A bomb tears through a Birmingham Sunday school; four girls are dead
At 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, nineteen sticks of dynamite went off beneath the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a building that had long hosted civil rights meetings. The blast killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair, who were getting ready for the church's Youth Day, and injured twenty-two others, including Addie Mae's sister Sarah. Klansmen Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry were later convicted of planting the charge outside the basement, though investigators long suspected a fourth man was involved. Within hours, some 2,000 people had gathered outside the ruined church.
The bombing pushed a reluctant Washington further into the fight for civil rights. It hardened Northern opinion behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the bombing became the argument that federal law, not local goodwill, would have to end segregation.
QWas a fourth Klansman ever suspected in the bombing besides Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry?
Investigators long believed a fourth man, Herman Frank Cash, helped plant the dynamite alongside Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry. Cash was named by the FBI as a suspect but died in 1994 before prosecutors ever brought charges against him. Because Alabama and federal authorities focused their resources on the three men they could build cases against, Cash went to his grave never having faced a courtroom for the crime investigators believed he committed. His role remains part of the historical record only through investigative files, not a verdict.
QWho heard the blast from blocks away and later became Secretary of State?
Condoleezza Rice was a few blocks from the church at her father's church that morning, and she said she never saw the explosion but heard it and felt it, a sound she later said still reverberates in her ears. Carol Denise McNair, one of the four girls killed, had been her friend and playmate. Rice later served as the sixty-sixth United States Secretary of State.
QHow did Condoleezza Rice come to feel a bombing that happened blocks from her own church?
Rice would later describe the moment in more detail than she had before: she did not see the blast, but she heard and felt it. Decades later, Rice described the attack as "calculated, not random," meant, in her words, "to suck the hope out of young lives" and push old fears into the next generation. The sound, she said, would reverberate in her ears forever.
