The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The bombing was committed by a white supremacist terrorist group.[1][2][3] Four members of a local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapter planted 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps located on the east side of the church.[4]
Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity,"[5] the explosion at the church killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded in 1965 that the bombing had been committed by four known KKK members and segregationists: Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry,[6] no prosecutions were conducted until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried by Attorney General of Alabama Bill Baxley and convicted of the first-degree murder of one of the victims, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair.
As part of an effort by state and federal prosecutors to reopen and try cold cases involving murder and domestic terrorism from the civil rights era, the State of Alabama placed both Blanton Jr. and Cherry on trial, who were each convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Future United States Senator Doug Jones successfully prosecuted Blanton and Cherry.[7] Herman Cash died in 1994, and was never charged with his alleged involvement in the bombing.
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and also contributed to support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Congress.[8]
In the years leading up to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham had earned a national reputation as a tense, violent and racially segregated city, in which even tentative racial integration in any form was met with violent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. described Birmingham as "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States."[9] Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor,[10] led the effort in enforcing racial segregation in the city through the use of violent tactics.[11]
Black and white residents of Birmingham were segregated between different public amenities such as water fountains and places of public gathering such as movie theaters.[12] The city had no black police officers or firefighters[12] and most black residents could expect to find only menial employment in professions such as cooks and cleaners.[12] Black residents did not just experience segregation in the context of leisure and employment, but also in the context of their freedom and well-being. Given the state's disenfranchisement of most black people since the turn of the century, by making voter registration essentially impossible, few of the city's black residents were registered to vote. Bombings at black homes[13] and institutions were a regular occurrence, with at least 21 separate explosions recorded at black properties and churches in the eight years before 1963. However, none of these explosions had resulted in fatalities.[14] These attacks earned the city the nickname "Bombingham".[13][15]
Civil Rights activists and leaders in Birmingham fought against the city's deeply-ingrained and institutionalized racism with tactics that included the targeting of Birmingham's economic and social disparities.[11] Their demands included that public amenities such as lunch counters and parks be desegregated, the criminal charges against demonstrators and protestors should be removed, and an end to overt discrimination with regards to employment opportunities.[11] The intentional scope of these activities was to see the end of segregation across Birmingham and the South as a whole.[11] The work these Civil Rights activists were engaged in within Birmingham was crucial to the movement as the Birmingham campaign was seen as guidance for other cities in the South with regards to rising against segregation and racism.[11]
The three-story 16th Street Baptist Church was a rallying point for civil rights activities through the spring of 1963.[8] When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress on Racial Equality became involved in a campaign to register African Americans to vote in Birmingham, tensions in the city increased. The church was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Fred Shuttlesworth, for organizing and educating marchers.[8] It was the location where students were organized and trained by the SCLC Director of Direct Action, James Bevel, to participate in the 1963 Birmingham campaign's Children's Crusade after other marches had taken place.[8]
On Thursday, May 2, more than 1,000 students, some reportedly as young as eight, opted to leave school and gather at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Demonstrators present were given instructions to march to downtown Birmingham and discuss with the mayor their concerns about racial segregation in the city, and to integrate buildings and businesses currently segregated. Although this march was met with fierce resistance and criticism, and 600 arrests were made on the first day alone, the Birmingham campaign and its Children's Crusade continued until May 5. The intention was to fill the jail with protesters. These demonstrations led to an agreement, on May 8, between the city's business leaders and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to integrate public facilities, including schools, in the city within 90 days. (The first three schools in Birmingham to be integrated would do so on September 4.)[16]
These demonstrations and the concessions from city leaders to the majority of demonstrators' demands were met with fierce resistance by other whites in Birmingham. In the weeks following the September 4 integration of public schools, three additional bombs were detonated in Birmingham.[17] Other acts of violence followed the settlement, and several staunch Klansmen were known to have expressed frustration at what they saw as a lack of effective resistance to integration.[18]
As a known and popular rallying point for civil rights activists, the 16th Street Baptist Church was an obvious target.
In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of America—Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Robert Edward Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and (allegedly) Herman Frank Cash[19]—planted a minimum of 15 sticks[20] of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, close to the basement. At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary, a 15-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull.[21] The anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes"[22]: 10 to Maull before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded. Five children were in the basement at the time of the explosion,[23] in a restroom close to the stairwell, changing into choir robes[24] in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Rock That Will Not Roll".[25] According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".[26]
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet (2.1 m) in diameter in the church's rear wall,[27] and a crater five feet (1.5 m) wide and two feet (0.61 m) deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing a passing motorist out of his car.[28] Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.[17]
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion. The church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn.[29]
Four girls—Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Rosamond Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949)—were killed in the attack.[30] The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated that her body could be identified only through her clothing and a ring.[31] Another victim was killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull.[32] The pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, recollected in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together".[33] All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.[34]
Between 14 and 22 additional people were injured in the explosion,[35][36] one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins.[37] She had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye.[38] In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had watched her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[39] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.[40]
Violence escalated in Birmingham in the hours following the bombing, with reports of groups of black and white youth throwing bricks and shouting insults at each other.[41] Police urged parents of black and white youths to keep their children indoors, as the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ordered an additional 300 state police and 500 Alabama National Guardsmen to assist in quelling unrest.[42] The Birmingham City Council convened an emergency meeting to propose safety measures for the city, although proposals for a curfew were rejected. Within 24 hours of the bombing, a minimum of five businesses and properties had been firebombed and numerous cars—most of which were driven by whites—had been stoned by rioting youths.[17]
In response to the church bombing, described by the Mayor of Birmingham, Albert Boutwell, as "just sickening", the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, dispatched 25 FBI agents, including explosives experts, to Birmingham to conduct a thorough forensic investigation.[43]
