It was called the “Deadliest Act.” Just minutes after 9:00 a.m. on April 19, 1995, when most of the 550 employees in Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building were heading to their offices, a truck bomb ruptured through the north face of the building. The bomb killed 168 people, including nineteen children. This, back then, was the deadliest mass murder on U.S. soil.
This year marks the seventh anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and it has been a long healing process. Part of this process has included the construction of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, consisting of a reflecting pool surrounded by 168 chairs, 149 chairs to represent the adult victims and 19 smaller chairs to represent the children killed in the bombing. A part of the remains there fence that surrounding the original crime scene that still stands. This fence holds individual remembrances in the form of photographs, hats, handwritten notes and anything that would help the visitors pay their personal tribute to the ones they lost. There are walls on both ends of the memorial, one depicting the minute before the bombing, 9:01 a.m., and the other depicting the minute after the bombing, 9:03 a.m.; which stand for the lives that have changed due to this terrible tragedy. Oklahoma City residents were meeting within three months of the disaster, but it was five years before the memorial was opened.
We have all now been witnesses to a newer level of terrorism in the United States, one much more colossal than the Oklahoma City bombing. September 11th was just as catastrophic but it affected, and was connected, to more people. This terrorist attack touched the hearts of the Oklahoma City residents that felt strongly linked to the New York, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania residents. Within weeks of the September 11th attack, Oklahoma City sent hundreds of teddy bears to the children of New York. And several of the Oklahoma City bombing survivors and victims’ relatives went to the World Trade Center site to counsel the grieving families. The Oklahoma City National Memorial bought a full-page ad in the New York Times two days after the World Trade Center attacks that said, “Oklahoma cares. You stood by us in our darkest hour and now we stand by you.” Since this is a day that will be etched in our memories, much like that of April 19, 1995, there is a question of what to do now.
Representatives of a New York task force toured the Oklahoma City National Memorial to get ideas on how to rebuild the twenty-acre area where the World Trade Center once stood. A joint state and city panel, called the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation (LMRC), is beginning to discuss how to honor the September 11th victims. National memorial officials decided in November that they wanted to create an exhibit connecting all the cities that have been victims of terrorist attacks. This new exhibit will be called “A Shared Experience: 04.19.95-09.11.01.” It will focus on the way people reacted to the 1995 bombing and the September 11th attacks. Although the numbers were tremendously different, the response to the terrorism was very much the same. The people seemed to ban together to form a stronger nation.
Roland Betts and Deborah Wright, members of the LMRC, began by talking with the survivors and victims’ relatives from the Oklahoma City bombing. They learned that the best thing to do was to take it slow and make sure that they get all the information from anyone who wants to participate. Feeling almost overwhelmed by the task ahead of them, they used the Oklahoma City National Memorial as a stepping block for future ideas for the new combined exhibit. “The memorial itself is so elegant and peaceful and serene,” Betts said. The notion that the city has done all of this, and it’s a consensual process, in a period of six years, … we find it scary.” The new exhibit about the shared experience of terrorist victims in Oklahoma City, New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania is supposed to open today, the seventh anniversary of the federal building bombing. The exhibit will remain in Oklahoma City for about a year, and then travel to New York, Washington, D.C., and then Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It will consist of five sections representing terror, courage, response, experiences and lessons. The exhibit will include information on the September 11th victims with Oklahoma ties and nine rescue workers killed at the World Trade Center site who helped rescue bombing victims from the federal building in Oklahoma City.