While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement

“It was years before we realized that his unwieldy rules were designed to protect us from the evil possibilities of the mean-spirited world around us.”

In this passage, McKinstry describes her father’s strict rules. Although she didn’t understand it at the time, many of his rules constituted an effort to keep his children safe from the racial violence and injustice that proliferated in Birmingham. Insisting that McKinstry never leave the house unless escorted by her brothers, for example, or forbidding his children from crossing the train tracks that led to the white side of town where notorious Klansmen lived seemed like impositions on his children’s freedom. However, looking back, McKinstry understands that the rules were in place to protect her and her siblings.

“About the only place he permitted me to go alone, unescorted by my brothers, was church. It was a safe place, and I had certain responsibilities there. I escaped to the church as often as I could.”

Here, McKinstry again discusses Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the space’s presumed safety. In contrast with the outside world, church seemed like a safe haven, even to McKinstry’s hyper-protective father. This means that the attack on the church was all the more shocking and destabilizing. McKinstry’s later return to the church speaks to The Role of Faith and Forgiveness in Healing.

“Not many young people can pinpoint the exact date, time, and place they grew up and became an adult. I can. It was September 15, 1963, 10:22 a.m., at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. My life changed forever after that day. Not only did I lose four friends, but I also lost my innocence and naivetéé about people and about the world in general. The loving trust I had in the goodness of humanity was gone. I began to see the world as a deadly and hostile place, where no one, not even my father or my brothers or my church, could protect me. And for the first time in my life, I felt all alone.”

In this passage, McKinstry describes the life-altering effects of the bombing. The tragedy caused her to abruptly lose her childhood innocence and come face to face with the harsh reality of racial violence and injustice. She had grown up feeling safe, secure, and loved, but the bombing caused her to question that security. Furthermore, danger had come to her church, the one place McKinstry felt safest, fundamentally disrupting and destabilizing her view of the world. This quote speaks to The Personal Experiences Behind Public Historical Events.

“Blacks and whites lived together in the same city, but we truly lived in separate worlds.”

McKinstry describes how rigid segregation laws kept Black and white people separated in Birmingham. This separation made it difficult to understand one another and build empathy, which allowed racial violence and injustice to flourish unchecked. This separation was also furthered by silence, as Black people were expected to keep quiet about segregation even after it was made illegal.

“The truth is, our parents kept us close to home so we would have minimum exposure to the signs and to white people. By the time I could read, I learned I could use any things or places marked ‘coloreds,’ and I could not use those things or places marked ‘whites only.’ What I had not yet learned was the depth of hatred that mandated those segregation laws. It seemed that what people learned at their churches on Sundays about unity and love they placed on the shelf during the remainder of the week. We were engaged in a no-win hate war. But as long as we black people ‘stayed in our places,’ our community was relatively safe.”

In this passage, McKinstry describes her early understanding of segregation in her city. Her parents kept her and her siblings at home to protect them from the violence and injustice in the outside world. McKinstry grew up with an awareness of segregation, but it took her years to realize the contempt, animosity, and injustice behind Jim Crow laws.

“Little did I know that the loss of those girls was, ironically, the real beginning of hope for blacks and whites in Birmingham. Their blood—the ‘blood of the innocents’—had spilled on the hands of Birmingham’s people. And now, finally, the whole world was watching.”

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the death of McKinstry’s four young friends brought much-needed attention to the fight for racial equality. For years, most white people had looked the other way when Black people were brutalized or murdered. However, the death of four innocent girls made racial violence and injustice impossible to ignore.

“At that moment, the bombings in Birmingham took on a new twist for me. People were dead. And these were people I knew! The racial situation had now become very real and very personal. My young, innocent mind made another powerful note: It happened in my church! Church had always been a special place, a haven where we worshiped God. It was his place—a spot reserved each week just for God.”

McKinstry had been aware of the racial violence in Birmingham, but it seemed far away, and she had never personally felt at risk. After the bombing, she suddenly became afraid. Her church, the place she thought was safest and most impenetrable, had been violated, and she no longer knew what she could trust. This quote speaks to The Enduring and Personal Impact of Racial Violence.

“Little Sarah made an incredible journey throughout life with mismatched eyes—one of the many challenges she would face in the years ahead. But none of her injuries compared with the wounds to her spirit. The only living witness to what happened in the restroom at 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, Sarah chose to live in silence and seclusion for many years.”

