While the World Watched

In her memoir, While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement, Carolyn Maull McKinstry discusses her experience as the only survivor of the five young girls who were present when a bomb placed in a bathroom in a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama exploded in 1963. The memoir recalls this catastrophic event, and the life-long impact it had on Maull McKinstry as she watched a series of assassinations, protests, and other acts of violence and victory during the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

The memoir begins with a portrait of Birmingham, Alabama – a city called, at once, the Pittsburgh of the South, the Magic City, and the most segregated city in the United States of America. The town had another, darker nickname – Bombingham, so called because of the huge number of bombs that were deployed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in order to maintain the strict lines of segregation in the city. Dynamite was easy to come by in Birmingham, because large mining operations used it frequently to remove rock to harvest steel ore. This dynamite was frequently used to bomb the homes of wealthy black citizens of Birmingham, as well as black churches and black schools. The bombings began in 1948, the year a number of wealthier black families decided to move into the formerly white neighborhood of Smithville. Carolyn Maull was born in 1948.

Maull was raised in Birmingham, one of six children in the Maull family. She was close to her grandfather, Reverend Ernest Walter Burt, who was an important figure in the Baptist community in Birmingham during that period. Maull was baptized and raised within the enormous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a historically black congregation that had been a landmark in Birmingham since the end of the Civil War nearly a century before. Maull felt safe in the Sixteenth Street Church and was strong in her faith.



Maull was part of the Civil Rights movement from its inception. At the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, she met Dr. Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth, among other prominent elders of the Civil Rights movement, and she was moved to participate in the large civil rights gatherings held at the church, which could fit more than 1,200 people inside. Maull was also part of the Children's March in Birmingham – a march that was met by Police Commissioner Bull Connor with fire hoses and German shepherds.

On September 15, 1963, Maull was working as the church secretary, greeting guests and counting attendance, which she then reported to the church offices. She had a brief reprieve from her duties between Sunday School and the morning service, and during that time, she visited with some of her friends in the girls’ restroom – fourteen-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, and eleven-year-old Denise McNair. After she chatted with her friends, Maull left the restroom alone to answer a phone that was ringing in the church office. She recalls a mysterious voice, which said only, “Three minutes” before hanging up. Maull was confused, but moments later, she heard a boom, and the church shook. The stained glass face of Jesus was shattered, and all of Maull's friends were killed.

Further bombings plagued Carolyn's young adulthood, including the bombing of her neighbor's house which shattered her own bedroom windows. Ultimately, Carolyn's account is one of an eyewitness to the horrors and violence of the Jim Crow South, the heroes whose lives were taken, and those who sacrificed themselves for change. Later, Maull became a Reverend in the church, and an example of the power of Christian forgiveness when she testified at the long overdue trial of bomber Bob Frank Cherry in 2001. Afterward, she publicly forgave Cherry, saying, “By God’s grace, I chose to forgive Cherry, and all the others that lived lives of hate. It was the difficult road, but it’s also the road to ultimate freedom.”



Carolyn Maull McKinstry is a survivor of the Civil Rights movement and was an eyewitness to the Sixteenth Street Bombing of 1963. She now serves as the president of the Sixteenth Street Foundation and speaks frequently on the national stage. She has been interviewed for a number of television shows and documentaries, and still lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband, Jerome.