If you don't yet know what happened in Birmingham, Alabama, on an early Sunday morning, at the 13th Street Baptist Church -- in mid September 1963 -- do go find out. Or watch Spike Lee's "4 Little Girls".
. . . .[Roger Ebert: ] The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived. . . .
The governor [of Alabama], whose demented attempt to prove himself a white man, has ended in the demonstration that he may not wholly be a man at all, deserves not even pity. His life is his own to live, and his nights are his to sleep, if he can. . . .
And it happened in Alabama to children we did not know and would never have known. But because they died, it happened to us. And the blood is on our hands, because every one of us owed to those children a future. . . .
Their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling. . . . And it is not new blood. It is old, so very old. . . . It clings and waits, and in its turn, it kills again. . . .
Now click the image, at right -- to read the rest of what a then only 20 year old Roger Ebert (as Editor in Chief of the Daily Illini) was thinking, of it all.
His artistic and rhetorical reach here is. . . astonishing. Oh my.
What might have been. . . . not that he didn't lead an amazing life, as it was.
Just. . . what if he had focused on politics. . . or civil rights, as a principal -- and principled -- avocation? What if? Here is the full PDF of that day's paper (see page 8).
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