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

Carolyn Maull McKinstry grew up “halfway in and halfway out of the South’s violent Civil Rights era” (35). She lived through the nation’s strictest manifestations of segregation laws, saw those laws dismantled, and watched as the county began to heal. Many of the events that McKinstry describes, like the Birmingham Children’s March and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, are well-known, iconic moments in American history. By telling her personal story, McKinstry reveals the real-life implications of these events and their lasting impact on those who experienced them firsthand.

In the early 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama, was a key location in the civil rights movement, and the teenage McKinstry was “right in the center of it all” (107). She marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Birmingham Children’s March and lost her friends in the tragic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Throughout the text, McKinstry combines her own narrative with passages from speeches by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, connecting her personal experiences to these well-known historical moments. She describes watching the opposition to school integration on television and seeing a photograph of Emmett Till’s mutilated face on the cover of Look magazine. These experiences greatly impacted McKinstry, making her wonder about the implications for her own life, such as her options for continued education or worry about her family’s safety.

Although the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and segregation was outlawed across the South, McKinstry and others who participated in or were affected by the civil rights movement continued to live with the lasting impacts of the trauma they experienced. In the public eye, these personal experiences were largely overlooked, and individuals like McKinstry were left to process their trauma alone. For years, McKinstry dealt with lingering depression and anxiety in silence. Furthermore, McKinstry sometimes felt that her personal experiences changed little with the passage of civil rights legislature. There were “visible changes,” like removing signs indicating segregated spaces, but “invisible changes came much more slowly” (189). Years later, when McKinstry moved back to Birmingham, she was “disappointed” in the slow progress toward equality. Working at BellSouth, McKinstry was the only Black employee in the office, and the local community pool was “private,” meaning it was off-limits to the neighborhood’s Black residents. McKinstry notes that law doesn’t necessarily change people’s hearts and minds, and her personal experience continued to reflect the South’s racial hostility even years after the official end of the civil rights movement.