The 16th Street Baptist Church marked the anniversary by turning its ground into a place the history the American experience.
The four girls killed in Birmingham on September 15, 1963 would be no older than 77 today. The people who knew them are still alive. And as of this week, so is a building meant to keep the story from going quiet.
On the 63rd anniversary of the bombing, the 16th Street Baptist Church held a morning service and opened its new Education and Visitor Center — a permanent space steps from where the blast went off.
The facts. On a Sunday in 1963, someone called the church, said two words — “Three minutes” — and hung up. Less than a minute later, dynamite planted by Klan members tore a hole through the rear wall and cratered the basement. Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair, 11, were killed. Addie’s 12-year-old sister, Sarah, survived and lost her right eye.
Birmingham had already earned the name “Bombingham” — at least 21 bombings had hit Black homes and churches in the prior eight years, per the National Park Service. None had killed anyone. This one did, and the country moved. Within a year, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice took decades. Robert Chambliss wasn’t convicted until 1977, Thomas Blanton in 2001, Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 without ever being charged.
This year’s commemoration drew Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin and Rev. Arthur Price. Then the doors of the new center opened.
History like this usually lives in a textbook — read once, closed, filed away. A visitor center works differently. It’s ground you can walk. A child born after the last conviction can stand where the bomb went off and understand what segregation cost, in a city that spent sixty years refusing to forget.
The names hold up the whole thing: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair.
