New play is based on Alabama writer’s novelization of pivotal Civil Rights event

By Karen Middleton
karen@athensnews-courier.com

January 24, 2008 10:46 pm

— For many, the pivotal time in the civil rights struggle was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, in which four innocent young girls were killed on Sept. 15, 1963.
One of those is nationally acclaimed author Sena Jeter Naslund, who is the spring semester eminent scholar in humanities at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Naslund, the author of a novel based on the bombing, “Four Spirits,” has collaborated on a theatrical adaptation of the book with Elaine Hughes, professor of English at the University of Montevallo. The play, “Four Spirits,” will premiere Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Chan Auditorium on the UAH campus, and continues on Feb. 8 and 9 at 7:30 p.m., and Feb. 9 and 10 at 2:30 p.m.
Naslund was named Kentucky Poet Laureate for 2005-2007, and is a writer-in-residence and professor of English at the University of Louisville. She has also been the program director for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing at Spalding University in Louisville since 2000.
She holds a doctorate from the University of Iowa and is the recipient of several prestigious awards, among which is the Harper Lee Award and Alabama Writer of the Year 2001.
The setting of the novel and play “Four Spirits” is Miles College, a historically black college located in 1960s Birmingham—known at that time as “Bombingham.”
The protagonist, Stella Silver, is an idealistic, well-reared white college student and she and her best friend, Cat Cartwright, are drawn into the civil rights movement, becoming friends with freedom fighters.
Interwoven with their stories is that of Christine Taylor, a student at Miles College who is inspired by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Taylor balances her studies with family responsibilities and her growing involvement in the civil rights movement. Other characters are Gloria Callahan, a gifted cellist, Lionel Parrish, teacher, and Jonathan Green, New York activist.
“This story meant a great deal to me,” said Naslund by phone. “The bombing was a turning point in my own orientation in the civil rights movement. These were children, so totally innocent, getting ready to go to youth worship. Something was radically wrong when four children die because of racism in our society.
“I wanted to make a positive contribution to change.”
Naslund said the character of Cat Cartwright is based on her best friend in real life, Carol Countryman.
“She had experienced discrimination,” said Naslund. “She was a Phi Beta Kappa, she had completed her student teaching, but she couldn’t get a job in Birmingham public schools because she was in a wheelchair.”
The New York Times has said of “Four Spirits,” “As it turns out, Naslund has done something unusually fine–she’s written a drifting, collective portrait of a city in distress… But at no point does Naslund do injury to the spirit of that era, even when she invents a series of bombings and deaths that parallel that period’s actual violence. Nor does she use the bloody conflicts of Birmingham for mere narrative excitation the way that bad historical fiction might.”

Local reaction
Monday, at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance at the Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives, Athens Mayor Dan Williams said the church bombing in Birmingham was the, “greatest single event to change people’s minds in the history of the civil rights movement.”
Williams said after the gathering that he was in Tuscaloosa visiting a friend who was a student at the University of Alabama School of Law and looking the campus over trying to decide if he wanted to enroll there too when he heard about the bombing on the radio.
“I was raised a typical white southern boy,” said Williams. “I kind of just watched the civil rights struggle from the sidelines. But that, the bombing, affected me so deeply, that four little girls could be killed so senselessly.”
Retired Lt. Col. James Walker, who lives in Tanner and teaches ROTC at Austin High School in Decatur, said he was a student at the all-black Trinity High School in 1963 when he got word of the bombing.
“I thought it was just wretched—a terrible time,” said Walker. “As an American, that act reached into me and tore out my soul. Those little girls believed in the same God that I believed in and their lives were taken so suddenly and so needlessly.
“By that time, I had made up my mind to serve my country, but that act gave me pause. I stopped and asked myself if I really wanted to serve a country where that could happen, but after I thought about it I knew that those people who did that did not represent my country. It was an aberration—a terrible aberration. Since that time we’ve learned to move forward as one people. To be truthful, that’s all we have, the hope that we can move forward together.”
Discounted tickets are available at $7 (from $10) each for adult groups of 10 or more and student discount tickets for 10 or more for $3 each (from $5). Call 824-6210.

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