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…