Civil Rights Era and The 1963 Bombing
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church served as an organizational headquarters, site of mass meetings and rallying point for blacks protesting widespread institutionalized racism in Birmingham, Alabama and the South. The reverends Fred Shuttlesworth, who was the chief local organizer, James Bevel, SCLC leader who initiated the Children's Crusade and taught the students nonviolence, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were frequent speakers at the church and led the movement.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Frank Cherry and Robert Edward Chambliss, members of the Ku Klux Klan, planted 19 sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the church. At 10:22 a.m., they exploded, killing four young girls–Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair–and injuring 22 others. They were there preparing for the church's "Youth Day". A funeral for three of the four victims was attended by more than 8,000 mourners, white and black, but no city officials.
This was one of a string of more than 45 bombings that for more than a decade had terrorized progressive agitators as well as citizens who did nothing more than buy a house in a new neighborhood. (Dynamite Hill, a neighborhood in transition, was the area of numerous house bombings.) The taking of indisputably innocent lives shocked the city, the nation and the world. The bombing is credited with increasing Federal involvement and helping the passage of civil rights legislation. President Johnson secured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act the following year; and in 1965 the voting rights act was passed, making literacy tests and poll taxes illegal.
Following the bombing, more than $300,000 in unsolicited gifts were received by the church and repairs were begun immediately. The church reopened on June 7, 1964. A stained glass window depicting a black Christ, designed by John Petts, was donated by the citizens of Wales and installed in the front window, facing south.
Read more about this topic: 16th Street Baptist Church
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights, era and/or bombing:
“The Civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, be infringed.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
“I call her old. She has one family
Whose claim is good to being settled here
Before the era of colonization,
And before that of exploration even.
John Smith remarked them as he coasted by....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Did all of us feel interested in bombing buildings only when the men we slept with were urging us on?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)