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.
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