#denisemcnair — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

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.

#16thStreetBaptistBombing #4LittleGirls #AddieMaeCollins #CynthiaWesley #CaroleRobertson #DeniseMcNair