The title of the Sunday morning sermon was to be “A Love That Forgives.”
That was the message 14-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry anticipated hearing from John H. Cross on Sept. 15, 1963, at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
But the sermon was never delivered.
Instead, at 10:22 a.m., a homemade bomb placed outside the church by Ku Klux Klan members blew a large hole in a wall of the building. Killed instantly were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — McKinstry’s friends who were in the girls’ rest room.
Just minutes before the bomb exploded, she had been speaking with her friends in that same bathroom.
Long before the bombing occurred, Sixteenth Street Baptist, the first black church built in Birmingham, had become a regular meeting place for civil rights leaders. Because of its connection to the civil rights movement, the church became a target of the Klan.
After the bombing, McKinstry struggled to make sense of the crime, asking herself over and over again, “Where were all the good people — the Christian people — who sat in all the churches on Sunday mornings and heard the message of loving their neighbor? Where were those people? Why didn’t they come to help?”
This was not the only bombing that she would experience. Later a bomb exploded just across the street from her house, knocking her younger brothers out of their bunk beds. Her home was damaged, as were neighbors’ homes.
“Bombing was a way of life in Birmingham,” McKinstry said recently. “But no one even pretended like they were fixing anything. The bombs just kept going off. And I kept thinking, ‘How is this going to end?’ You’re puzzled because you don’t see an end.”
These events motivated her to share her story of forgiveness in a new book, “While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement,” published by Tyndale House.
After the bombing that damaged her home, McKinstry began to feel a calling upon her life and believes God started preparing her for a special ministry.
She went on to graduate from Fisk University in Nashville and work for BellSouth in Birmingham for 22 years. In 2002, McKinstry’s calling prompted her to retire from her job and enroll in Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham.
In 2008, she received a master of divinity.
“Part of my going back to divinity school had to do with the pain I still felt,” McKinstry said. “I said, ‘I’m going to go back and study and see if I can figure this thing out.’”
She met Denise George, who teaches a writing class at Beeson, where her husband, Timothy George, serves as dean.
“Carolyn was a student when I met her,” said Denise George, who helped McKinstry write the book and get it published. “We sat down to have lunch and started talking. I grew up in the South and had heard of the church bombing, but I never put it into perspective. It was like all the pain and hurt didn’t matter to anyone. I knew her story had to be told.”
Both women realized how important it is that younger generations know what happened during that era so that history does not repeat itself.
For George, helping to write the book proved challenging in several ways.
“First, it was such a powerful story and because Carolyn was my friend, I wanted it to be told just right to be effective,” she said. “Second, it was all historical and everything had to be documented accurately. Last, it was such a deeply and emotionally painful topic to talk about. A lot of these people were church-going people. They would go to church on Sunday and hear about loving their neighbor and then would be involved in bombings and beatings.”
Finally, there was the endeavor to avoid the dryness with which some historical accounts are conveyed in books.
“I wanted it to read like a story,” George said. “I want people to see how God doesn’t cause pain and tragedy, but He always brings something good from it. When we go through something like this, if we allow God to use us, we can become ‘wounded healers’ and can offer people hope. Carolyn is now ministering to other people in Christ because of it.”
In fact, for 25 years now, McKinstry has been offering her message of love, forgiveness and reconciliation by sharing her story around the country whenever she has been asked to do so. Last week, she was in Virginia for a live “700 Club” appearance.
“People like hearing the story because of the good ending,” McKinstry said.
“And it seemed, every time I spoke, I felt better too because the story touched people’s hearts. They would cry with me and hug me. I think the greatest blessing God has given me is to see there are more people like me in the world than those who planted the bomb in Birmingham.”
To purchase the book, visit www.thealabamabaptist.org and click on the LifeWay Christian Stores button.
To contact McKinstry, e-mail cmckinstry@bellsouth.net.
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