Perhaps haunted by the memory of four little girls bombed to death by white supremacists, at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, my parents wanted to give their four children the best Xmas ever after enduring bomb threats from anti busing activists in Denver, 11 years later.

Our family was relatively large and struggled financially. My parents both had full-time jobs as maintenance workers at the post office. To make extra money, my mother worked the lunch shift at the school cafeteria, while my father did odd jobs – mowing lawns, painting houses or whatever work he could get just to keep food on the table. By no means did they ever have a lot amount of money to spend on Christmas presents, so gift giving at our house was definitely a modest affair. We kids usually received two or three small presents apiece, one of which always was invariably an article of clothing, and we sometimes maybe got one “big” gift – like a Monopoly game or something, to share. But Christmas 1974 was different.

We woke up that year to find a shimmering jackpot of presents under our tree.

The “big” gift was a hi-fi stereo and each of us received a couple of LPs. We each got brand new bicycles and roller skates, along with assorted other goodies and baubles. And I got the shiny rocking horse with the black mane and red bridle I had wanted since I was old enough to point at his picture in the Sears catalog. We weren’t sure why we had gotten so many gifts that year and certainly never questioned whether we deserved them or not. I rode my pony until his springs were sprung, and it is only now, some thirty years later, that I think I may have discovered why Santa was so generous in 1974.

In October of 1970, the court ruled to integrate the Denver Public School system. Shortly after the announcement was made, someone dynamited the system’s 38 parked school buses, damaging or destroying thirty percent of the fleet. Clearly, someone did not share the dream of ethnic mixing in the schools and were willing to resort to violence to keep it from happening. I can only imagine how my parents must have felt when they heard the news.

They may have recalled reading about the bombing in a Birmingham church that killed four little girls in September of 1963, just nine months after their baby daughter, my older sister, was born. I know they never expected racial violence of this sort to follow them from the deep South to northeast Denver, where aspiring young black families thought they could live in peace. Those are the things that must have been on my parents’ minds the day someone dynamited the buses destined to take us to school the next year.

Meanwhile, I could think only of the havoc the ruling would have on my social life. School district lines had been redrawn so that I would no longer attend the school that my sisters and brothers had gone to a block away from my house. My best friend would remain at that school while I would have to get up an hour earlier each morning to catch a bus to a school across town. We learned that implementation of the desegration ruling would be delayed for five years. That should have given people plenty of time to get used to the idea. If nothing else, it gave the district time to rebuild its bombed-out bus fleet. Although I know it happened, I do not remember hearing about the bombing of the buses. My parents must have shielded us from that news. I do remember crying when I learned that desegrating Denver’s schools meant I would be separated from my friends. And I vividly remember the day someone called in a bomb threat to the elementary school from which I was being sent.

At the time, I was too young to understand exactly what I had in common with four little girls blasted dead in Birmingham. To me, they were just faded photographs in faded newspaper clippings, and bombs were for the pale-faced blonde kids demonstrating duck-and-cover drills in black-and-white newsreels. This bomb that someone said would send us all to kingdom come was both out of place and out of time in my mind. The school administration was ill prepared for the threat. They sounded the fire alarm, but instead of having us leave the building, we were instructed into the hallways to “duck and cover,” like those cowering kids in the newsreels. Then, thankfully, someone decided that in fact we should leave the building and so we filed out of the school, many of us without coats, into the frigid winter day.

One of the teachers had the idea of singing while we waited to be told where to go, what to do. So we sang, starting out with nursery rhymes and other schoolroom ditties. But pretty soon the repertoire changed. “Row Your Boat” became “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” The sound and sight of a couple of hundred black kids standing outside singing was surely reminiscent of scenes from the Civil Rights era a few short years earlier, when those same songs inspired peaceful demonstrators in the South. But when you’re a child, it’s hard to appreciate any sense of solidarity with a history-making movement of the previous decade.

What the singing did do was calm me down enough to think more clearly about the situation. I only lived a block away from the school. It made no sense to be freezing just outside of a building they thought might literally be blown to bits in a few moments, and there was no way a handful of teachers could keep track of all of us. I crept my way stealthily to the edge of crowd and ran home into my mother’s anxious waiting arms. She had learned about the bomb threat from my sisters and brother, who had also run home from the chaos. No explosives were found at our school that day – it turned out to be just a threat. Still, we took that threat seriously. What had been done to our buses could still be done to us. We did not return to school that week.

In the weeks and months that followed, we spent our time in alternating states of relief and fear. There were more bomb threats and we survived them. But no one could be sure we would actually survive the school year. Our young lives had changed drastically. Going to school was serious business. Who knew when one of the threats would be carried out?

Our parents tried to shore up our courage (and their own) with tales of Civil Rights triumphs. After all, great strides had been made. Unlike our forebears, we could sit anywhere we wanted to on public buses and our parents could vote. If nine African American children could integrate a white school in Little Rock, in 1957, and live to tell about it, then dozens of African American children should be okay almost twenty years later in Denver, Colorado, right?

What an emotional roller coaster that fall must have been for our poor parents. The walk to school each morning became a journey of dread they now felt compelled to share with us. Memories of the Little Rock Nine gave them hope. The specter of four dead little girls in Birmingham gave them pause. They must have wanted to make us feel safe and to show us how much they loved us that Christmas. They must have wanted to restore our innocence and give us all that our hearts desired, so that we didn’t have to think about being threatened or hurt, or maybe even killed. And so that year, Santa opened his bag wider than ever, and expressed everything my parents had in their hearts. I got a bike and some skates, some books, records, and other toys, and the prettiest rocking horse on the planet – a vanilla filly with a curly black mane and shiny red bridle. Christmas that year was the bomb.