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On September 15, 1963, four hundred African Americans joined together to worship at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. A few days earlier, the courts had ordered the Birmingham schools to be desegregated, and tensions between white segregationists and African Americans were at a breaking point. Four girls, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins (age fourteen), and Denise McNair, age eleven were in the basement of the church when a bomb exploded, killing them instantly. Others in the church were seriously injured. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church served as an organizing center for rallies and marches. Many well-known civil rights leaders, such as Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Dick Gregory, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr., used the church as their headquarters at one time or another.
At 10:22 that morning there was a loud thud followed by a large blast that sent a gust of fire above the church. Closed doors flew open, and the walls shook. Some of those inside believed the Russians were coming. A motorist was blown from his car. A pedestrian calling his wife from a pay phone across the street was thrown across the street, the phone still in hand. Pastor John Cross moved toward the fog that was at the northeast side of his church. There was a large hole in the wall of what had been the women’s lounge. The bomb had made a crater 2 1/2 feet deep and 5 1/2 feet wide. Civil defense workers began digging into the wreckage. There they saw blood-spattered leaflets printed with a child’s prayer: ‘Dear God, we are sorry for the times we were so unkind.’ They finally uncovered four bodies. They were stacked horizontally, like firewood. Cross had no idea who they were. They looked like old women, and he knew that the basement had been filled with Sunday school children.
‘Lord, that’s Denise,’ said Deacon M.W. Pippen, owner of the Social Cleaners. Denise McNair was Pippen’s granddaughter. Cross then realized the corpses were girls. Pippen had recognized Denise’s no-longer-shiny patent-leather shoe. The clothes had been blown off the girls’ bodies. Samuel Rutledge, looking for his 3 1/2-year-old sons, instead found a female buried alive, moaning and bleeding from the head. He carried her through the hole toward the street. ‘Do you know who she is?’ people asked one another. Cross thought she had to be 40 or 45 years old. But Sarah Collins was only 12. After being loaded into an ambulance, she sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and occasionally said, ‘What happened? I can’t see.’ The ambulance driver delivered Sarah to University Hospital and returned to pick up his next cargo, the corpse of her sister Addie Mae.
Approaching her father in the crowd on the sidewalk, Maxine Pippen McNair cried, ‘I can’t find Denise.’ M.W. Pippen told his daughter, ‘She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.’ Watching his daughter take in the significance of the shoe he held up, he screamed, ‘I’d like to blow the whole town up.’
Word of the bombing reached Martin Luther King in Atlanta as he was about to step up to the Ebenezer Baptist Church pulpit. ‘Dear God, why?’ he had silently asked. Writing President John F. Kennedy that unless ‘immediate federal steps are taken,’ the ‘worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen’ would come to pass in Alabama. His telegram to Gov. George Wallace charged, ‘The blood of our little children is on your hands.’
King prepared to go back to Birmingham, to another riot scene. The now-familiar assortment of law enforcement officials stood guard with their shotguns at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church while two FBI lab men flown down on a military jet sifted through the debris.
One of the stained-glass windows had survived the explosion. Only the face of Jesus had been blown out.
Prosecutions in the killings of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Morris Wesley, and Carole Robertson were delayed by the reluctance of witnesses and a dearth of physical evidence. One suspect died in 1994 without having been charged; three others were convicted of murder between 1977 and 2002.
In signing the Civil Rights Act, which banned major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic and religious minorities and women, President Johnson deployed 72 pens, providing plenty of keepsakes. One went to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who said the new law would ‘bring practical relief to the Negro in the South, and give the Negro in the North a psychological boost that he sorely needs.’ LBJ told the East Room crowd that the historic ceremony was occurring on his daughter Luci’s 17th birthday and exactly nine years after his heart attack in 1955.
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