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. FD-350 (Rev. 5-8-81) oT (Mount Clipping in Space Below} {Indicate page, name of Newspaper, city and state.) Explosion was followed i Date: 9/12/93 Edition SUNDAY | |" e 157-352 | Classification: lsu, ibmitting Office: RH TTA pit Titie. "BAPBOMB” | Character: by sound of breaking glass By Frank Sikora News staff writer He was sitting at a table, listening to someone reading the Scriptures when suddenly the chandelier crashed on the table Almost at the same split second, there was a boom followed by glass shattering. James S. Goodson recalls that someone said: “What happened” And someone else replied “A bomb,” Goodson, new 73, a retired school principal, was in the men’s Sunday School class that morning of Sept. 15, 1963. when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed The historic church, a gathering place for civil rights rallies in the spring when Martin Luther King Jr. led marches. had been the target of threats in the past. But on that morning the threat blew into a deadly reality. “Tremember after we got up from the table that everyone was trying to get out,” Goodson said. “We went to the back door and I remember seeing the steps had been blown into a level position and I knew we couldn't get out that way.” Then. he said, he and the other men. and some other adults and children who were in the main part of the church, began hurrying out the front door. “There were people everywhere and police,” he said. “That's what surprised me. I kept wondering how had the police got there so fast They aiready had a rope throwr about the place.” It was then that he became aware that there were probably fatalities. Four girls died in the blast, and about 20 other people were injured. “My car was badly damaged,” Goodson said. “I had parked in on the 16th Street side, right where the bomb had been placed.” The spot of the bomb was deter- mined to be against or just under some concrete steps leading to a back door. “Thad walked right over it when I had arrived at about 9:30 or so,” he sald. Ella Demand, one of the Sunday School teachers, had suffered a bad eut and Goodson remembers some- how getting the car to run. “I was dragging a bumper and had to wire the door shut, but I got her to the hospital,” he said. He was there when two of the girls were brought in, sheets cover- ing them. “The doctor would raise if and say, DOA.” In 1977, Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley, who had been looking into the bombing for several years, got a Tmurder conviction against a Ku Klux Klan member, Robert Chamb- liss, then 73. Although the bembing caused some members to leave the church, Goodson still belongs. It did bring a change in Birming- ham, he said. “White people who had been al- most afraid to speak to me before would talk to me and say something like, ‘I’m sorry about what happened at the church.’ But it was such a ter- rible price.” L357. 352 “SFI-/S g THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS BIRMINGHAM, AL. OS aA