Latest news with #OklahomaCityBombing
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mayor: One lesson of the OKC bombing is that evil can and must be resisted
Editor's Note: This commentary is adapted from the speech delivered by Mayor Holt at the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 2025. Matthew 6:34 states 'Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.' We humans talk a lot about tomorrow. Macbeth was weary of tomorrow. The Bible is quite concerned that we worry too much about tomorrow. But I would argue that most of the time, tomorrow represents hope. It did for Scarlett O'Hara and Fleetwood Mac. Tomorrow is a blank canvas. And though no one is promised tomorrow, we each depend on it, and we hold it close, like a lottery ticket. Tomorrow may bring us a better day than today. On some days, it feels like tomorrow almost has to be better than today. On April 19th, 1995, on one level, the people of Oklahoma City certainly had to feel that way. How could tomorrow not be better than today? But on another level, we all knew the sorrows of April 19th would still join us tomorrow. Hundreds of families knew there was someone who was going to be just as gone tomorrow as they were today. There have been nearly 11,000 tomorrows since the bomb went off. As a city, those tomorrows have in fact brought all the hope and promise we could have ever imagined. One day of darkness has unquestionably been followed by thirty years of light here in Oklahoma City. We have invested billions of dollars into our quality of life, often fueled by unifying community choices that transcended partisanship or other things that might divide us. We are drawing new residents from around the country; we're now America's 20th-largest city. Our economy is diversified, our low unemployment rate is on a record streak, and new developments open every month. We have a global identity that is built on a foundation of success and/or basketball, but definitely not a bombing. We have launched our Thunder into what we hope is a historic NBA playoff run. And in three years, we will welcome people from around the world as we stage seven events of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. This month, our city turned 136 years old, and these last 30 years have unquestionably represented our city's golden age. No one who knows and loves Oklahoma City would dispute that statement. On the other hand, for those who lost so much on April 19th, 1995, for those who survived, and for those changed forever, those 11,000 tomorrows have been a mixed-bag. Even as tomorrow has brought weddings and births, graduations and success, there has always been an empty chair, or a traumatic memory, or a dark realization of the evil that humans can do. For each of you, I hope this community has done and will continue to do all that it can. I think I use an aspirational word like 'hope' there because to us, just standing with you can feel a bit inadequate. We want to return your loved one, we want to make your pain go away. But though we can't, I know each of us believes that our role in the Oklahoma Standard is to do all we can. As your mayor, I pledge that no priority in this city will ever stand between us and that commitment to you and your family who lost so much. It was a commitment originally made by President Clinton, but we all co-sign. Tomorrow is often a symbol of hope, but it is can also be a word of commitment, a reflection that a promise will endure into the future. We all recommit on this 30th anniversary that we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes. I want to also state a related commitment that will outlive all milestones, and all of us. Over eight anniversary addresses, I have spoken in favor of love, empathy, truth and better conversations. I have asked us to embrace pluralism, to look past things that can be used to divide us, like political opinions or ethnicities or religion, and asked us to instead consider the infinite ways in which we are alike. I have spoken against dehumanization and words of division, and I have asked us to gaze into the Memorial's reflecting pool and consider whether the person that you see is living up to the Oklahoma Standard in their own words, and social media posts, and actions. I have stated that this obligation starts with us as citizens of Oklahoma City, but that it should apply to everyone in this entire country, especially and including elected officials and all those in the public eye. I have also spoken repeatedly these last eight years about the passage of time. It's on my mind as this 30th anniversary is a milestone in the measurement of time. Thirty years is an inflection point, no doubt. Ten years is the blink of an eye. Twenty years is still less than a generation. But 30 years hits different. Many of us now have to admit that there are more yesterdays for us than there are tomorrows. Perhaps that reality reminds us that in addition to the obligation we have to the families most directly affected, we also have another related obligation in Oklahoma City, and this obligation is timeless and will outlive us. And that is the obligation to speak and act against the forces that created the environment for this act of evil, and really, for all acts of evil across human history. Even when the personal remembrances have faded, the people of this city will still have a scar in our downtown, a place where people used to go to work, serving their