16th Street Baptist Church
| 16th Street Baptist Church | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| National Register of Historic Places | |||
| National Historic Landmark | |||
 The 16th Street Baptist Church in 2005 |
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| location | Birmingham , Jefferson County , Alabama | ||
| Coordinates | 33 ° 31 '0.1 " N , 86 ° 48' 53.7" W | ||
| Built | 1911 | ||
| architect | Wallace Rayfield | ||
| Architectural style | Neo-romance | ||
| NRHP number | 80000696 | ||
| Data | |||
| The NRHP added | 17th September 1980 | ||
| Declared as an NHL | February 20, 2006 | ||
The 16th Street Baptist Church is a church of the Baptists -Gemeinde in Birmingham in Alabama , predominantly of African-Americans is visited. She hit the headlines when she was the target of a racially motivated bomb attack on September 15, 1963, in which four girls were killed. In 2006 the church was declared a National Historic Landmark .
Early history
After a black Baptist church was organized in Birmingham in 1871, shortly after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery , the 16th Street Baptist Church was founded in 1873, with parishioners first in a building on 12th Street and 4th Avenue North and then in gathered in a church room on 3rd Avenue North between 19th and 20th Streets. In 1880 the Baptist congregation finally acquired a plot of land in what is now 16th Street, where construction of a representative church began. This brick building was completed in 1884, but the city administration was against a church for blacks and ordered its demolition in 1908. The current building was then a new building, which was commissioned in 1911 by the black entrepreneur TC Windham and built by the likewise black architect Wallace Rayfield in a mixture of Romanesque and Byzantine elements. As a result, the community took on a pioneering role in the struggle for civil rights for the black population, which is particularly evident in the church visits by prominent figures such as WEB Du Bois , Mary McLeod Bethune , Paul Robeson and Ralph Bunche .
The assassination
Even when the civil rights movement gained prominence in the 1960s, the church was a center of these actions. This is what Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King said in church.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a Chevrolet and placing a box on the stairs leading to the church. Shortly afterwards, at 10:22 a.m., the bomb exploded, killing Denise McNair, 11 (a school friend of Condoleezza Rice ), Addie Mae Collins, 14, Carole Robertson, 14 and Cynthia Wesley, 14. The four girls had just finished Sunday school. 23 people were also injured, some seriously. The girls' funeral was attended by 8,000 mourners, but none of them were city officials.
Civil rights activists accused George Wallace , the governor of Alabama, of being responsible for the attack . Just a week before the attack, he had told the New York Times that in order to stop the integration, you would need a few "first-class funerals" - a few "first-class funerals".
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan , as the man who planted the bomb. He was charged with the murder and illegal possession of 122 sticks of dynamite . On October 8, 1963, he was acquitted of the charge of murder. All he had to do was pay a $ 100 fine for the dynamite.
The case remained unsolved until Bill Baxley became Attorney General for Alabama. He had the FBI files brought to him and discovered that much of the evidence against Chambliss had been kept secret and had never been used in the trial.
In 1977, 15 years after the assassination, Chambliss was charged again with the murder. The now 73-year-old Chambliss was convicted and received a life sentence. He served this before he died eight years later. In May 2002, 71-year-old Bobby Cherry was found to have been complicit in the girls' murder and was sentenced to life in prison until he died in 2004.
Aftermath of the attack
The assassination helped ensure that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 , which put a stop to the segregation policies of some southern states. The congregation received $ 30,000 in donations and set about rebuilding the partially damaged church, which reopened on June 7, 1964.
Folk and protest singer Joan Baez sings about it in the song Birmingham Sunday (Richard Farina).
The title Alabama by saxophonist John Coltrane (Live at Birdland, 1964) is dedicated to this attack.
In the 1997 documentary Four Little Girls , Spike Lee dealt with the assassination attempt on the church.
The second scene of the 2014 film Selma by Ava DuVernay shows the attack.
The church today
On September 17, 1980, the Church was added to the US List of Historic Places ; on February 20, 2006 it was declared a National Historic Landmark by the US Department of the Interior . The church is visited by over 200,000 people annually. The congregation, currently run by Rev Arthur Price, also has a drug addict program. Since the church building has suffered significant water damage, it is currently in need of renovation for $ 3 million.
literature
- Diane McWhorter: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution . Simon & Schuster, New York, NY 2001, ISBN 0-684-80747-5 .
- Christopher M. Hamlin: Behind the Stained Glass: a History of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church . Crane Hill, Birmingham, AL 1998, ISBN 1-57587-083-5 .
- Toraine Norris: Sixteenth Street Baptist named US landmark . In: Birmingham News . February 17, 2006.
- Howard Cruse: On the Edge of Heaven . 1995 (fictionalizing graphic novel ).
Web links
- Jessica McElrath on afroamhistory.about.com about the assassination attempt ( Memento from May 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- Bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on history.com
- New York Times article on the Cherry 2000 trial
Individual evidence
- ^ Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the National Register Information System. National Park Service , accessed July 26, 2017
- ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Alabama. National Park Service , accessed July 19, 2019.