Zincwarrior
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- Nov 18, 2021
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60th anniversary of the Birmingham Church bombing that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement.
On Sept. 15, 1963, dynamite ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four Black girls in the church basement as they prepared to attend Sunday services. The powerful blast reduced the church to rubble, mangling cars in the parking lot and stopping clocks. The dynamite blew plaster off the walls and peeled the face off the image of Jesus in a stained-glass window.
Later that day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, pledging to urge nonviolence among his followers but warning that absent a meaningful response from the federal government, “we shall see the worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen.”
Sixty years later, as the country continues to reel from recent high-profile police killings of unarmed Black Americans and lawmakers in several states restrict the teaching of Black history, the city of Birmingham is hosting a week of events to commemorate the victims of the church bombing and highlight the civil rights push that followed.