16th Street Baptist Church marks bombing anniversary with a new visitor center

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Sixty-three years ago, dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members exploded through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls as they prepared for Sunday services.

Hundreds of people filled the church on Tuesday on the 63rd anniversary of the bombing. The church marked the anniversary with the opening of a new visitors center that leaders said is aimed at educating people about one of the most horrific events of the Civil Rights Movement and urging a recommitment to continue the struggle for justice.

Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the guest speaker for the annual memorial service, said the remembrance falls at a time when politicians are trying to take content out of museums, attacking the Voting Rights Act and turning to the politics of division.

“We’re in a critical moment in America. There is a narrative struggle. There are people who are preaching the politics of fear and anger, and they want to govern through fear and anger,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson, who helped build memorials and museums tracing the legacy of slavery in America, said a “whole network of elected officials” — not only the Klan — shared responsibility for the climate that led to the deadly bombing.

“And today we have those same voices, and we have to stand against those voices by being committed to truth and justice,” Stevenson said.

Klansmen had placed a bundle of dynamite outside the church under a set of stairs. The bombing came during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, eight months after then-Gov. George Wallace pledged “segregation forever.”

The girls were gathered in a downstairs washroom before Sunday services when the dynamite exploded at 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963. The explosion killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14. A fifth girl, Sarah Collins Rudolph, the sister of Addie Mae, was in the room and was severely injured but survived.

Three Ku Klux Klansmen were eventually convicted in the blast: Robert Chambliss in 1977; Thomas Blanton in 2001; and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002.

The opening of the education center comes at a time of uncertainty about how history is presented in national parks and museums. President Donald Trump in March 2025 signed an executive order aimed at defunding museum exhibits and programs that he said promote “divisive narratives.”

The church sits within the bounds of the National Park Service’s civil rights monument in Birmingham, an area that includes the park where Black protesters were met by police dogs and fire hoses. But the church independently runs the visitors center.

The new center has space for exhibits, oral history initiatives, artist residencies, community quilting projects, public speaker series and other programming.

Church leaders envision the center as a place where people can reflect after visiting the church and bombing site.

“I want them to take away that history is not just in the past. History is also present, and that there’s still work to do,” said the Rev. Arthur Price Jr., the pastor of 16th Street Baptist. “When we talk about the challenges in our country, when we talk about the injustice, the inequity, and the inequality, there’s still a whole lot of work for us to do.”

Lisa McNair’s sister, Denise, was one of the girls who lost their lives in the 1963 bombing.

“It’s part of our shared American history, and if we don’t know our history, we’re destined to repeat it,” McNair said at Tuesday’s event.