A Time to Speak
Charles Morgan Jr
In 1963, as tensions in Birmingham between white segregationists and Black civil rights supporters boiled, a bomb exploded at the Sixteen Street Baptist Church on September 15. The blast killed four innocent Black girls and injured other congregants. Soon after the tragedy, Charles Morgan Jr., a young, white attorney stood before members of the all-white Young Men’s Business Club and said that every white person who failed to condemn racism was as guilty as the bombers. He said, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’” His speech drew the ire of whites, and Morgan and his family eventually left Birmingham for Atlanta where he became a well-respected civil rights attorney. Morgan recalls that turbulent period in his memoir, A Time to Speak, published in 1964. (Harper & Row)