neighbors. The site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is now peaceful and shaded by tall beautiful trees, but the jagged edges of concrete that surround it remind us that it is a scar, a symbol of what humans can do to each other when do they not love each other, when they do not seek to understand each other, when they fail to acknowledge our shared humanity, when they dehumanize each other, when they entertain conspiracy theories, when they are willing to act outside of peaceful democratic processes even to commit violence, and when they let extremism rot their brains to the point where even a child is a soldier in their imagined war. Humans are highly unlikely to ever fully shed our capacity for evil, but evil can be answered and kept at bay. Evil must be answered. And the residents of this city must always be the protectors of a commitment to do so. Perhaps on this 30th anniversary, like a relay runner in one of our memorial marathons, we are beginning to pass the baton of that commitment. And that baton of commitment will be kept by P.J. Allen, Rebecca and Brandon Denny, Joseph Webb, Nekia McCloud and Chris Nguyen, the six children who survived the bombing. It will be kept by Clint Seidl, Krista Doll, Dina Abulon, Hilary Johnson, Dionce Thomas, and the 249 children who lost one or both parents that day. Those are the youngest among us who bore direct witness. But this commitment will also be kept by those who are too young to have borne witness. It will be carried by the 38 members of the Memorial Teen Board. It will be kept by my kids, George and Maggie, who are now almost the age I was when the bombing happened. They host a video about the bombing for middle school kids you can find on YouTube. It will be kept by your kids and your grandkids. It will be kept by the people who will stand here on the 60th anniversary and the 90th anniversary, when everyone here will turn towards a wheelchair on stage and ask the last remaining survivor what it was like. Even then, when tens of thousands of tomorrows will have passed, this commitment by the people of Oklahoma City to stand against evil must endure. I thank each of you and those who will follow us for your commitment, for it will require all the tomorrows that lie ahead. David Holt is mayor of Oklahoma City. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Our shared humanity must shine forth as we remember the past | Opinion
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bill Clinton speaking at OKC bombing 30th anniversary: Learn the former president's ties
Former President Bill Clinton is set to give the keynote address on Saturday, commemorating victims and survivors at the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. The former president has spoken at previous remembrance ceremonies since 1995, most recently at the 20th anniversary in 2015. Clinton was the sitting president on April 19, 1995, when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed, which left 168 people dead as a result of the bombing. While he was the president of the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in United States history, Clinton's ties to Oklahoma City go beyond his term requirements. Here's what you need to know about Clinton's trip to Oklahoma City for the ceremony. President William 'Bill' Clinton served as the 42nd president of the United States from January 20, 1993, to January 20, 2001. Clinton, who was two years into his first term as president at the time of the bombing, said April 19 is burned into his memory. Just days after the bombing, he delivered what many historians say was one of the finest speeches given by a modern president. Clinton said that speech — given on April 23, 1995, during a memorial service at State Fair Arena and only about nine minutes long — was one of the two most important speeches of his presidency. "I wanted to keep it as brief as possible and to rally people and give them hope that we would overcome this," the former president told The Oklahoman. "How we handled this and what it (the bombing) did to us was really, really important." Bill Clinton is in Oklahoma City to speak at the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing on April 15, 1995. As sitting President, Clinton has spoken on the bombing since his days in office and has returned to the ceremony every 5 years. The victim Alan Whicher was a friend of Clinton's who would die in the bombing of the Murrah building. Whicher was a U.S. Secret Service agent who was a part of Clinton's initial security detail before being transferred to Oklahoma City. Whicher had lived in Oklahoma City for seven months before April 19, 1995. "You know I liked him a lot and I missed him when he left," Clinton said in a recent interview with The Oklahoman. "So I was determined to do what I could to help Oklahoma City become the place he thought it was when he went there." This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Bill Clinton at OKC bombing event: What to know about president's ties
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Revisiting the Ruins: What the Oklahoma City Bombing Teaches Us, 30 Years On
