On a sunny day in Sept. 1963, the pews were packed with men, women and children ready to jump to their feet in prayer for a brighter future. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley gathered in the basement to prepare for Youth Sunday, an 11 a.m. sermon which the four girls led with inspiring vigor.
When the first hymn of the day, "God, Our Father, We Adore Thee," began, Charles Decker recalled he had heard the lyrics chanted from his general store nearly five blocks away.
The screams traveled further, he noted. The only thing that could match the congregation, it seemed, were the explosions that ripped through them.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan had planted pipe bombs in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to send a message to the black community: know your place. All four girls were casualties of that message.
The foot soldiers of white supremacy that rigged the devices were to blame, of course, but the radicalization was derived from state and national figures who told them that the only reason for pain in their lives was the creeping progress of desegregation and civil rights.
In the United States and around the world, this kind of scapegoating has led to incalculable violence. It is obvious, then, that no one should ever seek to rip those wounds open again.
I fear that the conduct we have witnessed by John McCain, Sarah Palin and their supporters has moved us dangerously close to doing just that.
After the financial crisis unfolded and Barack Obama's message on the economy gained more traction, McCain's poll numbers tanked. From an essentially tied race immediately after the Republican convention, McCain now sits nine points behind the Democrat and looks to be headed to a wipe-out in November.
McCain's camp concluded sometime last week that the only way to turn the tide in their favor was to stoke anxiety over Barack Obama's alleged ties to William Ayers, Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright. They believed that a message of fear about Obama's "otherness" would tilt the race just enough for them to win in a squeaker.
It has led the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee to run ads repeatedly accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." It has led Sarah Palin to make pointed accusations that Barack Obama does not love this country.
It has led all three to claim he is a radical, a subversive, someone waiting for the opportunity to sell America down the river to Iran and the mullahs. Perhaps, most frighteningly, it has led them to radicalize their supporters to the point where violence against Barack Obama has become a legitimate fear.
At a campaign stop in Ohio, McCain asked the crowd "Who is the real Barack Obama?"
"Terrorist" and "Arab" were the most audible responses on the tape. At another campaign stop in Minnesota, a McCain line led one person in the crowd to scream "off with his [Obama's] head!"
When McCain spoke about Obama's tax proposals in Wisconsin, one woman screamed "traitor!" The Secret Service confirmed on Friday that two white teenagers at a Palin rally in Florida yelled "kill him" after she questioned his association with William Ayers.
Perhaps the scariest of these scenes was in Georgia. On Wednesday, Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss faced off in a televised debate with Democratic challenger Jim Martin.
In response to a question about their view on the presidential race, a woman in the crowd shouted "Bomb Obama!"
Bomb Obama. Four little Alabamian girls are rolling in their graves.
It has gotten so bad that, at a rally last Friday, McCain tried to calm the waters by assuring voters that Obama was a "decent family man," one "that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States" and was booed by the crowd.
This was, of course, only after polls showed that the rhetoric was scaring independent voters into Obama's arms and several rebukes from high-ranking Republican officials like Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL), former McCain campaign manager John Weaver and conservative columnist Dan Balz.
McCain and Palin are explicitly responsible for the hatred that has been provoked. Their words on the campaign trail, in ads, on talk radio and television are stoking a new generation racial tension that will haunt this nation far after their joke of a campaign is run off the rails in November.
If, God forbid, something were to happen to Obama, his family or any of his supporters, based on the vitriol we've witnessed at his rallies, it would only be appropriate to seek a criminal indictment of the two for inciting violence.
The bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church demonstrated for the last generation how stoking racial and ethic tensions can lead to horror. We can only hope, for the good of the nation, that McCain and Palin recognize the scum that they have become, and reverse course. I do not believe that their pending electoral destruction will pacify what they have created.
Scott Harris is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at sharris@student.umass.edu.
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