Sept. 15 marks the anniversary of an infamous terror attack: the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. On that Sunday morning, members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, planted dynamite on the east side of the brown brick building.
The bomb went off in the midst of Sunday school, at 10:22 a.m., murdering four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, who were all 14 years old, and Denise McNair, who was 11. The blast injured 22 other churchgoers, including a 12-year-old girl, Sarah Jean Collins, who was blinded in one eye.
Sixteenth Street Baptist was the oldest Black congregation in the city of Birmingham. Just on the edge of downtown, the building had been the main hub of organizing for civil rights demonstrations that spring, known as the Children’s Crusade. More than 1,000 Black children marched together protesting segregation, famously facing down police dogs, fire hoses and jail. Months later, this church at the center of it all became the target of white supremacists…