Civil Rights Events

Birmingham 1963

16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

A Horrendous Event

 

Fast forward past Governor George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door,” barring the admittance of two qualified black students June 11 to the University of Alabama.

 

Fast forward past the murder of Mississippi activist Medgar Evers, ambushed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, June 12.

 

Fast forward past Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “March on Washington” and “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial August 28.

 

Fast forward past Governor Wallace’s attempt September 9 to prevent black students in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee from entering five all-white elementary and secondary schools in those cities despite being ordered by federal judges not to interfere.

 

Fast forward past President Kennedy’s order September 10 that the Alabama National Guard be federalized and that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara use any of the nation’s armed forces he deemed necessary to enforce school desegregation in Alabama.

 

We stop to focus on a horrendous event that occurred on Sunday morning, September 15, at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

 

Many of the civil rights protest marches that took place in Birmingham during the 1960s began at the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had long been a significant religious center for the city’s black population and a routine meeting place for civil rights organizers like King.

 

KKK members had routinely called in bomb threats intended to disrupt civil rights meetings as well as services at the church (Birmingham 1).

 

… the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church … greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service (16^th Street NPS 1).

 

On September 15, 1963, 14-year-old Cynthia Morris Wesley and three other members of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church youth choir left their Sunday school class to freshen up for their roles as ushers in the main service. The lesson for the day had been “The Love That Forgives.” Eleven-year-old Denise McNair met Cynthia and her classmates in the women’s lounge, in the northeast corner of the basement.

 

Carole Robertson, 14, was the most mature of the girls. She was wearing medium-high heels for the first time, shiny black ones bought the day before. Carole’s mother had gotten her a necklace to go with the shoes and put a winter coat on layaway for her.

 

Also in the lounge was 14-year-old Addie Mae Collins. One of eight children, Addie was a little on the shy side, but she looked radiant in her white usher’s dress. Cynthia and Carole also wore white. The three ushers were standing with young Denise by the window, which looked out onto Sixteenth Street at ground level. So elegant was this church that even the restroom window was made of stained glass.

 

Addie’s younger sister Sarah Collins stood at the washbowl. At the request of a Sunday school teacher, 15-year-old Bernadine Mathews came into the lounge to encourage the girls to return to their classrooms. Cynthia said she needed to push her hair up one more time. “Cynthia,” Bernadine chided her, “children who don’t obey the Lord live only half as long” (McWhorter 1-2).

Carolyn McKinstry was the 15-year-old Sunday-school secretary of 16th Street Baptist Church.  In her book, While the World Watched: a Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement, she narrated this:

 

At the end of Sunday school, I would get up and make a report. Around 10:15 a.m. I got up to collect the reports. I started upstairs. You had to pass the girls’ bathroom. I paused at the doorway, because they [Addie Mae, Carol, Cynthia, Denise] were all standing there, combing their hair, playing, and talking. We were all good friends, and we were excited about two things that Sunday. It was Youth Sunday, and that meant we got to do everything. We were the choir. We were the ushers, the speakers. The second thing was, after church we were going to have a gathering with punch and dancing. I knew my report had to be done at a certain time, so I went on up the stairs. When I got to the office, the phone was ringing. The caller on the other end of the phone said, “Three minutes.” Male caller. But he hung up just as quickly as he said that. I stepped out into the sanctuary to get more reports, and I only took about 15 steps into the sanctuary, and the bomb exploded (Joiner 1).

 

Sarah Collins Cox, then 12, was in the basement with her sister Addie Mae, 14, and Denise McNair, 11, a friend, getting ready to attend a youth service. "I remember Denise asking Addie to tie her belt," Cox, now 46, says in a near whisper, recalling the morning of Sept. 15, 1963. "Addie was tying her sash. Then it happened." A savage explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite stashed under a stairwell ripped through the northeast corner of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. "I couldn't see anymore because my eyes were full of glass - 23 pieces of glass," says Cox. "I didn't know what happened. I just remember calling, 'Addie, Addie.' But there was no answer. I don't remember any pain. I just remember wanting Addie" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 1).

 

A motorist was blown from his car. A pedestrian calling his wife from a pay phone across the street was whooshed, receiver still in hand, into the Social Cleaners, whose front door had been whipped open.

 

Pastor John Cross moved toward the fog that clung to the northeast side of his church. There was a 7- by 7-foot hole in the wall of what had been the women’s lounge. The bomb had made a crater 2 1/2 feet deep and 5 1/2 feet wide, demolishing a foundation that had been a 30-inch-thick mass of stone facing over a brick-and-masonry wall (McWhorter 3).

 

Inside the church, a teacher screamed, “Lie on the floor! Lie on the floor!” Rafters collapsed, a skylight fell on the pulpit. Part of a stained glass window shattered, obliterating the face of Christ. A man cried: “Everybody out! Everybody out!” A stream of sobbing Negroes stumbled through the litter — past twisted metal folding chairs, past splintered wooden benches, past shredded songbooks and Bibles. A Negro woman staggered out of the Social Dry Cleaning store shrieking “Let me at ’em! I’ll kill ’em!”— and fainted. White plaster dust fell gently for a block around.

 

Police cars poured into the block — and even as the cops plunged into the church, some enraged Negroes began throwing rocks at them.

 

On top [of the rubble of bricks] was a child’s white lace choir robe. A civil defense captain lifted the hem of the robe. “Oh, my God,” he cried. “Don’t look!” Beneath lay the mangled body of a Negro girl.

 

Barehanded, the workers dug deeper into the rubble — until four bodies had been uncovered. The head and shoulder of one child had been completely blown off (Time 1).

