The Four Girls of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

The Sunday school lesson at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty-three, was titled A Love That Forgives. The congregation was preparing for morning worship. Four girls were in the basement ladies' lounge, finishing their preparations.

Addie Mae Collins was fourteen years old. Her father had moved the family from sharecropping country to Birmingham in search of work, and Addie Mae had grown up singing in the church choir. Carol Denise McNair was eleven, the youngest of the four. Her father was a photographer who documented Birmingham's Black community; Carol Denise had told people she wanted to be a doctor. Carole Rosamond Robertson was fourteen, an honor student, a Girl Scout, and a violinist. Cynthia Wesley was also fourteen, the adopted daughter of a teacher who described her as the most academically serious of the group.

All four had come to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that morning because it was the organizing center of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been using it as a staging ground all year, through Bull Connor's fire hoses in May, through demonstrations that had put thousands of people in the streets. The church was known to the Klan for exactly that reason.

Sometime the night before, members of the Klan's Cahaba River Group placed a dynamite charge under the church steps on the east side of the building. It detonated at ten twenty-two in the morning. Twenty-two other people were injured. Sarah Collins Rudolph, twelve years old and Addie Mae's sister, survived with serious eye injuries.

Governor George Wallace called the bombing a regrettable incident. Martin Luther King Junior wrote to Wallace directly that his public statements of defiance had created, in King's words, the climate in which the bombing was possible. The FBI identified Robert Chambliss, known in Birmingham as Dynamite Bob, as the bomber within days of the explosion. He was not charged. He continued working as a city employee. He was convicted fourteen years later, in nineteen seventy-seven. Thomas Blanton Junior was convicted in two thousand one. Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in two thousand two. A fourth man, Herman Cash, died in nineteen ninety-four and was never charged.

Four girls in their Sunday clothes. The lesson they never got to hear was about forgiveness.