Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church (1963)

CTL-E-5424 · Event · other · 1963

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls in the basement restroom as they prepared for the church's Youth Day: Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, each fourteen, and Carol Denise McNair, eleven. The church had served as headquarters and gathering point for that spring's Birmingham campaign, in which the city's children had marched against segregation and been met with dogs and fire hoses; the bombing came four months after that campaign's settlement and eighteen days after the March on Washington. Two more Black teenagers were killed in Birmingham's streets in the violence of that day. The crime became a national reckoning — it hardened support for the civil rights bill then before Congress — but convictions came slowly: the first bomber was tried in 1977, and the last living defendants not until 2001 and 2002. CTL records the bombing as its own event. The graph's Letter from Birmingham Jail (CTL-E-1622) belongs to the campaign of that spring; it is a NEAR neighbor of this record, not a substitute for it.

The record

• Also known as: 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, Birmingham Church Bombing

Notes

Statistics: Bombing: September 15, 1963 (NPS; Britannica). The intake paste's stop #24 (1963) is VERIFIED. Victims: Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), Carol Denise McNair (11). Tribute care applies — four children, named here in full because the graph's first duty is names. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review (TRIBUTE): Four girls in their Youth Day dresses. The record names them, gives their ages, and refuses the abstraction 'Birmingham church bombing' as a complete sentence — it was a bombing of children, at church, on a Sunday morning, and the country's memory should have to carry all of those words every time. · Photo slot: CLEARED CANDIDATE — Wikimedia Commons File:16th Street Baptist Church.JPG (the church building), CC BY 2.5, license verified from Commons API metadata on 2026-10-15; not downloaded — visual pass follows merge per standing pattern. The building, not the crime scene: no victim or aftermath imagery is cleared for this record, by design.

Sources

• National Park Service, Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument — supports: the September 15, 1963 bombing, the four victims and their ages, and the church's role as the 1963 campaign's headquarters (primary source)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Birmingham Church Bombing' — supports: the Klan perpetrators, the day's wider violence, and the delayed prosecutions (1977; 2001–2002)
• FBI, 'Birmingham Church Bombing' (vault/history) — supports: the investigation's history and the identification of the bombing cell (primary source)

Record CTL-E-5424 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources (2 primary) · CTL research: BCI-001, RELP-001.
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