A Largely Forgotten Speech After the Birmingham Church Bombing

Andrew Cohen remembers a speech by a white lawyer in Birmingham the day after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four little girls:

On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:
Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it." Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.
He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it.

Cohen goes on to alternately quote the speech and fill in with explanation.  Here's a little bit about the threats Morgan received after the speech:

 Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. "Is the mortician there yet?" a voice asked. "I don't know any morticians," Morgan responded. "Well, you will," the voice answered, "when the bodies are all over your front yard." Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. "They'll shoot you down like a dog," the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety....
"Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech," recalls Steve Suitts, the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of Morgan's longtime friends. "Once we discussed the anonymous threats that Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black's papers saying 'Nigger-lovers don't live long in Alabama.' Chuck smiled and said he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.
"But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles," Suitts told me this week via email. "He once told me that he had received a note that he did not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something like, 'Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain't always getting home. Next time?' That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had actually followed his family all day."

The reign of terror in the south between the end of Reconstruction and the end of the Civil Rights movement is terrifying in the structured, state-sanctioned violence and intimidation fueled purely by hate.  The treatment of Mr. Morgan was scary, but not nearly as terrifying as what blacks faced.  It is a part of American history we can never forget.  This is definitely an article to read.