This song is a tribute to the four children who were killed in the white supremacist 16th St. Baptist Church Bombing that happened on Sunday, September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. The lyrics are taken directly from the poem by Randall Dunn called “The Ballad of Birmingham.”
The text is written from the perspective of the mother of Denise McNair, one of the four girls who were killed by the blast. Maxine Pippen McNair, her mother, famously found the shoe of her daughter while searching for her in the building’s wreckage. This personal detail has been inextricably linked to the public’s consciousness of this atrocity due in part to a piece written by journalist and civil right’s advocate Gene Patterson. Originally written for and published in the Atlanta Constitution, the piece was read aloud by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News on following Monday.

“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies.

We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.

We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.

We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die."

-Gene Patteron, September 16, 1963
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Gene Patterson's most famous column: 'A Flower for the Graves' - Poynter — Poynter

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