Frank Sikora – författare

This is a spellbinding story of a shocking crime that fuelled the civil rights movement, including new data and recent convictions. It was a time when Martin Luther King Jr and other leaders rallied black youth and adults to march for their civil rights, a time when the Ku Klux Klan was active in cities and throughout the countryside of the Deep South, employing 19th-century tactics to intimidate blacks to stay ""in their place."" It was also the year that the worst act of terrorism in the entire civil rights movement occurred just as Birmingham, Alabama, was coming under close national scrutiny. This book tells the story of one grim Sunday in September 1963 when an intentionally planted cache of dynamite ripped through the walls of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and ended the dreams and the lives of four young black girls. Their deaths spurred the Kennedy administration to send an army of FBI agents to Alabama and led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. When the Justice Department was unable to bring anyone to trial for this heinous crime, a young Alabama attorney general named Bill Baxley began his own investigation to find the perpetrators. In 1977, 14 years after the bombing, Baxley brought one Klansman to trial and, in a courtroom only blocks from the bombed church (now a memorial to the victims), persuaded a jury to return a guilty verdict. More than 20 years later two other perpetrators were tried for the bombing, found guilty, and remanded to prison. Frank Sikora has used the court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts to weave a story of spellbinding proportions. A reporter by profession, Sikora tells this story compellingly, explaining why the civil rights movement had to be successful and how Birmingham had to change.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led the black drive for civil rights, but the changes he sought came largely in legal opinions issued by federal judges. Foremost of these was Frank Minis Johnson, Jr., of Montgomery, Alabama, who presided over some of the most emotional hearings and trials of the rights movement—hearings brimming with dramatic and poignant testimony from the black people who cried out for the freedoms that are the legacy of all Americans. Beginning with Judge Johnson’s coming-of-age in the hill country of Winston County, Alabama, this book covers many of his notable cases: the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, school desegregation, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the night-rider slaying of Viola Liuzzo, as well as Johnson’s work for prisoners, women, and the mentally ill. Much of the book is comprised of interviews and direct quotes from Johnson himself, making this recounting of Judge Johnson’s life dynamically autobiographical. Includes a new introduction and afterword by the author, Frank Sikora.