Dale H. Long is known for telling stories — not fibs or lies, but the riveting truth of what happened on September 15, 1963, just before 11 a.m., when a powerful bomb snuffed out the lives of four little Black girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Long was 12 years old then and hanging out in the church’s library when the blast cratered the east side of the church killing 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Dionne Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson.
“There were about 10 of us in the library,” says Long, who along with his younger brother Kenneth was dropped off at the church by their mother. “All of us were musicians. We should have been getting ready to go upstairs and play in the church’s orchestra.” It was Youth Sunday and Long was preparing to play his clarinet. The library was in the church’s basement with a huge floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Long and his friends were bantering about high school football — “boys’ stuff,” he says — when they felt the room shake and noticed lightbulbs exploding.
“I really didn’t hear anything [the bomb]. I could feel the percussion,” he says. “I knew something was going on, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.” But then Long was compelled to run. “I remember running out of the library into the open area,” he says, and fighting through dense smoke — including running into people and folding chairs. “It was dark, dusty, smoky. It was hard to see where you were going,” he says, and remembers hearing the wailing of fleeing church members.
Long finally made his way to the light in the stairwell. After ascending the stairs, he encountered a mean-spirited police officer. “The police officer extended his arm to keep me from passing. He told me, ‘Nigger, get back down there.’” Long ignored the officer. He ducked underneath his arm and sped outside into an overcast day. He could see birds hovering above the church while making his way to the corner of Sixth Avenue and 16th Street. The odor was pungent, he says, like the smell of gunpowder. Suddenly it dawned on him: “They’re blowing up the church with people in it.”
People were milling around in a frenzy. Many were bleeding from shards of flying glass, he says, and looking for their loved ones. Remembering his brother, he returned to the church and ran into a fireman, who let him through. Once inside, he searched the classroom, got down on the floor, looked under tables, and called his brother’s name — Kenneth. No one was in the room, he says. So, he returned to the library to retrieve his clarinet.
He continued searching outside. “I finally saw this big oak tree that was in front of the church,” he says. “It had grown up through the sidewalk. We used to play around that tree.” A small group of children and a friend of his grandmother’s had gathered there out of harm’s way — including Long’s brother, whom he offered to take care of until their father could get them home. “I hugged him and made sure he was okay,” he says. “He said he was.”
Long’s father was working a second job at the A.G. Gaston Motel around the corner from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. “He’ll be here pretty quick,” he told his grandmother’s friend. “Meanwhile, I’ll take care of him.” It wasn’t long before he spotted their father running down the sidewalk with fierce urgency. “I’ve never seen that man run like that,” he says. “A police officer tried to stop him. Maybe the same one who tried to stop me.” Like Long, their father ignored the officer. He was determined to get to his boys. “He ran right past him and got to us, hugged us like he’d never done before. He had tears in his eyes, because he had experienced the same thing a few months prior.”
Birmingham in the sixties was a dangerous place for Black people. Segregation was the order of the day and bombings were common. The Klan didn’t spare the A.G. Gaston Motel either. It was dynamited on May 11, 1963. Long learned later via radio reports that 27 people had been taken to the hospital and four little girls were killed. “They were my friends,” he says, remembering them fondly. “It was not a casual acquaintance. We were friends.”
Carole Rosamond Robertson’s funeral was held at St. John A.M.E. Church on Sept. 17, 1963. Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair and Cynthia Dionne Wesley were eulogized the next day at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. Long tried to attend the homegoing services at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. “It was too many people. They wouldn’t let me in,” he says. “But I could hear Dr. King’s eulogy on the PA system.” After their funeral, Long witnessed the pallbearers loading the three coffins of his friends into hearses. Dr. King was standing nearby, he remembers, about 10 feet away. “I’d never seen anything like that,” he says. “I was 12 years old.”
Long’s memory of that fateful day in September hasn’t waned over the years. At 73, he still recalls the fury after the Klan unleashed hell in Birmingham, the aftermath of pain and suffering, and the terrible loss of his friends. He graduated from high school in 1970 and matriculated at Texas Southern University on a music scholarship. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1974. He and his wife Ellen have been married for nearly 50 years.
A survivor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Long has moved on. His professional career includes the NASA Space Shuttle Program, Texas Instruments, the City of Garland, the City of Dallas, etc. Honors, awards and citations have been bestowed upon him. Now retired, he finds time to volunteer, mentor young people, and keep the memory of his friends alive by telling the story of that tumultuous day in September.
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