The Manresa Project is proud to announce the text to be used for the 2007 First Year Reading Program.
Bombingham, by Anthony Grooms, offers a searing account of a key period in the civil rights movement, the massive non-violent demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring and summer of 1963. Told from the point of view of a young African-American boy (recalling the incidents in flashback as a soldier a few years later in Vietnam), the book presents famous incidents—demonstrating children attacked by fire-hoses and police dogs, Martin Luther King’s dramatic arrest, the bombing (and murder of four young girls) of the Sixteenth Street Baptist church by the KKK—from a fresh perspective.
With wry humor and haunting description, it is a portrait of the wonder and the terror of childhood in a time when ordinary citizens risked their lives to change America. By turns both reflective and dramatic, Grooms chronicles the events of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War through the heightened perspective of a narrator who struggles to find the meaning of his role in both events. Bombingham is a moving testament to the power of responsibility and faith in the face of tragedy.
Anthony Grooms was educated at the College of William and Mary and at George Washington University. He is the author of Ice Poems and Trouble No More: Stories and winner of the 1996 Lillian Smith Award. As a writer, teacher, and arts administrator, he has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs. He is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and lives in Atlanta with his wife, Pamela B. Jackson.
2007 is the 40th anniversary of a notable era in Milwaukee’s civil rights movement: the open housing marches of the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968 led by Fr. James Groppi, which began just west of Marquette’s campus and crossed the 16th street viaduct (now named after Groppi) into Milwaukee’s south side. Several events are being planned to commemorate these and other events, and the First Year Reading is honoring the occasion with this choice.
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