and the theme gets heavier as I find connections between then and now...
    The title?
    1968. It Was A Very Bad Year.

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  4. skittles1923@gmail.comNovember 17, 2012 at 4:23 PM

    wow totally awesome

    ReplyDelete