Last year, we joined forces with Katie Couric to make An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th, a documentary film that premiered on HBO in April 2024 (and is now streaming on Max). It was created to shed light on one of the most devastating tragedies in recent history: when, on April 19, 1995, ex-Army soldier Timothy McVeigh took the lives of 168 people (19 of them children) by bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Today is the 30th anniversary of this deeply disturbing tragedy. The film was Katie's idea originally: She had approached HBO about revisiting the event. As the TODAY show co-anchor in 1995, she was on the ground in Oklahoma City soon after the explosion, and she wondered how the surviving victims and family members were doing, so many decades later. As documentary filmmakers, we have a longtime relationship with HBO, having made several films for them over the years. We'd actually made one about the bombing for Bill Moyers in 1996 — a special for the TODAY show — that focused on some of the people most deeply affected by the tragedy. HBO introduced us to Katie and we set off together to tell the story. We started by contacting the people who'd been in our earlier film; we had stayed in touch with some of them over the years and were moved to see how they had turned their grief into life-affirming missions. Bud Welch lost his daughter, Julie, in the bombing; he admitted to having wished someone would kill McVeigh. But over time, he remembered his daughter was opposed to the death penalty, and that the best way to honor her memory was to fight against capital punishment. He eventually befriended McVeigh's father, Bill, and went on to become a global human rights activist. Marsha Kimble lost her daughter, Frankie, in the bombing. In the wake of that loss, she organized a group called Families and Survivors United that got federal legislation passed allowing survivors and family members of victims to watch the trial on closed-circuit TV. (Additionally, if they chose to attend the trial, they could testify during the sentencing phase.) This led to Marsha becoming a national victims'-rights advocate — one who came to NYC after 9/11 to work with grieving survivors and family members of victims. Kathy Sanders lost her two grandsons, Chase and Colton, in the bombing. A few weeks later, she and her husband Glenn hosted a dinner for the families who'd lost their children in the Murrah Building's daycare center. One of the mothers asked if anyone else had seen the bomb squad at the building earlier on the morning of April 19. That question started Kathy on her own journey as a citizen investigator: She realized she didn't know the whole story and was determined to find out the truth. (The result of her research into possible cover-ups and theories was a book called Shadows of Conspiracy: The Untold Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing.) Nancy Shaw survived the blast that killed so many of her co-workers in the Murrah building's Social Security office, and we were relieved to find her well. She had continued working for Social Security after the office moved to another location and had retired a few years earlier. Remembering that explosion in April, she says in the film, 'It felt to me like my skin was burning off, and it was a wind so powerful that it felt like it pinned back my hair.' (Shaw said she thought she saw McVeigh in the elevator in the months prior to the bombing, but wonders if that was a false memory — though the head of the daycare center also reported seeing him.) LaDonna Battle-Leverett lost her parents, Calvin and Peola Battle, in the Murrah building — the couple was at the Social Security office for a 9 a.m. appointment when the bomb exploded. The Battles' four daughters had to wait 14 days for their parents to be found in the rubble. She was shocked when she eventually saw McVeigh in person, in court: 'You're looking for the monster and you finally get that day to see him, and you're thinking like, Wait a minute, is this him? He looked like anyone's kid. Just your normal average Joe.' She remains actively involved in Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum events, speaking about her experience to keep alive the memory of what happened there. We found that the memory did indeed need to be kept alive: We were surprised during our research for An American Bombing to learn that few people under the age of 35, outside of Oklahoma, had even heard of the tragedy. Somehow the story had been erased. So we had to figure out how to recount the most important elements of the case to make it understandable to viewers, without overwhelming the film. We also realized we had to go back in time to show what informed and motivated the perpetrators, an effort that took us back to the early 1980s. There were many narrative threads to interweave, and a massive amount of information to collect and pore over. In making the documentary, we searched for 'characters' who had experienced the events surrounding the bombing from various firsthand perspectives to keep the storytelling dynamic and engaging, including FBI agents, investigative journalists, attorneys on both the defense and prosecution sides, and Kerry Noble, a former member of an extremist religious group, to give us an insider's view. Noble enabled us to include the most provocative information — that the Murrah building had been targeted by the members of his group in 1983. One of those members, Richard Snell, was executed on April 19, 1995. for murder — the same day as the OKC bombing — prompting many to question whether the bombing had been carried out to honor him in some way. This also raised the possibility that McVeigh was part of a larger movement that hid