I recently purchased The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America by Edward J. Blum & Paul Harvey. The prologue begins with the story of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963 when four little girls were murdered by segregationists: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. The second page bore the image below, a stained glass Christ without a face, lost during the bombing of the church. Striking. What could this image have meant then? What does it say to us now?
The Color of Christ in “Bombingham”
Four little girls
Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back at home at all–
But left instead
Their blood upon the wall.
~Langston Hughes