One man’s message following Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing gets timely retelling in new book
The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963 as an act of white supremacist terrorism. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four girls, marked a turning point in the United States 1960s civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On the Sunday morning of Sept. 15, 1963, shortly before the start of church service, Ku Klux Klansmen’s dynamite ripped through Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and a nation’s conscience. The terror attack killed four Black girls, maimed a fifth and injured more than 20 others.
Charles Morgan Jr.
The next day, Birmingham lawyer Charles “Chuck” Morgan Jr. condemned the murders and the white community that had allowed hundreds of bombings in the city – not a single one solved by police – during the civil rights era.
“And who is really guilty? Each of us. … Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” Morgan said in a speech to the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham.
Revulsion over the bombing was swift outside Birmingham. Morgan’s speech was published nationally, earning him praise. But in Birmingham after the speech he became “a pariah among whites, and his speech itself fed a tide of aggrieved self-vindication,” civil rights historian Taylor Branch wrote in “Parting the Waters.”
The cover of the newly republished “A Time to Speak.” (contributed)
In May 1964, Morgan published “A Time to Speak,” a memoir that recounted his speech and the reaction to it, as well as his upbringing, education and career during the time of staunch Jim Crow segregation in Alabama and the South.
On Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 16th Street Baptist Church, the Morgan Project is hosting the republishing of “A Time to Speak.” The 5 p.m. event includes a panel discussion with Lisa McNair, sister of Denise McNair, who was killed in the bombing; Charles Morgan III, the son of Chuck Morgan; Carolyn McKinstry, who survived the bombing; and former Alabama U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, who as a U.S. attorney prosecuted the last two known Klansmen responsible for the bombing and wrote the foreword to the new edition of the book. Tondra Loder-Jackson, a professor of Educational Foundations in UAB’s School of Education, will moderate.
After the panel discussion, attendees will be able to buy the book at a reception across the street at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI).
McNair and Morgan are board members of the Morgan Project, a Birmingham nonprofit founded after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis in 2020. Its mission: “Standing up against racism by advocating for the rights of racial or other minorities. Teaching tolerance, social justice and anti-bias through real engagement with our community.”
Former Alabama U.S. Sen. Doug Jones wrote the foreword to the republished “A Time to Speak.” (file)
Jones in his forward to “A Time to Speak” wrote, “It is fitting that Charles Morgan Jr.’s account is being reprinted at yet another time of racial reckoning. It is likewise fitting that his work is titled ‘A Time to Speak.’ As I think he would be the first to say today, there is never not a time to speak. And Morgan’s story shows us all, every one of us, how much we have to gain in doing so.”
For Morgan, that gain came at tremendous cost. As he stood in front of his peers at the YMBC’s weekly business luncheon, Morgan “had nothing to gain and everything to lose,” Jones noted.
“He was a prominent lawyer and an accomplished and respected member of Birmingham’s white, aristocratic establishment,” he wrote. “But that day was not a day to mince words and Morgan risked everything.”
Jones wrote that Morgan could have called out the Klan, denounced the many previous bombings of innocent citizens’ homes and businesses, or even agreed with the newly elected Birmingham mayor (Albert Boutwell), who bizarrely claimed, “We are all victims.”
“Instead, he called out every single person in the room for their own role, their own complicity in the deaths of those girls.”
Morgan, in a 1995 interview for the BCRI’s Oral History Collection, said he gave the speech because he was so outraged at the bombing.
“I mean, I didn’t sit down and rationally say, ‘Hi, there. I think I’ll go give this speech. … I mean, I just … I was furious. That’s why,” he told interviewer Betty Hanson. “It was sick. The whole thing was sickening.”
In an October 1965 interview with “The Harvard Crimson” student newspaper, Morgan said that after his YMBC speech, “I didn’t wait to be ridden out of town, but I knew the rail was coming. Within four or five days, I packed my bags, closed down my office and moved.”
Morgan fled his hometown, often derisively referred to at the time as “Bombingham” and “the Tragic City,” for Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate.”
“Leaving Birmingham was an inconvenience for my family,” Charles Morgan III wrote in March 2021 on the Comeback Town blog. “It was more than an inconvenience for Lisa McNair – Denise’s younger sister. Yet her parents, Chris and Maxine, stayed in Birmingham and became a miraculous force for forgiveness and reconciliation.”
In Atlanta, Chuck Morgan continued his career as a civil rights lawyer. In 1964, he established the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Also that year, he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that state legislative districts needed to be nearly equal in size, establishing the “one man, one vote” principle, according to his obituary in The New York Times on Jan. 9, 2009. Morgan was on Muhammad Ali’s legal team that successfully appealed to the Supreme Court the boxer’s conviction on draft evasion. Morgan resigned from the ACLU in 1976 and spent the remainder of his career in private practice. He died in 2009 at his home in Destin, Florida, at the age of 78.
The Morgan Project has launched the Conflict and Courage Scholarship Contest for students in grades nine through 12. The contest, which includes prizes ranging from $750 to $1,500, uses the 16th Street bombing and Morgan’s reaction to it as the backdrop for a range of topics students can write about. Submissions will be accepted through March 31. For more information, contact Ashley Mann at 205-317-9397 or ashley@sandpiperconsult.com.
To learn more about The Morgan Project, click here. For more information, contact Julie Levinson-Gabis at 205-903-3211 or julielgabis@gmail.com.
