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RedditIt is a moment that divides before and after. Less than 24 hours earlier, the two sisters at the center of the photograph were worrying over house curtains. Now they fear that the 11-year-old daughter and only child of Maxine Pippen McNair (center, right) lies across the street, buried in the rubble of what had been the ladies’ lounge of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Sunday, September 15, 1963, was the most sensational day yet in a city historically embarrassed by dubious superlatives; Birmingham, which called itself the “City of Churches,” was also known as the most segregated city in America. Maxine’s daughter, Denise McNair, and three friends had been primping for their role in Youth Day services when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klansmen blasted them into history.
When the photograph was taken, the family knew only that Denise was missing. It is not clear whether Maxine McNair’s uncle Flozzell Pippen (barely visible in the background) had yet found Denise’s shoe amid the chunks of church wall. The Pippens were standing under the awning of the family dry-cleaning business, the Social Cleaners, where the previous May, Maxine’s sister Juanita Pippen Jones (center, left) had been rudely confronted by an officer of the Birmingham police K-9 Corps. On that day, the culmination of a month-long nonviolent campaign Martin Luther King Jr. had been waging in Birmingham, school-age demonstrators faced down fire hoses and police dogs and inspired President Kennedy to introduce federal legislation outlawing segregation.
Neither Denise nor the other murdered girls had been among the thousands of young people who had marched that spring. Although the “children’s miracle,” as their triumph came to be known, had been launched from the centrally located sanctuary of Sixteenth Street Baptist, the proud bourgeois congregation had not actively supported King’s crusade. Denise’s parents—schoolteachers like her aunt Juanita—had shielded her from the indignities of second-class citizenship, vaguely explaining that “a few white people don’t like colored children, but...most white people like all children.”
The newly hired Birmingham News photographer who captured the family’s gathering grief was Vernon Merritt III, 22, an Alabama native whose father, a businessman active in state politics, vocally detested the civil rights movement. Most of Merritt’s colleagues on the News saw the cataclysmic events of 1963 as “just an assignment,” recalled another photographer, Ed Jones.
But Merritt “really believed in the cause,” says Pam Blecha, who was married to him at the time. “He thought it was the real deal.” A few months after the church bombing, Merritt landed in Time—as the subject of a story—after a county sheriff assaulted him with a cattle prod for boarding a bus to photograph the black children integrating the public schools of Notasulga.
Merritt spent less than a year at the News, and later shot for the Black Star agency, Newsweek and Life. He covered Vietnam (and was temporarily paralyzed from sniper fire), the 1968 Memphis garbage strike that turned out to be King’s last stand, the miniskirt and the pig that played Arnold on “Green Acres.” Life assigned him to Neil Armstrong’s family at Cape Kennedy when Apollo 11 lifted off to the moon. His classic portrait of Coretta Scott King still sells as a poster.
Merritt’s divergent pursuits after Life folded as a weekly in 1972 included the founding of Equus, a glossy magazine for the horsey set, and sailing. On the morning of August 17, 2000, his sailing companion and third wife, Linda Stanley, found him in their Old Lyme, Connecticut, backyard, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. She said he accidentally fell on the .22 rifle he had taken out to dispatch the groundhogs colonizing their property. He was 59.
Comments
that is so sad i cnt believe that bomber would do dat 2 denise mcnair ,carol roberson, chynthia wesley,and addie mae collins let them rest in peace[RIP]
Posted by on July 20,2008 | 04:59PM
Why do I not see the photo though? My heart breaks as I remember it. My two youngest adopted children are African American, in High School now, and looking at the Civil Rights Movement - the bombiing in particular interest to my daughter. They were her and she is them - and she will overcome and travel onward for them. They are Not forgotten.
Posted by Diane Page on October 6,2008 | 11:46AM