Crash at Crush / 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing - September 15

The Crash at Crush took place on this day in 1896. / On this day in 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed in an act of terrorism by white supremacists.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, it's Eves checking in here to let you
know that you're going to be hearing two different events
in history in this episode, one from me and one
from Tracy V. Wilson. They're both good, if I do
say so myself. One with the show, Welcome to this
Day in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com
and from the desk of Stuff You Missed in History Class.
It's the show where we explore the past one day

(00:21):
at a time with a quick look at what happened
today in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and it's September. The crash at Crush
took place on this day in eighteen ninety six, and
if that name doesn't sound familiar, it's one of the
many times that people wrecked some trains together for fun.

(00:44):
People like to smash things, and people like to watch
things being smashed. And then the late eighteen hundreds and
early nineteen hundreds, this included intentionally staging train wrecks for
people to watch. William George Crush was a passenger agent
for the State of Texas at the Missouri Kansas Texas
Railroad Company, also known as the Katie was kind of

(01:06):
a shortened version of those initials m KT. He had
a great idea to sell more tickets on this railroad.
The railroad was replacing all of its thirty five ton
locomotives was sixty ton models, so he thought they might
on purpose wreck two of the old ones together at
a specially constructed stretch of track, And of course they

(01:26):
could also sell tickets to get to that stretch of
track on the Katie for two dollars apiece. Thirty three
trains were pulled into the whole effort. He was a
little concerned about whether this would be safe. In particular,
he worried about whether the boilers of these two locomotives
might explode on impact, so he asked around among the engineers.

(01:48):
All but one of them said that probably wouldn't happen,
so he went ahead with his plan. They laid down
special track from the Waco Dallas line and they basically
made a pop up town that they named Crush. It
was fifteen miles north of Waco and about three miles
south of the town of West. It had a restaurant
and lemonade stands and a grand stand and a huge

(02:08):
carnival with all the expected carnival attractions. They drilled wells
and they borrowed a tent from P. T. Barnum. They
built a temporary jail just in case the crowd got rowdy,
and they hired two hundred constables to patrol on the day.
They also prepared for a media onslaught with two telegraph
offices and a stand for reporters. This whole site was

(02:31):
surrounded by hills that gave a lot of natural vantage
points to watch the wreck, and there was a stretch
of railroad track that they were able to put among
these hills that would let both of the engines go
slightly downhill until they met at the middle. They chose
locomotives and one thousand one. One of them was painted

(02:52):
green with red trim and the other red with green,
and then they advertised what they were going to do
all through the summer. Of passengers started arriving on September
at about ten in the morning. There were about ten
thousand spectators. They were supposed to start the event at four,
but at four there were still trains that were arriving

(03:13):
full of people, and some of these trains were so
crowded that passengers were hanging on to the top of
them instead of riding inside. When they finally started at
five o'clock, there were forty thousand people watching, which was
about twice as many as they had thought were going
to come. The two trains came slowly together, and they

(03:33):
touched their cow catchers sort of like they were boxers.
William Crush raised his hat from on horseback. After the
trains had reversed apart again, he whipped down his hat
as a signal for the event to begin. Their drivers
anchored their whistles down and they got the engines going
before jumping clear, and when the two locomotives hit each other,

(03:54):
each going about fifty miles an hour, they folded together
like accordions, and the box cars they were towing shattered
into splinters. Unfortunately, that one engineer that Crush had talked
to who suggested that the boilers might explode was the
one who was correct. Both of the boilers did explode,

(04:16):
and scalding water and flying debris flew into the crowd,
causing so many injuries, some of them very serious, and
they were also tragically deaths. One man was hit with
a length of break chain and was killed instantly. There
was a young girl who was hit with debris and
died on the way home. There was also a man
who survived the wreck itself unharmed, but on the way

(04:38):
home was run over by one of the trains and killed.
Even in the face of all the injuries and the chaos,
though souvenir hunters rushed to the wreck from their vantage
points to try to take away pieces of it. The
Katie fired William Crush immediately, but then hired him back
the next day, and then not long after all of this,

(04:58):
composer and pianist Scott jo Blind published his Great Crush
Collision March. You can learn more about this and about
the other train wrecks that people staged on purpose for
fun in the September episode of Stuff You Missed in
History Class. Thanks to Tari Harrison for all her audio
work on this show. You can subscribe to This Day

