Good Friday

  

 Wales Window

The church had been targeted by white racists because it was being used as a meeting place by black civil rights workers at the height of their campaign in the American south. In the explosion that tore apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, one Sunday in September 1963, four young black girls were killed:
Denise McNair, 11,

Carole Robertson, 14

Cynthia Wesley,14 

 Addie Mae Collins,  14.

Bobby Frank Cherry, a former member of the Klu Klux Klan white supremacist movement had served in the United States Marine Corps  as a youth, where he was trained in working with explosives and demolitions. After the Marines, he held various jobs, including truck driving. He had seven children by his wife, Virginia, but he was neither kind nor loving, frequently physically assaulting his wife and children. When Virginia died in 1968, he placed his children in an orphanage and with relatives. He remarried four times.

In 1963, Bobby Cherry was friends with fellow Klansmen, Mitchell Burns and Thomas Edwin Blanton. Burns was approached by FBI investigators and asked to provide evidence against Cherry and Blanton. He agreed, after being shown post-mortem photos of the dead girls. Apparently, he was so disturbed by the photos that he vomited. Burns' assistance came in the form of going to numerous honky tonks with Burns and Blanton, recording their conversations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the car boot and making thorough notes after the meetings.The FBI collected the tapes during the immediate investigation, then "lost" them.

Blanton and Cherry were suspects from early in the investigation. Cherry had form for racist violence: he had assaulted black minister Fred Shuttlesworth in 1957 using a set of brass knuckles and had pistol-whipped a black man in a restaurant after the man insulted Cherry^. J. Edgar Hoover, however,  prevented attempts by the Birmingham office of the F.B.I. to bring charges against them. After the rediscovery of the tapes in 1997, the cold case investigation led to the prosecution of Blanton and Cherry. Cherry alleged that he was unable to stand trial as he suffered from dementia, but experts later assessed him and concluded he was faking mental illness.

The recordings primarily contained racist sentiment. One records Blanton and Cherry discussing with approval the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Blanton began to implicate himself and Cherry by bragging, but Cherry, who was less acquainted with the informant, sharply cut him off by saying, "Now, this good ol' boy doesn't need to know about that!" and laughed.

 During the trial, at which five witnesses, including his third wife, gave evidence that he had bragged about perpetrating the church bombing, Cherry smiled and looked amused. He could be seen joking with his lawyers and several supporters, not seeming to believe that the legal system which had protected him up to that point would ultimately send him to jail. He was convicted on four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Cherry's appeal on the grounds that his trial was inherently unfair because 37 years had elapsed between the crime and his indictment in 2000 was rejected. During his prison sentence, Cherry repeatedly claimed to be the victim of a malicious false campaign against him and he said that he was a "political prisoner" who was denied proper treatment. He died in the Kilby prison's hospital unit, on November 18, 2004, aged 74.

Blanton was convicted of murder. He was sentenced to four life sentences in state prison, and died on June 26, 2020, at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility from unspecified causes while serving his life sentences, at the age of 82.

 

An ocean and a continent away from the Alabama and Klu Klux Klan lunacy, John Petts (1914-1991), a Welsh artist, (although born in London) best known for his engravings and stained glass work, was horrified "as a father and as a craftsman" upon hearing the news of the bombing and the murder of the four children.

‘Naturally as a father I was horrified by the death of the children. As a craftsman… I was horrified at the smashing of all those windows, and I thought to myself: my word, what can we do about this?’

Petts contacted David Cole, the editor of The Western Mail suggesting a fundraising campaign to replace the church’s main stained glass window as ‘…a gift from the people of Wales. A national gesture of goodwill.’

The following day, the paper launched the campaign with the headline ‘Alabama: Chance for Wales to Show the Way.’ More than 3,000 people donated no more than half a crown each, as per Petts’ stipulation. Within days the £500 target had been reached, with the fund closing at £900.

‘Photographs were shown of children both black and white in the Cardiff Docks area queuing up at the Western Mail offices handing over their pocket money,’ Petts recalled.

‘And within a short while the fund was closed and I found myself flown over to Alabama…"

Petts’ bold design for what has become known as The Wales Window depicts a black Jesus ‘…a suffering figure in a crucified gesture, with one hand flung wide in protest, the other in acceptance.’ 

 The artwork contains Christ's words: "You Do It to Me" 1965. It is known as "The Welsh Window".

Speaking to the BBC in 1987, Petts recalled: 

"They had never heard of Wales, they had no idea where it was, but they were very quickly told something of the little country Wales and how it put great value on independence and freedom, to bandy with the great big words.  An idea doesn't exist unless you do something about it.

"Thought has no real living meaning unless it's followed by action of some kind."

Petts died in 1991.

Paul Robeson, baritone, socialist activist and Communist sympathiser,  had a particular fellow feeling for the Welsh miners and their struggle, having appeared in the film, The Proud Valley, filmed by Ealing Studios in 1940. Denied entry to Britain after the Second World War, Robeson was unable to attend the annual Miners' Eisteddfod in October 1957, but instead broadcast to them. He hoped that we may one day be able to lead "abundant, peaceful and dignified lives."

 

 Oh, haupt voll blut und wunden,
(Oh, sacred head, now wounded)
St Matthew's Passion,
J.S. Bach. 

Whatsoever you do to the least of my little ones, you do it to Me. 

(thanks to mr verge for this deeply moving story for Good Friday.)