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.”

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