September 16th: Bells, Birthdays and Turning Points in History

On September sixteenth, 1810, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang his church bell in the small town of Dolores, Mexico. Now, yesterday we talked about the unforgettable firsts of September fifteenth, like the debut of the tank at the Somme, but that single bell rung by Hidalgo on this day was a sound that would echo much, much louder than any engine of war—it was a call to arms that would ignite a revolution. And it's just... absolutely wonderful, isn't it? The idea that history can pivot on something so simple. A bell. A voice. A decision. September sixteenth is a day packed with these pivots. Some are moments of glorious creation, of art and nationhood.

And some... some are reckonings. Moments where the past reaches out and demands justice, years or even decades later. Looking back, we can see the threads connecting them all. We can see how a cry for freedom in 1810 Mexico shares a certain defiant spirit with a blues riff born in Mississippi more than a century later. We can see how the patient, decades-long work of protecting the planet mirrors the patient, decades-long fight to hold murderers accountable. Today, we have the gift of hindsight. We can see the whole story. So let's use it. Let’s start with a story that technically begins the day before, on September fifteenth, 1963.

But its shadow falls so heavily across this date, and its resolution took so long, that it belongs to this entire sweep of history. We need to talk about Birmingham, Alabama. Just before eleven in the morning on a Sunday, nineteen sticks of dynamite, planted by Ku Klux Klan members, exploded underneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The church was a central organizing point for the Civil Rights Movement. It was a place of hope, of strategy, of community. And on that morning, it became a tomb. Four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were in the church basement, preparing for the Youth Day service.

They were killed instantly. Martin Luther King Jr. would later call it one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. He called it an act of "racial terror," and he was exactly right. This wasn't random. This was a message. One of the bombers, a man named Robert Chambliss, had been heard telling an associate, “Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate.” They knew what they were doing. They were trying to bomb the hope out of an entire movement. And for a while, it looked like they might get away with it. The initial investigation was a travesty. Evidence was ignored.

Witnesses were intimidated. And the director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, personally blocked prosecutors from moving forward. His official reasoning, written down for all to see, was that "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote.” Let that sink in. The head of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country looked at the murder of four children and decided it was too much trouble. The case went cold. The files gathered dust. The families of those four little girls were left with nothing but grief and the horrifying silence of injustice. From the vantage point of the late 1960s, this story was over.

A tragedy, yes. But a closed chapter. But this is where the lens of hindsight becomes a searchlight. Because the story was NOT over. In 1971, a new Alabama Attorney General named Bill Baxley reopened the case. He was told it was a career-killer, a waste of time. He requested the original F.B.I. files and was horrified. He later said they were “mostly worthless.” But he also found evidence that Hoover had deliberately withheld from the original prosecutors. So Baxley and his investigators started over. From scratch. They tracked down old witnesses. They found new ones. They rebuilt a case that had been sabotaged from the very top.

It took six years. But in 1977, Robert Chambliss, the man who had bragged about the bombing, was finally convicted of the murder of Denise McNair. One down. But Baxley wasn't done. The fight continued. And this is the part that gives me chills. Justice for the other girls would have to wait even longer. Decades longer. It wasn't until 2001 that Thomas Blanton was convicted. And a year after that, in 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was finally found guilty. Almost forty years after they had planted that bomb. Think about that arc. From the terror of 1963, to the cynicism of Hoover, to the lonely crusade of Bill Baxley in the seventies, all the way to a courtroom in the twenty-first century.

We see it now as a single, continuous story. A story that says that justice delayed does not always have to be justice denied. It shows us that what looks like an ending in one decade can be just the beginning of a reckoning in the next. The bombing didn't break the Civil Rights Movement. It galvanized it. It horrified the nation and forced people to choose a side. It was a pivot. A terrible, bloody, agonizing pivot, but a pivot nonetheless. And today, we remember the names of those four girls not just as victims, but as catalysts for a change they never got to see. Now. Let's take that idea of a pivot, a single moment that changes everything, and travel back to that church bell in Mexico.

September sixteenth, 1810. The man ringing the bell is Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. He’s a priest, but he's also a product of the Enlightenment. He's read forbidden books. He believes in new ideas about liberty and self-governance. And he is fed up with three hundred years of Spanish rule. So on this morning, he stands before his congregation, and he doesn't deliver a sermon. He delivers what becomes known as the "Grito de Dolores"—the Cry of Dolores. It’s an impassioned, probably a little chaotic, call to arms. He denounces bad government, calls for an end to the Spanish colonial system, and rallies the people to fight for their own destiny.

