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The Conversation
Jason Wollschleger, Professor of Sociology, Whitworth University

Birmingham church bombing wasn’t an isolated act of terrorism – there were dozens of attacks on Black houses of worship during the Civil Rights Movement

Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee pray beside the ruins of a burned church near Dawson, Ga., in 1962. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Sept. 15 marks the anniversary of an infamous terror attack: the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. On that Sunday morning, members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, planted dynamite on the east side of the brown brick building.

The bomb went off in the midst of Sunday school, at 10:22 a.m., murdering four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, who were all 14 years old, and Denise McNair, who was 11. The blast injured 22 other churchgoers, including a 12-year-old girl, Sarah Jean Collins, who was blinded in one eye.

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