(05:18):
in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
else you get your podcasts, and you can tune in
tomorrow for a battle cry. Hello, Hello, everyone, Welcome to
This Day in History Class, where we bring you a

(05:38):
new tidbit from history every day. The day was September
nineteen sixty three. Members of the Ku Klux Klan planted
bombs in the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,

(05:59):
killing war girls and injuring many other people. Birmingham was
an important site of protests and organizing during the civil
rights movement. Launched in nineteen sixty three. The Birmingham Campaign
was a movement of protests against segregation laws in the city.
It was home to Bethel Baptist Church, which was the

(06:21):
headquarters of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and
where activists Fred Shuttlesworth served as pastor for several years.
And Birmingham was the site of the Children's Crusade in
May of nineteen sixty three, when students marched to protests
segregation and were met with blasts from water hoses, attacks

(06:42):
by police dogs, arrests, and meetings by police officers. The
students involved in the Children's Crusade gathered at the sixteenth
Street Baptist Church and marched downtown. The sixteenth Street Baptist
Church specifically was a place where civil rights active has
met and organized in Birmingham. People like Southern Christian Leadership

(07:05):
Conference leader James Bebel and Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke
at the church, but on September nineteen sixty three it
was a site of terrorism. That day, the church hells
Sunday services as usual, but around ten am, Caroline Mall,
who was acting as Sunday School secretary, picked up a

(07:27):
phone call. The caller only said three minutes and hung up.
Just after Caroline hung up the phone, a bomb exploded
in the church. Three of the girls that were killed,
Addie Maycollins, Denise McNair and Carol Robertson, were fourteen years old.
Cynthia Wesley was eleven years old when she was killed

(07:49):
in the church bombing. Sarah Collins, Addie May's sister, was
blinded in one eye because of the blast. The bomb
had been planted beneath steps on the east side of
the church and the girls who died were in the
basement at the time of the explosion. More than twenty
people were injured in the blast. There had been other

(08:11):
bombings in Birmingham in nineteen sixty three in retaliation to
disegregation measures being passed. The Gaston motel, where Dr King
had been staying but left, was bombed. The house of
A D. King, Martin Luther King Jr's brother was also
bombed in double a. CP attorney Arthur Shore's house was firebombed.

(08:32):
Segregationists reactions to the success of the civil rights movement
were often violent. After the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing,
protesters came to the scene of the crime. Two black boys,
Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, were killed in the riots,
and more were injured. Alabama Governor George Wallace sent National

(08:53):
guardsmen and three hundred state troopers into Birmingham, and hundreds
of police officers in sheriff's deputies all also showed up
to police the crowds. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Spoke
at the funeral held for three of the girls. The
FBI office in Birmingham launched an investigation into the bombing.
In a memo to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, agents

(09:17):
named white supremacist Thomas Blanton, Robert Chamblis, Bobby Frank Cherry,
and Herman Cash as suspects, but by the time the
investigation ended in nineteen there were no indictments. The FBI
said that witnesses were reluctant to talk, that there was
not enough physical evidence, and that info gathered from FBI

(09:38):
surveillance was not admissible in court. The bombing, along with
other tragic events that affected people's perception of the civil
rights movement, like John F. Kennedy's assassination in the March
on Washington, inspired support for and the passage of civil
rights legislation in the following years. Alabama Attorney General Bill

(09:59):
Baxley lay Or reopened the case, and in nineteen seventy seven,
Robert Chamblis was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced
to life in prison. Lantern and Terry were sentenced to
four life terms in two thousand one and two thousand two, respectively.
Cash died in nineteen four before he was charged. FBI

(10:21):
informant Gary Thomas Road Jr. Was also suspected of being
involved in the bombing, but he was cleared of involvement.
It's been claimed that Hoover ordered FBI agents not to
disclose evidence against the bombers two county prosecutors to prevent
justice from being served, but the FBI said his concern
was to prevent leaks and that he did not think

(10:43):
a conviction could be one on circumstantial evidence. The FBI
did acknowledge that it did not give secretly recorded tapes
and other evidence to Alabama officials when it reopened its investigation.
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is now out a National
Historic Landmark. I'm Eve Steff Coote and hopefully you know

(11:06):
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(11:35):
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