And they do! Oh, they do. An army of farmers and townspeople, mostly armed with farm tools and a burning sense of injustice, rises up behind him. It's messy, it's brutal, and from a military perspective, it's a long shot. And in the short term... it fails. Within a year, Hidalgo is captured. He is tried, stripped of his priesthood, and executed. His head is put on display as a warning to other rebels. And just like with the Birmingham bombing, if you were standing there in 1811, you would have thought, "Well, that's the end of that." The spark has been snuffed out. But we know better. Oh, we know so much better. Because the idea Hidalgo unleashed with that bell—the Grito—was more powerful than any army.

The fight continued. Other leaders took up the cause. The war for independence raged for another decade. And in 1821, Mexico was finally, officially, independent. What looked like a failure in 1811 was actually the beginning of a victory. Hidalgo the man was gone. But Hidalgo the symbol, the father of the nation, was eternal. He didn't live to see the country he dreamed of, but he was the one who dared to ring the bell. And that is a lesson history teaches us over and over again. Sometimes the most important role you can play is just to be the one who starts it. To be the first voice in the crowd. To be the bell that wakes everyone else up.

So we have these massive, nation-shaping, justice-defining events. But September sixteenth is also a day for creation on a more personal, but no less powerful, scale. It's a day that gave us some truly spectacular artists. On this day in 1925, in a tiny cabin in Mississippi, a baby named Riley B. King was born. The world would come to know him as B.B. King. And what is there to say about B.B. King? He didn't invent the blues, but he took the raw, emotional heart of the Mississippi Delta and gave it a voice that could speak to the entire planet. That voice was his guitar, Lucille. He had this incredible ability to say more with a single, bent note than most guitarists could say with a thousand.

It was pure emotion, translated directly into sound. He took this American art form, born from hardship and resilience, and made it a global phenomenon. He was an ambassador of soul. His birthday isn't just a biographical fact; it's a reminder of the power of music to cross any border and touch any heart. But there's another musical birthday on this day that is, for my money, even more delightful because of its sheer, unexpected reach. On September sixteenth, 1887, Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris. Now, you may not know her name. She wasn't a rock star. She was a teacher. But WHAT a teacher. Oh my goodness. Nadia Boulanger was arguably the most influential teacher of musical composition in the entire twentieth century.

Her list of students is just... staggering. It's absurd. Are you ready? Aaron Copland, the man who defined the sound of the American West. Philip Glass, the minimalist pioneer. Astor Piazzolla, the master of the modern tango. And get this—Quincy Jones. Yes, THAT Quincy Jones, who would go on to produce Michael Jackson's "Thriller." They all went to Paris to study with this one woman. She taught them discipline. She taught them craft. She taught them how to find their own unique voice. She was a kind of human nexus point, a hidden force shaping the sounds of an entire century, from concert halls to film scores to pop radio.

And there is something SO wonderful about that. The idea that one person's genius can be to unlock the genius in others. B.B. King gave us his voice. Nadia Boulanger gave us a whole choir. And the day's creativity isn't just limited to art. On this day, we see the creation of nations and... even the creation of hope for the planet itself. On September sixteenth, Papua New Guinea achieved its full independence from Australia. Another birthday for a nation. Another moment of self-determination, of a people taking control of their own story. It's the Grito de Dolores echoed in the Pacific, decades later. A quieter moment, perhaps, a transfer of power rather than a war, but the same fundamental human drive is there.

And then there's the Montreal Protocol. The research links it to this date, when forty-six countries came together to sign a treaty. And it wasn't just any treaty. It was a plan to save the world. Literally. They agreed to regulate and phase out the chemicals that were eating a giant hole in the ozone layer. You know, we are so used to stories of international gridlock and failure. But the Montreal Protocol is the astonishing exception. It WORKED. The ozone layer has been healing. It is perhaps the single most successful international environmental agreement in human history. It's a testament to the fact that, when we want to, when the danger is clear enough, we actually can work together to solve planet-sized problems.

It’s a data point for optimism. So, when we look back at September sixteenth from our vantage point, what do we see? We see a beautiful, complicated, contradictory mess. We see the very worst of humanity in that church basement in Birmingham. And we see the very best in the patient pursuit of justice that followed. We see a revolution sparked by a single priest, a reminder that no empire is forever. We hear the birth of the blues as a global language, and we discover the quiet teacher who shaped the soundtrack of a century. We see a new nation born and a world coming together to heal a wound in the sky. It's a day that teaches us that history is never just one thing.

It is terror and it is triumph, often in the same breath. The work of justice is long, the birth of freedom is loud, and the creation of beauty is absolutely essential. The past is not a settled, dusty thing; it's an active argument, and every single one of these stories is a voice in that debate.