September 15 |

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombed | Four Girls Killed

16th-Street-Baptist-Church-bombing-girls — The four young girls that were killed in the bombing (clockwise from top left): Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.

The explosion at 10:22 a.m. took the lives of the young girls and injured over 20 others at the church. The innocence of youth was scarred that Sunday morning in Birmingham as the children were preparing for the church's "Youth Day". The world mourned with 8,000 persons who attended the funeral. Riots which occurred after the church bombing resulted in the deaths of two African American boys, Virgil Ware age 13, and Johnny Robinson age 16. African American leaders had reached a tipping point in their patience with the lack of government actions.

16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Photo: John Morse, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins in a wire to President Kennedy said that unless the government provided more than "picayune and piecemeal aid against this type of bestiality" Negros will " employ such methods as our desperation may dictate in defense of the lives of our people." Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a wire to segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace stated," the blood of four little children...is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder."