16th Street Baptist Church
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16th Street Baptist Church
The 16th Street Baptist Church is a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. In 1963, the church was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members. The bombing killed four young girls in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The church is still in operation and is a central landmark in the Birmingham Civil Rights District. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2006.Amie A. Spinks (November 2004) , National Park Service Since 2008, it has also been on the UNESCO list of tentative World Heritage Sites. Beginnings The 16th Street Baptist Church was organized as the First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham in 1873. It was the first black church to organize in Birmingham, which was founded just two years before. The first meetings were held in a small building at 12th Street and Fourth Avenue North. A site was soon acquired on 3rd Avenue North between 19th and 20th Street for a dedicated building. In 1880, the church sold that property and built a new church on the ...
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Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% from the 2020 Census, making it Alabama's third-most populous city after Huntsville and Montgomery. The broader Birmingham metropolitan area had a 2020 population of 1,115,289, and is the largest metropolitan area in Alabama as well as the 50th-most populous in the United States. Birmingham serves as an important regional hub and is associated with the Deep South, Piedmont, and Appalachian regions of the nation. Birmingham was founded in 1871, during the post- Civil War Reconstruction period, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, notably, Elyton. It grew from there, annexing many more of its smaller neighbors, into an industrial and railroad transportation center with a focus on mining, the iron and steel industry, ...
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Ralph Bunche
Ralph Johnson Bunche (; August 7, 1904 – December 9, 1971) was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. Among black Nobel laureates he is the first African American and first person of African descent to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He was involved in the formation and early administration of the United Nations, and played a major role in both the decolonization process and numerous UN peacekeeping operations. Bunche served on the US delegation to both the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 and United Nations Conference on International Organization in 1945 that drafted the UN charter. He then served on the American delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 and joined the UN as head of the Trusteeship Department, beginning a long series of troubleshooting roles and resp ...
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Literacy Test
A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. In the United States, between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were administered to prospective voters, and this had the effect of disenfranchising African Americans and others with diminished access to education. Other countries, notably Australia, as part of its White Australia policy, and South Africa adopted literacy tests either to exclude certain racialized groups from voting or to prevent them from immigrating. Voting From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the Southern United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters, purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. The first state to establish literacy tests in the United States was Connecticut. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities and others deemed problematic by the ruling party. Souther ...
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Voting Rights Act Of 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history." The act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a ...
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1964 Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. The act "remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history". Initially, powers given to enforce the act were weak, but these were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. The legislation was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, but it was opposed by f ...
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Dynamite
Dynamite is an explosive made of nitroglycerin, sorbents (such as powdered shells or clay), and Stabilizer (chemistry), stabilizers. It was invented by the Swedish people, Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel in Geesthacht, Northern Germany, and patented in 1867. It rapidly gained wide-scale use as a more robust alternative to gun powder, black powder. History Dynamite was invented by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in the 1860s and was the first safely manageable explosive stronger than black powder. Alfred Nobel's father, