KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Sunday school has finished, and the 11 o’clock worship service has just gotten underway. Today, the youth choir is singing. This is how things were supposed to go on that Sunday morning 50 years ago as well. Then a bomb made of at least ten sticks of dynamite exploded, killing four young girls inside the church.
FREEMAN HRABOWSKI (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County): It shook the very fabric of our society broadly, not only in Birmingham but in the country. Because if four little girls dressed in white for Sunday school can be blown to pieces because of hatred, everyone has to stop and think, where are we going as a society?
LAWTON: The bombing came amid ongoing racial turmoil in Birmingham and across the US. At the beginning of 1963, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had decided to make Birmingham the center of a new non-violent campaign to end segregation. For years, many Birmingham churches had been fighting segregation under the leadership of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. But the largely middle class Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had not taken an active role in that effort. Glenn Eskew is professor of history at Georgia State University and author of the book But For Birmingham.
Read or watch and listen to it all.
PBS ' Religion and Ethics Newsweekly–Birmingham Church Bombing 50th Anniversary
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Sunday school has finished, and the 11 o’clock worship service has just gotten underway. Today, the youth choir is singing. This is how things were supposed to go on that Sunday morning 50 years ago as well. Then a bomb made of at least ten sticks of dynamite exploded, killing four young girls inside the church.
FREEMAN HRABOWSKI (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County): It shook the very fabric of our society broadly, not only in Birmingham but in the country. Because if four little girls dressed in white for Sunday school can be blown to pieces because of hatred, everyone has to stop and think, where are we going as a society?
LAWTON: The bombing came amid ongoing racial turmoil in Birmingham and across the US. At the beginning of 1963, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had decided to make Birmingham the center of a new non-violent campaign to end segregation. For years, many Birmingham churches had been fighting segregation under the leadership of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. But the largely middle class Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had not taken an active role in that effort. Glenn Eskew is professor of history at Georgia State University and author of the book But For Birmingham.
Read or watch and listen to it all.