On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, at 10:22 AM, a bomb exploded beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The church was a center of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham — it had served as a meeting place for organizers, a staging ground for demonstrations, and a symbol of Black civic life in the most aggressively segregated major city in the United States. Four girls were killed in the explosion: Addie Mae Collins, age 14. Cynthia Wesley, age 14. Carole Robertson, age 14. Carol Denise McNair, age 11. They were in the basement restroom, preparing for the Youth Day service. Twenty-two other people were injured. The bomb had been planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan. It was not the first bomb to hit Birmingham — the city had been bombed so many times it was known as Bombingham. It was the one that changed everything.
The bombing did not happen in a vacuum. It happened three weeks after the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered the I Have a Dream speech to 250,000 people on the National Mall. It happened five months after Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor had turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful demonstrators — images broadcast on television screens across the country and around the world that had forced the Kennedy administration to take civil rights legislation seriously. It happened in a city where the Klan operated with the knowledge and often the cooperation of local law enforcement. The bombing was a response to everything that had happened that year — a statement by white supremacists that the movement could be answered with explosives, that Black children in a church on a Sunday morning were legitimate targets, that terror would continue regardless of what laws were passed or what speeches were given.
The FBI investigated the bombing and identified four suspects within weeks — Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jr., Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry, all members of the Ku Klux Klan. The investigation was closed in 1968 without charges being filed. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, personally blocked prosecution despite having substantial evidence. The case was not reopened until 1971, when Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley made it a priority. Robert Chambliss — known as Dynamite Bob for his history of bombing Black homes and churches — was finally convicted of murder in 1977, fourteen years after the bombing. He was 73 years old. Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were not convicted until 2001 and 2002 respectively — 38 years after they killed four children. Herman Cash died in 1994 without being charged.
The four girls killed in the bombing became central symbols of the Civil Rights Movement — their deaths used to demonstrate, to a national audience that had been watching fire hoses and police dogs but had not yet been fully forced to reckon with the human cost, what segregation actually required in its defense. President Kennedy called the bombing a criminal act. Congress had been stalling on civil rights legislation for months. The bombing — and the assassination of Kennedy two months later — accelerated the political pressure that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair were used, as Black death has so often been used in American political life, as evidence in an argument that should never have needed to be made. They deserved to live. They deserved to grow up. They deserved a Sunday morning in church without a bomb beneath the steps.
The 16th Street Baptist Church still stands in Birmingham. It was restored and rededicated in 1963 and remains an active congregation. A memorial stained glass window — the Wales Window, donated by the people of Wales — depicts a Black Christ with his arms outstretched, one hand reaching toward the words “You do it to me.” The four girls are memorialized across the street in Kelly Ingram Park, where the demonstrations of 1963 had taken place. Their names are on the park’s sculptures. Their names are on the church. Their names should be in every American history textbook. For decades they were not. The bombing was treated as a footnote — a tragedy that occurred on the way to the Civil Rights Act rather than a crime committed by named individuals who were protected by a federal law enforcement apparatus that chose not to prosecute them. This archive puts their names in the record and leaves them there.