WHEN I WAS A COLLEGE STUDENT IN THE EARLY SIXTIES in Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself, if I ever did become a novelist, that I would write about the acts of courage and tragedy taking place in my city. I would try to re-create through words what it was like to be alive then: how ordinary life went on, how people fell in and out of love, how family members got sick, how people worked ordinary jobs, tried to get an education, worshiped, looked for entertainment, grew up, died, participated in the great changes of the civil rights struggle or stood aside and watched the world change.
There were many horrors and haunting events but none more powerful than the murder of the four young girls to whom this book is dedicated. In my imagination they stand in a sacred circle, a ring of fire around them. I do not step into that circle. That is to say, I do not try to re-create them. Their families and friends are holding them dear the way they really were.
I have created fictive characters for the reader to know and mourn. The event at the White Palace is meant to stand not for any particular historic event but to suggest some of the many atrocities that occurred between May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brownv. Board of Education and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, a death preceded by the deaths of many less well known people, including, on February 8, 1968, those of Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, killed when highway patrolmen fired on protestors.
For the sake of readers too young to remember, some of the historical events alluded to or presented in a fictive framework in Four Spirits include the beating of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in front of Phillips High School (where I was a student) in 1957, and the repeated bombings of his home and church; the castration of Judge Aaron; the appearance and speech making of Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor at Ku Klux Klan rallies; the peaceful and unnoted occasional integration of the Gaslight nightclub on Morris Avenue in Birmingham; the demonstrations of May 1963 led by Reverend Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King, among others; the assault on those demonstrators by fire hoses and police dogs, as ordered by Bull Connor; the jailing of thousands of schoolchildren protestors, as well as Dr. King and other leaders; the joining of mass meetings by a few white college students, such as Marti Turnipseed; the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the deaths of four schoolgirls; the 1963 and 1964 Mississippi murders of Medgar Evers, of James Chaney, and of New York activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the educational effort made on the Miles College campus by a number of white people, including myself and my friend Carol Countryman, who, like Catherine Cartwright in this story, came to the campus in her wheelchair. Carol lived to become a pioneer for rights for the handicapped, eventually making a trip to Washington, D.C., assisted by our mutual friend Nancy Brooks Moore, to speak out in that cause.