1963 was the same year that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Both were pivotal events in the civil rights truggle -- the first touched the hearts of white Southerners in a new way; the second brought Lyndon Johnson to the presidency, and it was his legislative skills that brought Kennedy's vision to fruition in the major civil rights laws that were passed.
Atlanta was a little bit different -- not much, but slightly better than its neighbors in dismantling generations of acquiescence to discrimination, bigotry, and cruelty to fellow humans. What made that difference was its leadership.
Mayor William B. Hartsfield proclaimed Atlanta as "the city too busy to hate." Yes, that was a blatantly materialistic view -- we'll do the right thing because we're just too busy becoming the premier city of the South; it's good for business -- but it was leading in the right direction.
When the Nobel Prize Committee gave it's Nobel Peace Prize to native son Martin Luther King, Jr., civic leaders, spurred on by a group of white women and church leaders, declared that indeed the city would honor Dr. King with a gala dinner -- integrated, of course.
And two of the leaders in this sensible response to changing attitudes were the Atlanta Constitution's Ralph McGill and Eugene Patterson. Their columns confronted both the reality and the moral rightness of accepting black people as equal citizens with equal rights and respect.
Here is a reprint of Eugene Patterson's column about the Birmingham bombing that killed the little Sunday School girls, in which he says that we must all share the blame for the actions of a "brutal fool who didn't know better," who thought he would be regarded as a hero. Patterson made us realize that we all helped perpetuate that climate of hate.
"A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.
"Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.
"It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.
Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies.
We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.
"We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.
"We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.
"We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.
"We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.
"This is no time to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in dynamite of our own manufacture.
"He didn’t know any better.
"Somewhere in the dim and fevered recess of an evil mind he feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us.
"We of the white South who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment.
"We, who know better, created a climate for child-killing by those who don’t.
"We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner. Let us see it straight, and look at the blood on it. Let us compare it with the unworthy speeches of Southern public men who have traduced the Negro; match it with the spectacle of shrilling children whose parents and teachers turned them free to spit epithets at small huddles of Negro school children for a week before this Sunday in Birmingham; hold up the shoe and look beyond it to the state house in Montgomery where the official attitudes of Alabama have been spoken in heat and anger.
"Let us not lay the blame on some brutal fool who didn’t know any better.
"We know better. We created the day. We bear the judgment. May God have mercy on the poor South that has so been led. May what has happened hasten the day when the good South, which does live and has great being, will rise to this challenge of racial understanding and common humanity, and in the full power of its unasserted courage, assert itself.
"The Sunday school play at Birmingham is ended. With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug."Amen. It's inspired writing like this that touched many white hearts in a South that was mired in unthinking, unfeeling tradition that kept the myth that blacks also preferred all the separate but (un)equal facilities and demeaning treatment. McGill and Patterson were a conscience of a city, and they had the eloquence to convey that conscience to all of who were ready to listen.
Ralph
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