 

“Lord, that’s Denise,” said Deacon M.W. Pippen, owner of the Social Cleaners. Denise McNair was Pippen’s granddaughter. Only then did Cross realize the corpses were girls. Pippen had recognized Denise’s no-longer-shiny patent-leather shoe. The clothes had been blown off the girls’ bodies.

 

Samuel Rutledge, looking for his 3 1/2-year-old son, instead found a female buried alive, moaning and bleeding from the head. He carried her through the hole toward the street. “Do you know who she is?” people asked one another. Again, Cross thought she had to be 40 or 45 years old. But Sarah Collins was only 12. After being loaded into an ambulance (colored), she sang “Jesus Loves Me” and occasionally said, “What happened? I can’t see.” The ambulance driver delivered Sarah to University Hospital and returned to pick up his next cargo, the corpse of her sister Addie Mae.

 

Approaching her father in the crowd on the sidewalk, Maxine Pippen McNair cried, “I can’t find Denise.” M.W. Pippen told his daughter, “She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.” Watching his daughter take in the significance of the shoe he held up, he screamed, “I’d like to blow the whole town up” (McWhorter 3-4).

The remains were … carried out to waiting ambulances. A youth rushed forward, lifted a sheet and wailed: “This is my sister! My God — she’s dead!”

 

The church‘s pastor, the Rev. John Cross, hurried up and down the sidewalk, urging the milling crowd to go home. “Please go home!” he said. “The Lord is our shepherd, and we shall not want.” Another Negro minister added his pleas. “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed,” he said. “We must have love in our hearts for these men.” But a Negro boy screamed, “We give love — and we get this!” And another youth yelled: “Love ’em? Love ’em? We hate ’em!” A man wept: “My grandbaby was one of those killed! Eleven years old! I helped pull the rocks off her! You know how I feel? I feel like blowing the whole town up” (Time 2-3).

 

Carolyn McKinstry recalled: When the bomb exploded, it felt like the building shook. Everything came crashing in, the glass and the windows in the church. I fell on the floor because someone said, “Hit the floor.” We were all on the floor for just a couple of seconds. And then I could hear people getting up and running out. I got up, and I went outside. I was looking for my two little brothers. One of the first things we noticed was that the church was already surrounded by policemen. People were in panic mode. They were everywhere looking for their family members.

 

When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb (Joiner 2-3).

 

“I will never stop crying thinking about it,” Barbara Cross, now 68, told TIME in an emotional phone conversation. Her father, John Cross, was the pastor at the church, which was Birmingham’s largest African-American congregation; she was 13 and in its basement the day that Ku Klux Klan members planted a bomb under the building’s stairs. The blast was strong enough to send stone shooting into cars parked across the street and to knock people off their feet in nearby buildings. And inside the church, things were worse.

 

The bombing killed four of Cross’ classmates who had gone to the bathroom: three 14-year-olds, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. (Sarah Collins Rudolph, often referred to as the “Fifth Little Girl,” lost an eye but survived her injuries.)

 

“Addie wanted me to come with her, but then the teacher stopped me and gave me a writing assignment that saved my life,” Cross recalls.

 

Soon after, she heard “the most horrific noises I had ever heard in my life.” That was followed by the smell of smoke.

 

Her first thought was that Birmingham had been attacked by Cuba, she says. “The building shook, and I was hit in the head with a light fixture. I remember everything getting dark,” she says, “and I thought the United States was being attacked.” A church official led her and her younger sister and brother out by the hand. Somehow, she made her way home, and stayed the night at the home of a neighbor who was a nurse, who removed the glass fragments from her scalp and treated the area.

 

Dale Long, now 66, was 11 and in the basement that day too. “Some of us boys should have headed upstairs [to services] by then, but we got carried away talking about who’s going to have the best football team,” he recalls. “Suddenly, the big floor-to-ceiling bookcases started moving, and we looked at each other and ran. Even though it was dark and dusty and smoky, I knew how to get out. I could see my dad running down the street. I had never seen my dad run before. He hugged us unlike anything I could ever remember and said we’ll be alright. He took us to his office in the motel, where reporters who were staying there were arguing over the two pay phones in the lobby that they were trying to use to report stories back [to their bureaus].”

 

“If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”

 

[Barbara] Cross says her father “blamed himself for the bombing.”

 

“My parents knew the church had bomb threats, but they never told us about them because they didn’t want to scare us from going to church,” she says. “My father took responsibility because he gave Dr. King permission to use the church for protests. When he got older, he’d cry when he talked about it. He carried those wounds to his grave” (Waxman 1-4).

 

The bomber had hidden under a set of cinder block steps on the side of the church, tunneled under the basement and placed a bundle of dynamite under what turned out to be the girls' rest room (16^th Street NPR 1).

 

 

Works cited:

 

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.”  NPR.  September 15, 2003.  Web.  https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1431932

 

“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).”  National Park Service.  March 23, 2016.  Web.  https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstreetbaptist.htm

 

“Birmingham Church Bombing.”  History.  A&E Television Networks.  August 28, 2018.  Web.  https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/birmingham-church-bombing

 

Joiner, Lottie L.  “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.”  Daily Beast.  September 15, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-years-later-the-sixteenth-street-baptist-church-bombing

 

McWhorter, Diance.  “The Stark Reminders of the Birmingham Church Bombing.” 
Smithsonian Magazine.  November 2013.  Web.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-stark-reminders-of-the-birmingham-church-bombing-4304931/

 

Smith, Kyle; Wescott, Gail Cameron; and Craig, David Cobb.  “The Day the Children Died.”  People Magazine.  Web.  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm

 

Time Magazine.  September 27, 1963.  Web.  http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-baptist-church-bombing-anniversary/

 

Waxman, Olivia B.  “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.”  Time.  Web.  http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-baptist-church-bombing-anniversary/