In 1993, FBI agents sifted through over 9,000 documents and wiretaps collected by the FBI in the 1960s. Then, 30 years after the four girls were killed, civil rights leaders once again drew attention to the case and pushed to have it reopened. Chambliss joined the KKK when he was 20 years old, in 1924. No one was charged with the deaths of the four girls until 1977, when Robert Edward Chambliss, known as “ Dynamite Bob,” was charged and convicted of the murder of only Denise McNair. Johnson was pushing what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the U.S. Within months, President Kennedy was assassinated, and newly-installed President Lyndon B. King returned to Birmingham to eulogize the four slain girls before an audience of more than 3,000 mourners. The murderous event galvanized the civil rights effort in the South and across the country. Many civil rights leaders and local residents blamed Wallace, who had told The New York Times just days earlier that Alabama needed a few “ first-class funerals” to quelle the racial conflict and, presumably, the preserve segregation. Most of the church attendees were able to exit the building before massive holes were blown into its structure, but the girls were trapped in the basement, where their bodies were later found huddled together beneath debris. services, including four little girls, who were in the basement when the blast erupted. Nearly 200 congregants were there, many attending Sunday school before 11 a.m. on Septem, a bomb was thrown from a passing car into the east side of the 16th Street Baptist Church. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience,” he wrote.Īt 10:22 a.m. “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say ‘wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity. King’s response reflected the desperation of the moment. It was there that he wrote his iconic “ Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in response to eight white religious leaders who publicly told King and his supporters to wait until racial tensions had calmed down before engaging in further demonstrations. In spring of 1963, King was arrested after leading members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in several nonviolent demonstrations in support of desegregation in Birmingham. Today, Alabama still has the second-highest number of active KKK groups in the country, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.īlack civil rights leaders considered Birmingham a convening location for local actions and movement work, including the likes of Dr.
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