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Photos courtesy of Lisa McNair.
The cover of Lisa McNair’s new book “Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew.”
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Photos courtesy of Lisa McNair.
Lisa McNair
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Photos courtesy of Lisa McNair.
Denise McNair with her dog in Birmingham. McNair was one of four victims in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963.
Denise McNair became famous at a young age for the most tragic reason.
On Sept. 15, 1963, just before 11 a.m.that morning at 16th Street Baptist Church, a bomb exploded, taking the lives of four 14 year-old girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.
A year later, Denise’s sister, Lisa, was born.
Lisa McNair never got to meet her sister but heard so much about her when she was growing up, she said.
“It was weird,” McNair said. “It was very strange. Once you’ve had relatives that have passed, you know what they smelled like, how they talked, what their mannerisms were. There’s none of that for me because I didn’t know her. To have a relative that is so close and not have any recollection of her, it’s left a huge gap in my life.”
This year, McNair wrote 40 letters to her sister and published them in her new book, “Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew,” which hit bookstores in September.
McNair always wanted to tell her story, she said.
“I’ve always wanted to do that, ever since I was 14-years-old,” McNair said. “I felt that my life was so different– that it was something worth telling and something I wanted to share with the world.”
It wasn’t until years later that she put pen to paper, but when she did, she had one problem: writer’s block. She didn't know where to start until her friend gave her a suggestion she hadn’t thought of, McNair said.
“She said, ‘Well why don’t you make it a conversation, like you’re writing letters to your sister because if you were to talk to her, you could say anything you wanted to say,’” McNair said.
She felt a lot of emotions while she was writing the book. There were times when she was happy and excited, she said, but she also felt sadness and exhaustion.
“It depended on what I was writing,” McNair said. “Some things were very interesting and fun to write,” McNair said. “It was just like you were telling a great story to somebody like, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta tell you about this.’ It flowed very easily and it was very exciting to write. And then there were times in the books where it was a tough subject and it would be very hard to write. Sometimes I would just be crying when I would be writing. Sometimes it would be so bad, where I would finish it and then I would have to lay down.”
When she was growing up, people didn’t understand why her family didn’t hate white people in general, she said.
For their family, the answer was quite simple.
“My parents were Christians,” McNair said. “They were God-fearing people. Christ teaches us that we must forgive and that we must love everyone. It just wasn’t in their nature to do anything other than that.”
It also helped that her family had firsthand experiences with white people, she said.
Her mother and father didn’t go to the same church. Her dad went to a Lutheran church while the rest of her family went to 16th Street Baptist Church, she said. The Lutheran church had a white pastor that preached to a predominantly black congregation.
“Everybody in the church was black [except] the pastor, his wife and three kids,” McNair said. “They were white. That gave my dad and all of us the wonderful opportunity to know that all white people, even though there were a lot of them that hated black people back then, didn’t hate us. It showed us that some of them could love us and be our friend.”
On top of their faith contributing to their empathy and compassion, she said, they had tangible evidence that “not all white people are bad.”
However, today’s racial tensions are particularly “painful” and “frightening” for McNair, she said.
“I’m on the road now to Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm all by myself,” McNair said on the day of her interview with Iron City Ink. “There are white people out here that hate me that I don’t know, and they could literally harm me. If the government sanctions that harm, there could be nothing done about it.”
McNair began public speaking because of her father, Chris, she said.
After the bombing, Chris McNair became a primary representative of the families who had suffered losses, McNair said. He was already in the public eye, she said, becoming the first Black legislator for Jefferson County in 1973.
“That kind of put him on a platform where people would reach out to him,” McNair said. “Everyone knew that his daughter was killed in a bombing, and going forward from there he could always be reached by the press because he was public figure.”
He began getting invitations to speak at multiple churches and other events around the country, she said.
As her father got older, it became harder for him to speak at events, so McNair and her sister decided to speak for him, she said.
“My sister and I talked about it,” McNair said. “I’m kind of an extrovert and more of a people person than she is. We talked about maybe splitting up the responsibilities because they [the invitations] were coming in very quickly, but later she was like, ‘No, that’s really your thing, run with it.’ So I did.”
Her book and public speaking ventures are only a part of what she does to advocate for civil rights, she said. McNair is a part of two nonprofit organizations, the Morgan Project and Sojourn to the Past.
The locally based Morgan Project develops curriculums and lesson plans for teachers to help them teach their students about the civil rights movement, Black history and the state’s racial history.
“We’ve been conducting workshops and educating teachers on how to teach the history,” she said. “It’s something that I do that I really enjoy.”
Sojourn to the Past takes students from across the country on a nine-day journey through the South to learn about the history of the civil rights movement and non-violent protest, she said.
“When we see racism, we need to call it for what it is and call out the people saying it like, ‘Hey, that’s not OK,’” McNair said. “Just remember that we are all Americans. We’re more alike than we are different, and we have to love each other and work together.”
“Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew” is available wherever books are sold. For more information, visit speaklisa.com.
