HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Too many histories of the Civil Rights Era in the South in general and in Birmingham in particular miss some of the good that happened during those times, says the Rev. Douglas M. Carpenter, founding rector of Huntsville's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.
"That story has not been told well," said Carpenter, who has just released a biography of his father, former Alabama Bishop Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter Sr., "A Powerful Blessing: The lifestory of charles Colcock Jones Carpenter Sr."
“Some seem to rejoice in telling all the bad about Birmingham – and there was a lot bad," Doug Carpenter said. "But there was a lot more to it than that.”
Carpenter will speak on the life of his father on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013, at 7 p.m., in Ridley Hall at the Church of the Nativity, Episcopal, 208 Eustis Ave. S.E. in downtown Huntsville. His talk follows a reception at 6 p.m. The lecture, sponsored by the Huntsville Literary Association, which Doug Carpenter helped to found during his years in Huntsville, is free and open to the public.
Carpenter will also be speaking in Huntsville on Feb. 19, 2013, during the 50th anniversary celebrations at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 8020 Whitesburg Drive in Huntsville.
"A Powerful Blessing: The Lifestory of Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter Sr." by Doug Carpenter.
Bishop Charles Carpenter, who died shortly after his 1968 retirement, was among the eight Birmingham clergy who were addressed in Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." King's essay, published in June 1963 after his April imprisonment in Birmingham, took the white religious establishment to task for moving too slowly on issues of racial injustice.
“Those eight clergy have been caricatured as inept Southern preachers, yet they were leading the forces against injustice in that time,” Doug Carpenter said. “These were eight great people, who have been kind of overlooked by historians.”
The group of religious leaders had responded to Gov. George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech with a notice in The Birmingham News two days later. Their notice addressed white parents to encourage them to follow the law that required integration.
It was a later notice by the group, published on Good Friday, April 13, 1963, that King read while he was in jail in Birmingham. That notice encouraged both sides to call a halt to demonstrations and to sit down together. A few of the hardline firehose-and-dogs leaders had been voted out of office in Birmingham, Doug Carpenter said, and his father saw the possibility of eluding the escalation of violence.
That year in Birmingham went from bad to worse, with the unforgettable images of firefighters hosing children and police dogs lunging at demonstrators. It was in September of 1963 that the 16th Street Baptist Church would explode in the logical conclusion of the Ku Klux Klan’s cowardly bombing campaign against the city.
When Doug Carpenter, now retired from the priesthood after founding St. Stephen’s in Birmingham, began working on his book, he said that publishers wanted him to only concentrate on the Civil Rights years.
But the story of those years, he said, can’t really be told without explaining how Bishop Carpenter became the courageous, visionary he was. Bishop of Alabama from 1938 to 1968, he traveled the state, making sure to visit each of the more than 100 Episcopal churches in the state them at least once a year.
“He had a song he set to the Marine tune that went, ‘From the hills of Monte Sano to the shore of Bon Secour,” Doug Carpenter said. “In my talk in Huntsville, I wan to talk about what created such a powerful, unique person – what happened throughout his life.”
For more information: 256-534-9964.