Or they had been. You know, months before. So in seeking to disrupt and punish things that had happened long before and were now settled, the perpetrators bombed kids changing into their choir robes.
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If you go out and read a bunch of modern white nationalists, or Hard Righties in general, you'll find a subset with a particular article of faith: if they just get the cops on their side and unleash violence, they'll win! you know, like in the segregated South, which won wait
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If you go back and look at the terrorism and state violence committed against the civil rights movement, there's kind of a weird dichotomy to it in that there's both really a lot of it and thankfully much less than there could have been
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The civil rights era had murders and beatings and bombings and police violence but one thing it didn't have was a Tulsa 1921. Riots of the period came later, and they were more bottom-up than top-down.
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If you look at the kind of guys who were in the Klan, the quality of membership really dropped off a lot from the first Klan of the Reconstruction era to the third of the Civil Rights movement. The guys down for violence were neither a mass movement nor brilliant strategizers.
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The bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church was evidently meant as a warning: the phone rang. A staffer answered. A man's voice warned, "Three minutes." The bomb went off less than a minute later, evidently because the perpetrators couldn't set a timer.
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That would have been pretty standard for Birmingham, where bombs were used constantly as an intimidation tactic. Fifty bombings from 1947 to 1965 gave one neighborhood the nickname "Dynamite Hill." These caused some minor injuries but apparently no deaths.
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And that's just going back to 1947; there were more bombings in town going back to the 20s. In Spike Lee's movie FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, the documentary about the church bombing, one interviewee notes in passing that Bob Chambliss was apparently connected to all of them.
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(FWIW, that Bob Chambliss was reportedly suspected in forty years' worth of bombings in Birmingham, AL but only four deaths makes me wonder if he wasn't so much into killing people as he was intimidating them and watching the fuss when bombs went off.)
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I keep telling people to think of political organizing as a nonviolent military campaign. That's what it is. The 16th Street Baptist Church was a base for efforts in a nonviolent military campaign. Its enemies launched a violent strike to try to counter it. It didn't work.
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Political organizing is all the important stuff an army does before a battle that hopefully never comes
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