September 15, 1963 – 16th Street Baptist Church bombing

September 15, 1963
During Sunday School,
15 sticks of dynamite
blew apart the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
in
Birmingham, Alabama,
killing four children
in the
basement changing room,
and injuring 23 others.
Prime suspects were the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Nacirema
(both white supremacist organizations;
 Nacirema is “American”
spelled backwards).
A week before the bombing
Governor George C. Wallace
had told
The New York Times
that to stop integration,
Alabama needed a
“few first-class funerals.”

This event set off
racial rioting and other violence
 in which
two African-American boys
were shot to death,
and became a turning point
in generating
broad American sympathy
for the
civil rights movement.

A member of the church,
studying on a scholarship in
Paris at the time, was
Birmingham High School student
Angela Davis.

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