One day when I was five, I sat on the floor, writing “KKK” on a tablet. “Don’t ever do that again!” my Dad said when he walked by and saw what I’d written.” Those letters stand for the Ku Klux Klan – a very, very bad group,” he said, tearing up the paper I’d written on, “they are hateful people.” On a Sunday evening in September 1963, our family gathered to celebrate my upcoming 11th birthday.
Suddenly, in the midst of birthday cake, ice cream and presents, my Mom started to cry. She’d heard the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a center of civil rights activism, had been bombed.
Four girls had been killed, she told me, through her tears. “One of the girls was 11. Just a littler older than you,” she said.