Bombingham, Fifty Explosions

Between nineteen forty-seven and nineteen sixty-five, at least fifty dynamite bombs exploded in Birmingham, Alabama. Most of them targeted Black homes and Black churches. The city earned a nickname in the national press: Bombingham.

The campaign began in the neighborhoods where Black families were attempting to buy homes on the west side of Center Street, which was the unofficial color line in the Smithfield neighborhood. Center Street divided white from Black property, and when Black families began buying west of it after World War Two, white Klan members responded by bombing the houses. Arthur Shores, an NAACP attorney who took cases challenging Birmingham's segregated zoning ordinances and who helped integrate the University of Alabama, was a frequent target. The section of Smithfield where he and other civil rights figures lived came to be called Dynamite Hill.

The bombings were not random acts. They were an organized campaign of terror intended to enforce residential segregation and to punish anyone who worked against it. From nineteen forty-eight to nineteen fifty-seven, Birmingham recorded forty-eight unsolved racial bombings, the highest number of any city in the United States. In nineteen fifty-eight alone, seven private homes and four churches were bombed in a single month.

No one was ever convicted for most of these bombings. Local law enforcement was not disposed to investigate aggressively. The city's police department, under Public Safety Commissioner Eugene Connor, was in some respects part of the same world that produced the violence.

The bombings were not background noise. They were policy, enforced with dynamite in the dark.