Four Little Girls, African American History Month. Cynthia Wesley ~cbs

 
Four Little Girls, African American History Month. Cynthia Wesley  ~cbs
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Cynthia Wesley, April 30, 1949 - Sept. 15, 1963.... There were times when Cynthia Wesley's father came home weary after a night of patrolling his Smithfield neighborhood for would-be mischief-makers. Or worse, bombers. Claude A. Wesley was one of several men who volunteered to ensure another peaceful night on Dynamite Hill, nicknamed for the frequent and unsolved bombings in a former white neighborhood that was increasingly a home to blacks. The Wesleys tried to protect their daughter from segregation's brutality. "We were extremely naive," remembers friend and playmate Karen Floyd Savage. "We didn't really discuss things in depth like that." The first adopted daughter of Claude and Gertrude Wesley, Cynthia was a petite girl with a narrow face and size 2 dress. Cynthia's mother made her clothes, which fit her thin frame perfectly. She attended the now-defunct Ullman High School, where she did well in math, reading and the band. She invited friends to parties in her back yard, playing soulful tunes and serving refreshments. "Cynthia was just full of fun all the time," Mrs. Savage said. "We were constantly laughing." It was while the two girls attended Wilkerson Elementary School that Cynthia traded her gold-band ring topped with a clear, rectangular stone for a 1954 class ring that belonged to Mrs. Savage. "We just sort of liked each others' rings and we just traded with no question of wanting it back," Mrs. Savage said. Cynthia made friends easily, talking often to close pal Rickey Powell. On Sept. 14, 1963, she invited Rickey to church the next day for a Sunday youth program. Powell accepted, only to reluctantly decline when his mother wanted him to accompany her to a funeral. "We were like peas in a pod," Powell said. "That was my best bud." When Cynthia died in the church blast, she was still wearing the ring Mrs. Savage gave her when they were younger. Cynthia's father identified her by that ring when he went to the morgue. The death of the four girls crushed Mrs. Savage. "I was so young. I never realized someone would hate you so much that they would go to that extent. In a way, that was sort of the death of my own innocence." Cynthia Wesley, one of the "Four Little Girls" killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm .... Even as the inspiring words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech rang out from the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington in August of 1963, racial relations in the segregated South were marked by continued violence and inequality. On September 15, a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama--a church with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured; outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the hard-fought, often dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans. http://www.history.com/topics/birmingham-church-bombing
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