I Have a Dream - Reflections on Birmingham
By Liz Buchanan
On Friday night March 17, we sang at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, a concert with the Carlton Reese Memorial Choir.
I hadn’t known who Carlton Reese was. He directed the choir that sang at the Birmingham Civil Rights rallies at places like Sixteenth Baptist. They sang to inspire and empower, drawing on the gospel tradition, changing the words to messages of freedom.
The Botanical Gardens took me back to my own childhood. I lived in Birmingham until I was eight and visited many times after that. It’s a neighborhood I knew well, the Botanical Gardens, the Japanese Gardens, the zoo with the polar bears and the monkeys and of course the zoo train. Across the street was the red-brick apartment complex where I had lived for two years, now knocked down to make way for something more luxurious.
I did not know, at age 6 in 1963, that the city I lived in was a place of abject inequality. I had little idea that Birmingham was being rocked by events that would change the world. Black kids just a few years older than me decided to take to the streets. They were brave in the face of many potential dangers: lynching, bombs, jails, police dogs, fire hoses. Four girls on the way to Sunday School would lose their lives to a bomb set by White Supremacists. Two boys, simply in the wrong place on the same day, would lose their lives to White thugs.
I had little idea. The Black people I knew were maids or yard-men or the white uniformed waiters at the country club. Once, as we were driving out of town, an adult pointed out to me a “colored” school. I didn’t realize that Jim Crow was set up to keep me from ever playing with a Black child my own age. It was just the way things were.
The message we heard from people like Dr. Carolyn McKinstry and Janice Wesley is that as Black young people, they had once thought the same. It was just the way things were. But they were stirred by the rallies, by the music of Carlton Reese’s choir, and by leaders such as Reverend Shuttlesworth and Reverend King, who said don’t accept that your schools aren’t equal, that you can’t go to the Kiddieland amusement park or try on clothes in a department store or aspire to attend any college or choose any career. They became a movement, they marched and made a difference in their own lives and everyone else’s.
The Carlton Reese Choir joined with us in celebrating the changes in Birmingham, still not a perfect place, but so much better. One of their singers, Annetta Nunn, served as the first Black woman chief of police in the city from 2003-2008. Two of the singers sat at our table for dinner after the concert, Eloise and Pat, two ladies with great laughs. We shared our experiences as teachers and travelers. Yet Pat told us about how her mother had once “gone over the mountain” to work as a maid. She might have worked in the home of someone I knew in Mountain Brook. Earlier that day, Dr. McKinstry had told us that her dad, a teacher with two advanced degrees in science, worked a second job as a waiter at the country club. He might have served my table. Yet these strong people emerged resilient from a system of hate and injustice. They were changemakers. As SANS sang Donnell’s song “I Have a Dream,” I felt moved in a new way by people in the City where some of the hardest-fought battles for the dream took place. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
Thank you, SANS, for this remarkable opportunity to learn and grow and use our new understanding of this history to make a difference in our own world.