This is one of two personal essays the INDY is publishing in light of the war in Iran by local writers. Read the other, “Know Your Right to Become a Conscientious Objector” by Joseph Terrell, here.
On September 15, 1963, at 10:22 a.m., bombs blasted and tore through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The terrorist attack planned and executed by four known Ku Klux Klan members resulted in the deaths of four little Black girls, who only moments before the blast had been preparing for Sunday school.
Addie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
Carol Denise McNair
were murdered, simply because white supremacists decided that they should die that day and those murderers knew that they’d most likely get away with it. And they weren’t wrong.
The first arrest in connection with the bombing wasn’t until 1977, although the FBI had concluded in 1965 that the KKK had executed the murders. In 1994, one of those listed as a suspect died without so much as an interrogation. It wouldn’t be until 2002, almost 40 years later, that the last of the four would be tried and sentenced.
For 40 years there were white men roaming the streets, living life repercussion-free, with hands dripping with the blood of four little Black girls. I can imagine that Addie’s, Cynthia’s, Carole’s, and Carol’s families and neighbors were shattered by the insulted injury they’d endured, as they learned that four vicious, evil, murderous white men were more valued, protected, and cherished than their four innocent, adorable, little Black girls.
Sixty-three years have passed since the blood of those little girls spattered against the backdrop of the evils of American white supremacy. Now in Iran, the souls of 160 little girls, blasted and bombed by an American Tomahawk missile on February 28, 2026, as they attended school at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, must wait to see how long it will be before even one repercussion exists, if at all. The elementary school was struck at least once more in the minutes following the initial strike, all but guaranteeing a jarring three-digit death toll. This cowardly act of terrorism is only an extension of who America had proven itself to be in 1963. The climate that emboldens Israel and America to join forces and kill at will in 2026, without any significant repercussion, is no less soulless than the climate that emboldened four members of the Ku Klux Klan to kill at will in 1963.
It wasn’t just the KKK who violated humanity in the 16th Street bombings; it was the entire American system that encouraged them before the murders and protected them thereafter. For the American monster that is white supremacy shows no mercy. A little Black American girl in Sunday school, a little Iranian girl in elementary school—they have no systemic power and therefore no value to the state.
In 2018 I went to the West Bank, Palestine. A Palestinian man from the territory showed me empty tear gas cans thrown by Israeli soldiers that he picked up from a playground close by; they read “Made in Philadelphia.” Like the U.S. Tomahawk missiles launched at the girls’ school in Iran, the bombs and tear gas cans launched at children on playgrounds in Palestine, and the explosives planted at the church on 16th Street, there is no shortage of violence against children that is “Made in America.” Bombing four little girls or bombing 40 times that number, this is who America has proven itself to be, a critical manufacturer in crimes against children. From the American Indigenous children abused and killed in assimilation schools and massacres and the Latine babies rounded up and traumatized during violent ICE raids to the Palestinian babies whose genocide America funds with military aid to Israel and the Black children who were murdered and bruised from the days they were piled onto slave ships—the killing, maiming, abusing, and discarding of babies under white supremacy, veiled as freedom patriotism, is who America has been and continues to be. It will continue to be that America so long as its people remain docile and complacent.
Like my elders and ancestors who put their lives on the line to resist, protest, and defy a murderous government, infiltrated by white supremacists and the KKK, this generation’s obligation is to resist, protest, and defy a government, unapologetically draped in white supremacy, as it violates and erases the lives of precious children at home and abroad.
From the civil rights movement to the present, I can proudly attest that my home state of North Carolina has seen no shortage of people throughout history who were willing to risk their reputation and freedom to send a message of resistance to this guilty system—from the Wilmington 10 who protested America’s war on Black people to the demonstrators who fill Moore Square in Raleigh, protesting the wars on Iran and Lebanon. From the 1957 Royal Ice Cream sit-in in Durham, where Black people refused to leave a segregated ice cream parlor, to the 2026 disruption of a U.S. Senate hearing on Capitol Hill, where Brian McGinnis, a U.S. Army veteran and firefighter from North Carolina chanted out, “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!” North Carolina has positioned itself as a leader and trendsetter in times when resistance and mobilization are needed.
The screams and cries of those murdered little girls, from Alabama to Iran, echo in the silence of a society that refuses to make righteous noise. They are forever entitled to our resistance and our rage.
I pray that the souls of all of the precious little girls, whose blood stains the American flag, may one day rest in peace. And I pray that my own little girl, who sees that flag each day she enters school, may one day live in peace.
Desmera Gatewood is a neurodivergent, Black, non-binary writer, organizer, and organization development practitioner.
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