John Archibald on Living with the Domestic Terror of 1960s “Bombingham”
March 10, 2021
I spoke to God last night. With him I shared my dreams. A living sacrifice, I want to be wholly accepted, Lord, to thee. But instead, to my weary soul it seems weakness and failure follow me.
–Rev. Robert L. Archibald Jr., journal entry, March 25, 1963
Most people think Birmingham got its nickname, “Bombingham,” after four little girls were killed in an explosion on a September Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. But that’s not true. As many as forty bombs, some lit with fuses and others detonated with timers rigged from fishing bobbers in leaky buckets, exploded across the city between the end of World War II and the Sixteenth Street blast in 1963.