Addie Mae Collins, 14. Cynthia Wesley, 14. Carole Robertson, 14. Carol Denise McNair, 11. These young, beautiful, black girls had their lives taken by an act of white supremacist terrorism in Birmingham, Alabama. White supremacists bombed the African-American 16th Street Baptist Church on Sunday, September 15, 1963.

In a Protestant Council of the City of New York panel discussion with James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr, Dr. Thomas C. Kilgore, Jr. asked, “Does this faceless picture suggest to you a meaning of the Birmingham tragedy?” Baldwin rebutted, “It suggests to me several meanings. If I were going to be cynical this morning, I would say that the absence of the face is something of an achievement, since we’ve been victimized so long by an alabaster Christ. It suggests much more seriously something else, and to me it sums up the crisis that we’ve been living through. If Christ has no face, then perhaps it is time that we … give him a new face. … And make the whole ideal, the whole hope of Christian love, a reality.”

Baldwin challenges us to act with the “hope of Christian love” and give Christ “a new face” in the world.

This episode is was recorded on Tuesday, September 15th, 2020, exactly 57 years after the 16th Street Baptist Church.

International protests following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery have dominated recent news coverage. However, the peaceful demonstrations' character, purpose, and scale have been miscommunicated. Birthed out of his frustration, Arthur Maxwell Powell II created this podcast to have direct conversations with protestors from Las Vegas, NV to Washington, D.C. Check it out here: https://anchor.fm/whyweprotest Thank you for listening!