its connections in terrorist cells. Katie introduced us to Bill Clinton, who was president at the time of the bombing, but also knew the landscape of anti-government groups from his days as governor of Arkansas. He had rarely spoken on camera about his experience with Noble's group — The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) — which was active in Arkansas during Clinton's term as governor; he had amazing recall and intimate knowledge about their activities. We were able to pair his retelling with the actual footage of the terrorist compound, matching his words exactly to the images of their camp and bunkers. When he heard about the bombing of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995, his mind went back immediately to the CSA. While others were suspecting Middle Eastern terrorists, Clinton said, 'My life and experience told me that there was a very good chance that this was a homegrown plot.' As President Clinton did, it's important to understand the Oklahoma City bombing in the greater historical context. In the early 1980s, an anti-government 'Patriot Movement' brought together various right-wing extremists who declared war on the U.S. government. Some in that movement inspired, sustained, and even celebrated McVeigh's act of terror. There were also larger social, economic, and political forces at work that shaped the landscape, making it fertile ground for extremist violence. As the threat of political violence rises yet again, it's essential to understand the factors and ideas that led us where we are today. As LaDonna Battle told us, 'They covered up the 1921 Tulsa race massacre — we still don't get it. If you cover [something] up, it doesn't get better, it gets worse. We need to continue telling the children this story.' Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson are award-winning filmmakers based in New York City — you can find the latest on their studio Blowback Productions on X and Instagram. The post Revisiting the Ruins: What the Oklahoma City Bombing Teaches Us, 30 Years On appeared first on Katie Couric Media.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Where were you then: The April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
The Brief Saturday, April 19, is the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. A bomb exploded outside a federal building downtown, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The man convicted, Timothy McVeigh, was executed in 2001, and an accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving several life sentences. This year marks 30 years since the Oklahoma City Bombing. The backstory On April 19, 1995, a bomb exploded from inside a parked car that destroyed a third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Hundreds of people were injured, and 168 people were killed – including 19 children. Timeline A little more than two years later, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on all counts and convicted of the bombing on June 2, 1997. Later that year, accomplice Terry Nichols was convicted in December of 1997 in federal trial of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction but acquitted of two counts directly blaming him for the attack. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed. Nichols is currently serving several life sentences. Dig deeper McVeigh and Nichols met in the U.S. Army and were veterans of the Gulf War. Their attack was motivated by radical political ideology and was reportedly revenge on the federal government for the 1993 Waco siege and the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff. Big picture view To this day, the bombing is still the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in the United States. The Source Information in this article was taken from a series of historical accounts, including the FBI, the Oklahoma Historical Society and several local Oklahoma news reports. This story was reported from Detroit.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
30th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony to be held indoors due to rain, organizers announce
Due to forcasted inclement weather, the 30th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony of the Oklahoma City Bombing will be held indoors, organizers announced Thursday. The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum was set to host the ceremony on the museum grounds starting Saturday morning. However, they opted to switch locations due to forecasts of heavy rain, which is expected to start late Friday and last into Sunday morning. The ceremony will now be held at First Church on the corner of Northwest Fifth Street and Robinson Avenue. Attendees can enter through the west doors of the church, and ADA accessibility is available on the east side of the church. The remembrance ceremony will begin at 8:30 a.m. with remarks from President Bill Clinton. Following his keynote address, there will be 168 seconds of silence while the families of the 168 lost lives read their names. The ceremony will run until 10:30 a.m. After the ceremony, the Oklahoma Fire Pipes and Drums will lead attendees to the Field of Empty Chairs. Attendees wishing to follow outside are encouraged to dress appropriately. The Memorial Museum will be open free of charge to guests, thanks to Cox Community Day. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OKC bombing remembrance ceremony to be held indoors due to rain