Here, McKinstry describes Sarah Collins, Addie Collins’ sister. Sarah had also been in the women’s restroom when the bomb went off. She survived but lost one eye and most of her vision in the second. However, McKinstry notes that “the wounds to her spirit” were far worse than the wounds to her flesh. Sarah’s story underscores the hidden cost of racial violence and the lives that remained irrevocably altered even after laws had been changed.

“It was like the word cancer. No one wanted to say it out loud or acknowledge it. And with the restroom ‘death chamber’ sealed off and walled up, offering no visible reminder of the bombing, it was almost as if it never happened.”

In this passage, McKinstry describes her community’s response following the bombing and the girls’ deaths. Across the South, silence in the face of racial violence and injustice had become a survival mechanism in a world where speaking out could lead to dire consequences. However, it also prevented McKinstry and others who experienced trauma from processing their experiences and healing properly.

“If this tragedy had happened today instead of in 1963, Monday morning would have, no doubt, been set aside as an official day of mourning in Birmingham. City officials would send out teams of crisis counselors to the Birmingham schools to talk with the students and help them cope with their confusion, anger, and grief. Parents would schedule appointments for their children with licensed psychologists and closely monitor them for the days, weeks, and months ahead.”

McKinstry comments several times on the lack of mental health resources available in the early 1960s, especially for Black children. After the bombing, she was completely isolated with her fear, grief, and anger. She had no one to talk to or to help her process her complicated feelings, and this made her healing process longer and more difficult.

“But Mr. Salisbury dared to show us the way outsiders saw our city. He saw the lack of respect white people accorded black people; the exclusiveness of white society; the injustices, mistreatments, and cruelties shown to blacks. What seemed perfectly normal to white Birmingham residents proved a genuine contradiction of our nation’s democratic ideals to outsiders such as Salisbury.”

In this passage, McKinstry describes a journalist who came to Birmingham to cover the bombings and terrorism taking place there for the New York Times. In the city, the pervasive violence and injustice against the Black community were taken for granted as an inevitable part of daily life. Salisbury’s scathing article forced the white citizens of Birmingham to realize that their treatment of Black people was cruel and inhumane.

“I’vee learned in the years since that some moments in history and in our lives go away. The issues we understand easily and the fears we resolve quickly fade into the past. They get filed away into a memory cabinet marked ‘closed.’

Other events, however, refuse to go away. They become a part of our ‘forever’ thoughts, and they surface unexpectedly at the most unpredictable times. These memories can be painful, but perhaps some things should never go away—they should be kept in the forefront of our minds to provide continuing lessons for daily life.”

Here, McKinstry describes the way that the memory of the church bombing lingered with her throughout her life. Hard lessons like the church bombing should never be forgotten because they remind society of the incredibly high price of freedom and the dangers of hatred and racial conflict. The memory of the bombing and the girls’ deaths must live on so history does not repeat itself. This quote speaks to The Enduring and Personal Impact of Racial Violence.

“Even though it seemed a logical conclusion, I never connected my newfound sadness and depression with my friends’ violent deaths. At the time, I had no knowledge of the grief process, clinical depression, or survivor’s guilt syndrome. Those were not the days of trauma teams and school grief counseling—especially not for black people.”

This passage again highlights McKinstry’s isolation in the wake of the church bombing and how limited mental health resources impacted her healing and recovery. McKinstry could not make sense of her feelings after the bombing, and she lacked help trying to process the experience, even from her family and community.

“And then I sensed God planting in me a vision for my future. ‘Carolyn, I need you to tell people that this is not about skin color or ethnicity or religion. It is about love, it is about forgiveness, it is about reconciliation. I need you to be my messenger, my ambassador. They will know I allowed you to live—I saved you so you could bear personal witness to my power to restore and forgive and draw people to me. Just lift me up.’”

McKinstry was in the women’s restroom with her friends just moments before the bomb detonated, and she believed that God spared her life for a reason. She felt a calling to spread God’s message of forgiveness and reconciliation, but for years, she was not ready to step into the role God offered her. She had to find forgiveness for herself and the men who had hurt her before she could share the message with others. This quote speaks to The Role of Faith and Forgiveness in Healing.

“But while visible changes had taken place, I noticed that the invisible changes came much more slowly.

We can, by law, change the outside, I thought. But we can’t so easily change people’s hearts. How do we change the inside?”

