SEPTEMBER SUNDAYS (IN MEMORY OF)

For the dead: 4 girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley; 2 boys: Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson
For the grief-stricken girl and maimed: Sarah Collins Rudolph
For the other 22 people wounded in that bombing
For all of us...

They were martyrs:
witnesses to a violent hatred
that bombed a sacred place
--who could have imagined
such vile evil, a mind that 
could conceive such terror
in 1963. But it was Bombingham,
a violent city where more than 50
bombs had been set off in homes
and institutions of black citizens
with no accounting.
One week before the church
shattered into history, George
Wallace, governor over violence,
said integration could be stopped
if Alabama had "a few first-class funerals."

Fifty years ago today at 10:22 am Central
Daylight Time. It was Youth
Sunday. Youth. Sunday.
The mayor wept. Tears have
never been enough for the 
four who died, and the one
who lost her sister and an eye,
or the two young boys killed just 
hours later. It was Youth Sunday.
They were primping and laughing,
practicing their singing, the
words they'd need to say
for Youth Sunday. They were
dressed to the nines
that day, talking about
school or boys, no doubt
whispering secrets, maybe
even gossiping about other
friends, because they were
young without a care for the 
world beyond those doors
that day. Besides it was, after all,
Youth Sunday.

Valerie Bridgeman
© September 15, 2013