“This act was not an aberration”: The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
During the fall of 1963, Angela Davis attended the Sorbonne in Paris as part of Hamilton College’s Junior Year in France Program. Following classes on September 16, Davis asked some of her classmates to wait for her as she bought a copy of the Herald Tribune. Looking over the paper, she came across a headline mentioning the murder of four young girls in a church bombing, and these initial words caused a vague awareness in her mind, but when she saw the bombing took place in Birmingham, at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and when she read the names of the four young girls, she closed her eyes tight, seeking to expel what she had just read from her head.
When Davis calls Carole’s and Cynthia’s names and states, “They killed them,” her companions look at her quizzically, trying to understand what she said. Davis points to the paper and tells her companions, “I know them. They’re my friends. . . .” To this, one of the group simply responds, “I’m so sorry. It’s too bad that it had to happen.” Davis points out that her companion’s words ring hollow because, as she writes, “They knew nothing of racism and the only way they knew how to relate to me at that moment was to console me as if friends had just been killed in a plane crash.” They do not recognize the terrorism, the hate, the violence that murdered Carole Robertson…
