Just three weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech, an Alabama church was bombed before a Sunday service — killing four girls and injuring several others.
The horrific scene at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was one of several tragedies at the peak of the Civil Rights movement that helped transform the nation.
On the 52nd anniversary of the bombing, here are several facts everyone should know of the senseless crime:
1. Members of the Ku Klux Klan called in bomb threats to the church several times prior to the bombing.
2. The bomb went off at approximately 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963 as 200 church members were attending Sunday school classes .
3. The bodies of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, were found in the basement bathroom under the rubble with 11-year-old Denise McNair.
4. Sarah Collins, 10, was also in the basement bathroom and lost her right eye at the time of explosion.
5. Four Klan members — Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss and Bobby Frank Cherry — planted the bomb, made of 15 sticks of dynamite, underneath the church front steps.
6. The four white supremacists were not charged until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was convicted of first-degree murder of victim Denise McNair. Blanton and Cherry were later convicted in 2001 and 2002 and sentenced to life in prison.
7. The church bombing was the third in 11 days.
8. The violent explosion eventually led to the Civil Rights Act being signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
9. Several movies and books depict what happened in Birmingham including “4 Little Girls,” directed by Spike Lee and “Selma,” directed by Ava DuVernay.
10. On May 24, 2013, President Obama awarded a Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to the four girls killed in 1963, presenting the medal to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
