This anniversary year could have been an opportunity for Birmingham to practice some rigorous truth and painful reconciliation. It has ended up being a balkanized, largely ceremonial affair. The city’s Empowerment Week, an underpublicized festival of imported panelists and celebrities concluding today, exemplified the crux of the mission’s flaw: why is it so difficult to extend the notion of empowerment to include the powerless? We are more comfortable devoting civic resources to media events and monuments, like the life-size sculpture of the girls unveiled in Birmingham this week, than addressing the persistent casualties of the history being commemorated.
Modern-day Americans seem loath to do the right thing unless it’s also the smart thing — even “compassionate release” has to be touted for its cost-saving virtues. Birmingham’s black-majority city government knew it had to sell the yearlong commemoration of 1963 as a big economic boon and named a co-chairwoman highly palatable to the business establishment, the native daughter Condoleezza Rice.
Why do they still hate us so much?McNair is the father of Denise McNair, one of the four little girls killed in the KKK's bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963.
Texas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson said progress is being made but vigilance is needed.All that blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice wiped away with a 5-4 vote.
"There is nothing we can take for granted," she said. "There is not a person in this room that says they don't want equality, but when you start breaking down what equality is, things change, people differ."
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