Carol Denise McNair

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.

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.

Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity," the explosion at the church killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.

Bombings at black homes 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.

These attacks earned the city the nickname "Bombingham".

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.

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.

The intentional scope of these activities was to see the end of segregation across Birmingham and the South as a whole.

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.

The three-story 16th Street Baptist Church was a rallying point for civil rights activities through the spring of 1963.

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.

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.

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—planted a minimum of 15 sticks of Dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, close to the basement.

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.

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, 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.

Herman Cash died in 1994, and was never charged with his alleged involvement in the bombing.

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.)

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.

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.

As part of a revival effort by states and the federal government to prosecute cold cases from the civil rights era, the state 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.

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 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull.

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."

Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, led the effort in enforcing racial segregation in the city through the use of violent tactics.

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.

The city had no black police officers or firefighters and most black residents could expect to find only menial employment in professions such as cooks and cleaners.

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.

As a known and popular rallying point for civil rights activists, the 16th Street Baptist Church was an obvious target.