Way Back When

I had actually begun a blog entry about my first car when I stopped to watch a 2-hour "Secret History of the Klu Klux Klan" on The History Channel. How easy it is to forget or suppress or put aside unpleasant feelings about the past. I know that we all have selective memory, but this documentary stirred up old anxieties, old fears, old queasiness. It's especially discomforting today, since I'm going to Birmingham, Alabama, next Monday, a city I miss about as much as I'd miss skin cancer.

When I was hired as by the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Birmingham in 1971, I asked one of my superiors for the name of a photographer to take my official government I. D. picture. I was given the name of Chris McNair. The name didn't immediately ring my bell, though I realized who he was before he took my photo. His 11 year old daughter, Denise, had died violently when the 16th Street Baptist Church exploded on September 15, 1963, dynamited by Klansmen Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and two others, cowards and terrorists who slithered through Southern nights in their many attempts to stop the march of freedom of former slaves and their descendants.

When the news of the bombing was announced, I simply couldn't believe it, even though I had lived much of my then 23 years in Birmingham. I had grown up in a racist society, but even this surprised, shocked, and truly saddened me. In later years, my work with the E. E. O. C. and other federal agencies was particularly medicinal, though not a complete antidote to the hatred I had seen around me and that I can still feel even over so much time and distance.

I don't know what I expected when I walked into Chris McNair's photography studio. I just didn't expect him to be so pleasant, almost soft spoken. He was a real man, have no doubt, but he exuded kindness, gentleness even. I suppose I expected an angry facade, a man still seeking revenge for what had been so unfairly taken from him and his wife, for nobody had yet been put on trial for the murders of four little girls that awful Sunday just outside downtown Birmingham. Because I'm white, I really expected him to view me with at least a hint of suspicion. But he met none of these expectations.

On the day they lost their child, both Chris McNair and his wife were at worship. I suppose faith is the only way out of that awful place that the death of a child puts the parents in. It took years for anybody to go to trial for these awful murders, the last one just into the 21st Century. But not only did Chris McNair continue his life as a photographer, he also served a public which had allowed such an atrocity. He was later elected to the Alabama State Legislature and the Jefferson County Commission, retiring from public life in 2001.

I met Chris McNair in life that one time only. But I'm still awed and amazed. You can meet him, too, as I did again many years later, in a film entitled "Four Little Girls," a heart-wrenching documentary by Spike Lee, which should've won the Academy Award the year it was eligible. Watch it, please, and you might gain a better understanding and a bigger heart.