Sunday school was drawing to a close, and a gaggle of adolescent girls gathered in a church basement bathroom, preening to look their best for a service set to begin at 11.
The Bible lesson that morning, about love and forgiveness, was based on a verse from Matthew: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
At 10:22 a.m., a deafening explosion stilled the hearts of four of the black girls in the bathroom: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11. Nearly two dozen others were injured.
Someone had slithered beneath the vast brick church, Sixteenth Street Baptist in Birmingham, Ala., and planted 19 sticks of dynamite under the bathroom. The explosion destroyed cars on the street outside and blew out stained glass windows nearly 100 feet away.
AP
Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a body from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where an explosion ripped the structure during services Sept.15,1963.
This unthinkable mass murder happened on Sept. 15, 1963, 50 years ago this month and barely 2½ weeks after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights March on Washington.
Two more black youths were murdered that same night, as Birmingham teetered on the edge of white anarchy. A policeman killed Johnny Robinson, 16, with a bullet to the back, and two white youths shot and killed bicyclist Virgil Ware, 13.
In his funeral eulogy, King said, “These children — unoffending, innocent and beautiful — were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Some 8,000 people attended the service, including many outraged white citizens.
The innocent victims of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 were (from left) Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14; and Cynthia Wesley, 14.
There was little doubt about who was behind the bombing.
A local Ku Klux Klan chapter, Klavern 13, had helped Birmingham earn the nickname “Bombingham.” Nearly 50 explosives had been planted or tossed in racially motivated attacks over the previous 15 years. Most of the violence was against black families that dared to move west of Center St., the city’s longstanding color line, or the white families that sold to them.
That newly integrated neighborhood, Smithfield, became known as Dynamite Hill, and the chief boomer was recognized to be a truck-driving Klansman named Robert (Dynamite Bob) Chambliss, 59.
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