16th Street Baptist Church bombing

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was an attack on a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963 by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The bombing was the most publicized act of violence during an intense period of racial tension in the South and galvanized the civil rights movement due to the shocking nature of the crime and the youth and innocence of the victims.

Background

Birmingham was among the most racially segregated cities in the South in the early 1960s and had long been a focal point for the civil rights movement. The city used discriminatory practices in many official capacities, including employment, education, and housing.

The state's governor, George Wallace, had been an outspoken advocate for racial segregation. In June of 1963, he had personally attempted to block African-American students from entering the University of Alabama, and on September 9, 1963—the week before the bombing—he had sought to block four black elementary students from desegregating a school in nearby Huntsville, Alabama. Shortly before the bombing, he told theNew York Times that Alabama needed "a few first-class funerals" to stop federal attempts to desegregate the state.

Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy had also made Alabama a focus. Beginning in April 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading African-American civil rights group, used Birmingham for a campaign of nonviolent action. One of the centerpieces of the movement was the Children's Crusade, which had high school and college students skip school on May 2-5, 1963 and walk peacefully from the 16th Street Baptist Church into various downtown businesses as a means of forced integration. In scenes that were publicized around the world, the local police turned firehoses and police dogs on the student demonstrators, thrusting both the civil rights movement and the 16th Street Baptist Church into the national spotlight. By September of 1963, tensions in the city were very high, particularly in light of national outrage at the brutality shown to demonstrators throughout the summer. Several small bombings of churches and black-owned businesses also occurred throughout the city in response to increasing civil rights concessions that included the integration of Alabama's public school system that fall.

The Bombing

As the 16th Street Baptist Church was a large, centrally located building with historic links to black culture, it was a common meeting point for demonstrators. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan would often make bomb threats to the church to interrupt civil rights meetings and church services being held there.

On September 15, 1963, a white man was seen leaving a package under the east stairwell of the church. At 10:22 a.m., a bomb detonated just moments after another threat was phoned into the church. The resulting explosion, near the basement's bathroom, caused many of the church's interior walls to collapse. The devastation was particularly intense in the basement, where five young girls had been putting on their choir robes in preparation for the eleven o'clock service (which was to have featured a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives"). Four of the five girls—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, all aged 14, and Carol Denise McNair, 11—were killed instantly. Collins's sister Sarah was the sole survivor, though she lost an eye in the explosion.

Aftermath

In the following days, black civil rights leaders urged their followers to remain peaceful, and Wallace offered a $5,000 reward for information on top of the $52,000 presented by the city. Despite the pleas for calm, riots erupted throughout the city between demonstrators and the police, leading to the firebombings of businesses and the further deaths of two black teenagers. King personally blamed Wallace for stoking white supremacists, while appealing for nonviolent solutions to the crisis.

The bombing received international press, embarrassing Birmingham and leading to calls for greater civil rights initiatives in the city and throughout the South. As a result of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and other human rights violations in 1963, John F. Kennedy began to press for the passage of a breakthrough civil rights bill that would bar any form of discrimination based upon race, color, sex, or national origin. An outpouring of public sympathy after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 ended Congressional stalemate over the issue, and Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, was able to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, 1964.

However, the perpetuators of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing remained unknown.

Later Events

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was assigned to investigate the crime. Witness statements of the bombing and the FBI's own intelligence about the white supremacist movement led them to consider a known member of the Ku Klux Klan named Robert Chambliss. Despite the investigators' increasing certainty that Chambliss was the primary perpetrator of the bombing, a lack of physical evidence and the tight silence among members of the white supremacist movement limited their ability to formally charge him of a crime. In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover closed the investigation without charging anyone, while also ordering that all evidence be sealed.

Hoover's refusal to allow the FBI to continue its investigation or share its findings with any other government agency has led to speculation that he may have had personal motivations for doing so. Hoover had an intense distrust of the civil rights movement and considered its leaders to be potentially subversive elements.

After Hoover's death in 1972, the investigation was reopened, leading to Chambliss's conviction in 1977. After Chambliss's death in prison in 1985, the FBI elected to reopen the case again in the 1990s, this time in hopes of indicting his accessories to the crime. Although suspected conspirator Herman Cash had already died, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry were arrested in 2000 and convicted of four counts of murder during separate trials, in 2001 and 2002 respectively, using secret FBI recordings from 1964 that implicated them in the bombing.

On May 24, 2013, President Barack Obama awarded the four victims of the bombing a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal. The medal was presented to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Bibliography

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Parks Service, US Dept. of the Interior, 22 Nov. 2023, www.nps.gov/articles/16thstreetbaptist.htm. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History, 16 Apr. 2024, www.history.com/topics/1960s/birmingham-church-bombing. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

“From the Archive, 16 September 1963: Black Church Bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.” The Guardian, 16 Sept. 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/16/16th-street-baptist-church-birmingham-alabama-1963. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

Graham, David. “How Much Has Changed Since the Birmingham Church Bombing?” The Atlantic, 18 June 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/historical-background-charleston-shooting/396242/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024