By Khaled AlSenan, News Correspondent

On the morning of Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, a pack of dynamite exploded on the steps of the 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Planted by several members of the Ku Klux Klan, the blast killed four African-American girls – 11-year-old Denise McNair,, and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. An important moment in the civil rights movement, the bombing led to public outcry that fueled racial tension throughout the nation. Nine months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On Sunday evening in Oakland, Calif., the Northeastern University School of Law sponsored an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing. Margaret Burnham, Professor of Law and founder of Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, both spoke at the event.

“In paying tribute to this tragic event, let us not pretend that we are simultaneously celebrating the end of racist violence and the triumph of democracy,” Davis said. “Let us also not labor under the illusion that this church bombing was an anomaly.”

The significance of this tragedy that made it stand out from other race-based crimes that members of the Ku Klux Klan had carried out was explained in an email from Robert L. Halls, associate professor of African-American studies and history. Professor Halls cited the victims’ ages as particularly striking. Furthermore, 1963 was the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and African-Americans were still not equally recognized before the law.

“Public accommodations, such as lunch counters and rest rooms, in my state and many other southern and border states, remained thoroughly segregated. This was galling,” said Halls.

Five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many Americans believe the United States has been enveloped by enough social progress to warrant such a term as “post-racial America.”  Others believe that sentiment simply stems from a majority whose privilege blinds them to the prejudices ethnic minorities face on a daily basis.

“I don’t want to be too blunt and I don’t want to deny that some ‘progress’ has been made, but the legacies of slavery and post-slavery racial discrimination run deeper than whether one now has the right to eat a hamburger at Howard Johnson’s restaurant,” Halls said. “If you go by opinion polls, the attitudes of many white Americans have changed for the better compared to polling results from the 1940s through the 1970s. But we still have a ways to go and I tend to think that people who have proclaimed that we have reached the millennial ‘post-racial’ society are either delusional or disingenuous.”

Professor Halls also said that racism today is not so much based on prejudices, or the inherent dislike of an individual based on their race, as much as it is based on his or her attitude towards other races.

“Attitudes are what people tell you when they fill out a questionnaire,” Halls said. “Some people who score low on prejudice in that sense, nevertheless engage in behaviors that have discriminatory effects.”

There are many abuses in the United States today that can be seen as racially-charged. The prison-industrial complex and the drug war have led to the mass incarceration of African-Americans, at a rate remarkably exceeding the rate of incarcerated white citizens. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2009 that African-Americans accounted for 39.4 percent of the total prison population, while only accounting for 13.6 percent of the general population.

The dumping of toxic wastes in low-income, urban areas, dubbed “environmental racism,” continues to destroy communities largely inhabited by black people. Legislators in states like North Carolina, Virginia and Florida have drafted strict voter ID laws, in what many pundits say is an attempt to discourage voter turnout in the inner cities.

“I know there are many people, including some African-Americans who might disagree with me, but I would banish the concept of race from the conversation because it conveys a sense that the differences we observe between ethnic groups derive primarily from genetic differences, instead of socioeconomic differences,” said Halls.