Sunday, September 15, 2013

The 50th Anniversary of the Bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama


On September 15, 1963, white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, an act of domestic terrorism in which four African-American girls were murdered in the explosion.

The explosion that came from a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan, a racist white supremacist segregationist organization.

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Above: The four girls killed in the bombing; The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church horrified much of the United States and the world. In many respects, the murder of the four little girls in Alabama had the opposite effect from what the Klansmen intended.

The murder of these four young African-American girls occurred a little over two months prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. 

Months after becoming becoming president, Lyndon Johnson began to push for the passage of President Kennedy's civil rights bill. In the summer of 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The above passage is taken from MLeavinsHistory.wikispaces.com: 

MLeavinsHistory: A Chronicle of the 1960s

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