1963
THE BOMBING OF THE 16TH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH
Many of the civil rights protest marches that took place in Birmingham during the 1960s began on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s Black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers such as Dr. King.
Ku Klux Klan members routinely called in bomb threats intended to disrupt civil rights meetings as well as services at the church.
At 10:22 a.m. on the morning of September 15, 1963, some 200 church members were in the building—many of them children, attending Sunday school classes before the start of the 11 am service—when the bomb detonated on the church’s east side, spraying mortar and bricks from the front of the church and caving in its interior walls.
Most parishioners were able to evacuate the building as it filled with smoke, but the bodies of four young girls (Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14 years old, and 11-year-old Denise McNair) were found beneath the rubble in a basement restroom.
Ten-year-old Sarah Collins, who was also in the restroom at the time of the explosion, suffered severe wounds to both eyes and lost her right eye, and more than 20 other people were injured in the blast. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, following a federal court order had mandated the integration of Alabama’s school system.
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry Black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break up the protests, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African Americans—Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson— were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order.
Dr. King later spoke before 8,000 people at the funeral for three of the girls (the family of the fourth girl held a smaller private service), fueling the public outrage now mounting across the country.
Though Birmingham’s white supremacists (and even certain other individuals) were immediately suspected in the bombing, repeated calls for the perpetrators to be brought to justice went unanswered for more than a decade. It was later revealed that the FBI had information concerning the identity of the bombers by 1965 and did nothing.
In 1977, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the investigation, and Klan leader Robert E. Chambliss was brought to trial for the bombings.
As reported in The New York Times, Elizabeth E. Cobbs (who later became Petric “Pete” Smith) testified at the 1977 trial of her uncle, Robert E. Chambliss, that she was with him as he watched television reports about the bombing and heard him say: ”It wasn’t meant to hurt anybody. It didn’t go off when it was supposed to.” That testimony supported the account of a retired laundry worker, Kirthus Glenn, who identified Mr. Chambliss as one of four men she saw in a car parked near the church at about 2 a.m., hours before the bombing, on Sept. 15, 1963.
Chambliss, the only person charged in the case at the time, was found guilty of murder in the bombing and died in prison in 1985. In 1994, Smith published a book about his life, suggesting others who might have had a role in the bombing.
The case was again reopened in 1980, 1988 and 1997, when two other former Klan members, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were finally brought to trial; Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be brought to trial.
Justice came slowly, but the effect of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was immediate and devastating. Outrage over the death of the four young girls in this terrorist attack built increased support for the continuing struggle to end segregation. That support would help lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Sources
Bending the Arc Project – The Fifth Girl