George said: “Mama, what is it, for God’s sake, what happened?”

“Four little girls!” she sobbed.

George looked at the monochrome picture on the screen. He saw two cars that looked as if they had been in a smash. Then the camera moved to a building and panned along damaged walls and broken windows. It pulled back, and he recognized the building. His heart lurched. “My God, that’s the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham!” he said. “What did they do?”

His mother said: “The whites bombed the Sunday school!”

“No! No!” George’s mind refused to accept it. Even in Alabama, men would not bomb a Sunday school.

“They killed four girls,” Jacky said. “Why did God let this happen?”

On television, a newsreader’s voice-over said: “The dead have been identified as Denise McNair, aged eleven—”

“Eleven!” said George. “This can’t be true!”

“—Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Carole Robertson, fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, fourteen.”

“But they’re children!” said George.

“More than twenty other people were injured by the blast,” the newsreader intoned in a voice devoid of emotion, and the camera showed an ambulance pulling away from the scene.

George sat down next to his mother and put his arms around her. “What are we going to do?” he said.

“Pray,” she replied.

The newsreader continued remorselessly. “This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years,” he said. “The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings.”

“Pray?” said George, his voice trembling with grief.

Right then he wanted to kill someone.

• • •

The Sunday school bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

At the funeral, Martin Luther King said: “In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers.” George tried to follow that counsel, but he found it hard.

For a while George felt public opinion swinging toward civil rights. A congressional committee toughened Kennedy’s bill, adding the ban on employment discrimination that the campaigners wanted so badly.

But a few weeks later the segregationists came out of their corner fighting.

In mid-October an envelope was delivered to the Justice Department and passed to George. It contained a slim bound report from the FBI entitled:

COMMUNISM AND THE NEGRO MOVEMENT

A CURRENT ANALYSIS

“What the fuck?” George murmured to himself.

He read it quickly. The report was eleven pages long and devastating. It called Martin Luther King “an unprincipled man.” It claimed that he took advice from Communists “knowingly, willingly and regularly.” With an assured air of inside knowledge it said: “Communist Party officials visualize the possibility of creating a situation whereby it could be said that, as the Communist Party goes, so goes Martin Luther King.”

These confident assertions were not backed up by a single scrap of evidence.