The discrepancy between visible and invisible changes is a recurring theme in While the World Watched. Although the civil rights movement succeeds in creating certain visible changes, like desegregating public spaces, prejudice and discrimination persists because people’s hearts remain unchanged. McKinstry goes on to dedicate her life to these invisible changes, trying to reach out with love, share her story, and connect with those different from herself.

“Within the span of a decade, I had watched my beloved grandmother die in the basement of Princeton Hospital, I had survived two bombings, I had seen four friends murdered, and I had lost three compassionate leaders to assassins’ bullets: John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. And I had not yet turned twenty-one years old.”

This passage summarizes the trauma of McKinstry’s childhood and adolescence. She experienced an incredible amount of personal and collective loss in her early life and was forced to cope by repressing the many complicated feelings associated with the tragedies.

“With little available to me in terms of post-trauma counseling and therapy, I had traveled this painful journey hand in hand with God alone.”

Here, McKinstry refers to The Role of Faith and Forgiveness in Healing. Without the ability to share her feelings and experiences with a counselor or even friends and family, she had to count on God. Without her faith, she would not have been able to recover.

“During Bobby Frank Cherry’s trial, I had to relive those past violent and tragic days in Birmingham’s history. Some might say I would have been completely justified to feel hatred, unforgiveness, and bitterness against the white people who had killed my friends and against all those who closed the doors of opportunity for generations of African-Americans.

But I discovered early in life—from my grandparents, my pastor, and others—that in God’s eyes, no life should be lived in hatred or unforgiveness. Bitterness hurts only the people whose hearts house it, not the offenders.”

This passage summarizes McKinstry’s views on love and forgiveness and how they helped her to finally heal from her trauma. For many years, she held onto hatred and bitterness, which was destroying her physically, mentally, and emotionally. When she was finally able to forgive the men who hurt her and killed her friends, she was able to find peace and freedom from suffering.

“During that time God gave me a renewed vision for the church—both the physical building and his people. As a community, we have a charge to care for the building, because this is where we come to do the Lord’s work. We have inherited this structure and the history it contains, and we need to take care of it. But at the same time, we are the true church, not the building. God’s love resides inside us, so whenever we go out into the world, we take the church with us.”

Here, McKinstry suggests that her calling to care for Sixteenth Street Baptist Church extended to the building itself and to spreading the church’s message outside its walls. It is important to preserve the church and the memories it holds so that we do not forget the high price paid for freedom. However, it is also important to hold faith within so that it remains present no matter what is happening in the outside world.

“God is capable of redeeming even the ugliest and darkest moments from our past. But sometimes we first have to be willing to go back and face some of those painful places again.”

This passage comes right after McKinstry testifies in court for Bobby Cherry. The trial forces her to go back and relive the events of the bombing, but afterward, she is finally able to move on and step into the role that God had prepared for her. She describes a similar situation at the hospital where her grandmother died. During divinity school, she worked in the hospital as a chaplain, facing the horrible memories of her grandmother’s death and giving the comfort she needed as a child to others in similar situations. Facing these memories, even though they are difficult, is a necessary part of healing.

“Jesus forgave the men who crucified him as well as the thief who hung beside him. Pondering that Scripture, as well as other passages throughout the Bible, I came to understand that I, too, needed to forgive those who had hurt me and my family and friends. And that forgiveness was more important for me than for them. It allowed me to move forward with the life God had planned for me.”

Here, McKinstry describes Christian principles of forgiveness and their influence on her own healing journey. She again emphasizes the idea that forgiveness is in the best interest of the victim, not the perpetrator. It is an essential part of The Role of Faith and Forgiveness in Healing.

“In order to truly love our neighbors, we have to get to know them. As we live and work and commute in the course of our busy everyday lives, we often miss opportunities to truly connect with the people who live around us. We can become so comfortable and protected in our own comfort zones that we fail to reach out to neighbors who are different from us. Genuine love sees beyond the external differences and finds the similarities of another’s heart.”

Throughout the text, McKinstry repeatedly references how Black people and white people in Birmingham live in separate worlds. This distance leads to a lack of empathy and a tendency to dehumanize and other those who are different from us. The only way to combat this distance is to reach out to others and form personal connections.

“God has used my story of pain and suffering as a witness to how love can overcome hate, how forgiveness can overcome bitterness, and how joy can overcome pain.”

McKinstry has overcome immense trauma and hardship, and she believes her story is a testament to God’s love and the healing power of forgiveness. She shares her story in the hope of helping others believe the goodness and the power of love and kindness.