Sister of Birmingham church bombing victim tells her story | DON NOBLE

Lisa McNair is the younger sister of Denise McNair, one of the four little girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963.

Lisa would not be born until one year later, and, as she mentions, her birth itself was a marvelous event. The McNairs were certain they could have no more children after Denise, but Lisa and her sister Kim came along and that offered some comfort.

Of course, Lisa did not know Denise, but growing up as the sister of one of the martyred girls affected her life, perpetually and in every imaginable way.

That life has not been a life of deprivation or a sensational one, but it is undeniably singular and she has a story to tell, with some unusual wrinkles.

“Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew” is the memoir of Lisa’s life, told in the form of 40 letters to her sister.

At the center of that story is a kind of paradox.

After the bombing, after the Selma march, the march on Washington, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, life became less strictly segregated in Alabama. And Lisa was the recipient of that loosening. As she tells us — actually tells Denise — in these letters, thanks partly to Denise’s sacrifice, she is living out Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of a more free and open society.

Starting in the third grade, Lisa’s parents sent her to the Advent School in Birmingham, where she was one of only a few Black students. She does not suffer discrimination there. On the contrary, Lisa is treated with respect and friendship by everyone at Advent.

The difficulties come when, as the years go by, she finds herself “far more comfortable with white folks and white culture than with Black folks.”

Over time, Lisa’s speech patterns, her accent shifted some. She lost touch with Black music, dance moves, slang.

Through those years, the ’70s and ’80s, she was criticized by Black out-of-school friends for not being Black enough. She writes: “I was sometimes criticized, chastised, ostracized, and even called a ‘white girl.’ ”

For a while, this didn’t bother her.

She considered leaving her Blackness behind and staying in the white world. She had become, in her own words, an unwitting “pioneer” in this respect.

But integration in Alabama had not evolved to allow for romance. Her white male school friends would not date her, would not have her as a girlfriend.

Also, there could be no anonymity for her in Birmingham, especially after Spike Lee produced the documentary “4 Little Girls” in 1997, a national sensation.

In several letters to Denise, Lisa expands on other areas in which the dropping of some structures of segregation affected the Black community. Many Black-owned businesses suffered because their long-time customers began shopping at the white-owned stores, now that they could.

Change brings consequences, foreseen and unforeseen.

McNair writes about her lack of success in college and proudly about her father’s career in Alabama politics, and candidly about the muddle he got into late in his career, it seems through no criminal fault of his own.

McNair’s story is subtly told and nuanced, as it needs to be. There were some dark times. She came to understand, “I was at war with who I was and I didn’t know how to resolve it ….”

Always a devout Christian, she has joined a mostly white church congregation and is happy there. But this does not please some of her Black friends.

She has now found a calling as an inspirational speaker, urging that more Black history be taught, talking to audiences about the church bombing and more generally about how we can as a society, “reconcile our differences.”

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew”

Author: Lisa McNair

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Pages: 200

Price: $19.95 (Cloth)