Memorial Park or Potter’s Field? The Public Neglect of Birmingham’s “4 Little Girls

• In Event: Contesting the American Narrative: African American Burial Spaces, Death Material Culture and Public Memorial

Abstract

In the wake of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Martin Luther King traveled to Birmingham to deliver a eulogy in honor of the four children who perished in the blast. Although the victims were not participants in the movement, King implied that they were an integral force in the larger struggle by stating, “They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”
For the past fifty years, Americans have revered the victims—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—as martyred heroines while their physical remains rest beneath a sea of headstones in a dilapidated cemetery. Worse still, the body of one of the victims is missing, while another is misidentified on her grave maker. This paper will demonstrate the inherent danger in conflating senseless racial violence with redemptive suffering or heroic martyrdom as it traces the enduring struggle to restore the girls’ individual identities in public forms of remembrance. As part of a larger project aimed at uncovering silences in the dominant civil rights narrative, this paper will focus on the cultural afterlife of this storied example to explore the tension that separates revered historical narratives from reality.

Author

• Adrienne Chudzinski, Indiana University