Honoring four little black girls murdered in their Christian church by terrorists deceived by white lies.

Sunday, September 15, 1963, was Youth Day in the historic brick 16th Street Baptist Church, where five young girls "dressed in their Sunday best" were eagerly primping downstairs in the ladies’ lounge before the upcoming Sunday service. At 10:22 a.m., dynamite that four members of a splinter KKK group had secretly stashed under the steps that led to the sanctuary exploded, sending glass and cement roaring through the basement and instantly killing Denise McNair, 11, Cynthia Wesley, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, and Addie Mae Collins, 14. Addie Mae's 12-year-old sister Sarah Collins Rudolph, standing at the sink at the back of the room, survived the blast with serious injuries and lost her eyesight. The blast was so powerful it buckled cars outside, blew the face of Jesus from a church stained-glass window, and stopped a clock in a shop across the street at 10:24. It was an apt symbol: When the bomb went off, says former Senator Doug Jones, "Time for Birmingham stood still.''

Another 22 people were injured by the explosion. Survivors remember "that horrific noise," the wafting dust, the moment when "everything got real dark and you could hear kids screaming." The mothers of some victims rushed downstairs into the chaos, wailing, "My baby, my baby." In a 2020 interview, Rudolph recalled "a lot of glass in my face, my eyes, and my chest...You go to church and think you’re safe in church, and your sister is killed and your friends are killed." "I was 15 when the church was bombed," said one survivor who'd gone upstairs moments before, "but then I was 15 for the next 20 years." The church's Reverend John Cross, who had been preparing to start the Youth Day service when the bomb went off, described crawling through the dust and rubble and finding the bodies, one after the other, "all stacked on top of another.'’ Cross never had the chance to deliver his sermon for the day; it was titled, "A Love That Forgives."

Though many have forgotten or never knew, the four girls were not the only young black lives senselessly taken that day; two black boys were also killed. After the bombing, a group of white kids went cruising around in a car draped with a Confederate flag; some black kids, including 16-year-old Johnny Robinson, threw rocks at them. When a police car arrived, white cop Jack Parker, sitting in the back seat with a shotgun pointed out the window, shot Robinson in the back as he ran away. 13-year-old Virgil Ware was riding on a bike with his brother when one of a group of white boys, who said he was just trying to scare him, shot him in the chest and face. Two boys were convicted of second-degree manslaughter; a judge suspended their sentences and gave them two years probation. The cop was not charged, leading Robinson's sister to declare, “We ain’t got nothing but heartaches." In 2009, the FBI reopened the case in hopes of bringing civil rights charges, but the officer had died.

That Sept. 15th was a bloody culmination of a year of racist terror that helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement. Months after George Wallace's "Segregation forever" and in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, Birmingham’s Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That spring, Birmingham saw so many sit-ins and protests, and racist bombings in response to them, the city became known as "Bombingham." It was ruled by police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who let the KKK beat arriving Freedom Riders with bats and chains, attacked protesters, including kids, with fire hoses and dogs, and arrested them by the hundreds; one was MLK, who then wrote his famous, defiant Letter from a Birmingham Jail. That summer, the violence and frustration escalated. On Aug. 28 over a quarter-million people joined the March on Washington, where King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church came five days after Black children entered the city's formerly all-white schools following an August court order; it capped a years-long fight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education SCOTUS decision declaring segregation unconstitutional. As far back as 1957, Rev. Shuttlesworth and other Black parents had tried to enroll their children in the city’s all-white high school, only to be attacked by Klansmen armed with chains, knives and brass knuckles. In that hateful climate, the Church, historically a place for civil rights activists to gather, was a natural target: "For white supremacists in Birmingham, the children and the 16th Street Baptist Church (were) the symbols of the movement that had beaten them." Thus did four members of a splinter KKK group - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Bobby Frank Cherry - decide to bomb the church. Chambliss told his niece, "Just wait till Sunday morning - they'll beg us to let them segregate."

The murder of children in a Sunday morning church by white racists drew national attention, and MLK Jr. to deliver a somber, soaring eulogy for the young victims, "the martyrs and heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity." Recognizing the galvanizing power of their deaths and echoing his Birmingham Jail letter, he argued, "They have something to say to every one of us" - the minister "who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows," the politician "who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred," a federal government that has "compromised (with) southern Dixiecrats" and northern hypocrites, each of us who "must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but (the system) which produced the murderers." Calling the girls' lives "distressingly small in quantity, but glowingly large in quality,” he insisted, "They did not die in vain. In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair."

Some change did come. Faced with the horror of their murders, support for civil rights legislation grew, leading to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But America's racism still flourished, and while "everyone knew who the killers were," they went free for 14 years. In 1963, Bill Baxley was a young law student outraged by the bombing; in 1977, as Alabama’s attorney general, he reopened the case, famously responding to a KKK threat with "Kiss my ass" on official state letterhead. With a still-racist FBI reluctant to share evidence, Baxley could only charge and convict Robert Chambliss - known as “Dynamite Bob” for his skill in racist attacks and "deep sense of meanness" - in the murder of Denise McNair. He died eight years later in prison having long written aggrieved, oblivious letters ripe with white privilege to his wife, "Mommie," whining about his lawyer, the governor, his trouble sleeping. "I got plenty to tell you when and if i ever get out," he griped. "It would make you all want to kill somebody.”

In 1997, Bill Clinton appointed Doug Jones, who'd attended Chambliss' trial as a young lawyer, U.S. Attorney for northern Alabama. Stunningly, doggedly, Jones again re-opened the case. Herman Cash had died, but in 2001 and 2002 Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry, both in their 60s, for first-degree murder. Before his opening statement, with the families of the four girls in the front row, Jones sighed in tribute to the past 38 years: "Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a long time.'' Jones portrayed Blanton as such a rabid racist he helped dynamite the Church and then spent years obsessively driving past the site, one of many Southerners who "saw their segregated way of life dissolving and couldn't stand it.'' Even Blanton's lawyer told the jury they wouldn't like his client, a loudmouth, racist creep, but they shouldn't hold the deaths of four girls against him. Blanton and Cherry were both found guilty; like Chambliss, they too died in prison, in 2004 and 2020 respectively.

On Friday, Birmingham churches rang their bells four times at 10:22 a.m. in tribute - in a synagogue, a shofar was blown - as hundreds of people black and white filled the church for a remembrance ceremony. The keynote speaker was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, who for Doug Jones personified "that hope" of MLK,'s 60 years ago when he vowed the girls "did not die in vain." Jackson said she came to Birmingham "to commemorate and to mourn, to honor and to warn.” Citing "the toll that was paid to secure the blessings of liberty for African Americans," she argued "the work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom." For that, "We are going to need the truth" - not right-wing whitewashing - about (a) past "filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice." “If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation,” she said, "we cannot allow discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history...It is dangerous to forget.”