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Terrorism isn't new to this country

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published July 31, 2005

I was thinking about terrorism the other day - not the al-Qaida suicide bombers but the homegrown variety. Before 9/11, there was Oklahoma City and Birmingham, Philadelphia (Miss.) and towns whose names have faded from memory.

Lest we forget, we have known American terrorists. They include anti-government extremists (Timothy McVeigh), antiabortion fanatics (Eric Rudolph) and white racists (the Birmingham church bombers). These bombers acted as loners in some cases and as part of an organized cell - the Ku Klux Klan, for example - in others. They killed innocent people, including children, and some invoked God's name in blowing up abortion clinics and black churches. Some were brought to justice, but many were not. They were losers whose rabid, twisted minds were sick with hate and ignorance. We called them criminals and vigilantes; they were terrorists.

The threat of international terrorism is changing our laws and the way we live. Terrorism is deadly, but it's also inconvenient. We have to take off our shoes and more to go through airport security. Since the London bombings, New York subway riders are subjected to random searches. Some Americans plan their vacations to foreign destinations by trying to guess which city - Paris or Rome? - is likely to be al-Qaida's next target.

For most of us, terrorism is something we read about and think about and hope we never experience first-hand. However, there is one group of Americans who saw terrorism up close - African-Americans who lived through the long, terrifying night of Jim Crow violence in the Deep South. Black Southerners in those days were terrorized. Mob lynchings were acts of terror. The assassinations of civil rights leaders were acts of terror. The bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls - children in Sunday school - was an act of terror. So were the dozens of firebombings of black homes and churches. The Jim Crow terrorists had plenty of accomplices - preachers, politicians and all-white juries that allowed the bombers and murderers of black people to walk.

These murders and bombings were more deplored than condemned by political and religious leaders who encouraged defiance of court orders and saw the civil rights struggle as a communist conspiracy. Jim Crow terrorists rarely heard anything spoken from church pulpits - or from any other platform - to disturb their conscience.

The morning after the Birmingham church bombing, only four of 100 U.S. senators rose to speak on that act of terrorism. Their remarks filled less than a page in the Congressional Record. At the time, I.F. Stone, the great independent journalist, wrote: "If four children had been killed in the bombing of a Berlin church by communists, the country would be on the verge of war. But when four senators (Hart, Kuchel, Humphrey and Javits) framed a resolution asking that the Sunday after the Birmingham bombing be set aside as a national day of mourning, they knew their fellow senators too well even to introduce it."

Imagine the reaction today if Muslim terrorists bombed a U.S. church and killed four children?

No, I'm not comparing our homegrown terrorists with al-Qaida, whose suicide bombers practice the wholesale slaughter of innocents. But I am suggesting that as we try to understand why young Muslim suicide bombers target New York skyscrapers or London's buses and subways, we also need to ask ourselves what drove the Birmingham bombers to dynamite a black church on a Sunday when they had to know it would be filled with men, women and children. And what drove Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier who served in the first Gulf War, to park a truck bomb outside a federal office building that included a day care center in Oklahoma City? The blast killed 168 people, including children.

As much as I've been thinking about these questions, I haven't come up with any good answers. Maybe there's nothing to understand except that terrorists, whatever their stripe or sick cause, should be seen for what they are - the incarnation of evil. They show no mercy, and they deserve none.

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 29, 2005, 21:52:02]