"Almost Like a Train Coming"

By Condoleezza Rice

It was quite a day when it happened. I remember being at a church which was a few blocks away from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and just being completely shocked by the sound. It was almost like a train coming. Then about an hour later, word started to spread on what had happened. Everybody rushed home to watch television. It was just awful. Then we learned the names of the little girls who had been killed, and everybody knew at least one of them. I knew Denise McNair. She grew up in my neighborhood. Her dad was the photographer who did everybody's weddings and birthday parties. She was 11 years old.

I don't remember being frightened at that moment, although it was a terrifying time. I just felt sad. Then seeing the funeral procession that came down Sixth Avenue, I remember thinking that the coffins were pretty small.

Later I remember being scared because the bombings became frequent. The home of another friend of my parents, Arthur Shores, who was the lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights people, was bombed not long after that. I remember driving by there and seeing all the damage. Yes, it was scary. The men in the community, my father among them, would go to the head of the cul-de-sac at night and sit there armed to keep night riders from coming through.

When I heard about the latest arrests, I was relieved. Relieved for the families, relieved for Birmingham. I think that city has been trying to bring closure for a long time to what happened. I visited the civil rights museum there just about a month ago for the first time when I was there to give a speech. It sits right across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and across from Kelly Ingram Park, where the police dogs were. The curator was telling me that corporate contributions had at first come slowly. But soon every major corporation in Birmingham was contributing. She talked about how this museum gave closure to what Birmingham had been through. I thought the same thing about the arrests. It's finally putting all the pieces in place and letting the survivors move on.

Rice, who served as provost of Stanford and is George W. Bush's foreign policy adviser, grew up in Birmingham and was seven at the time of the bombing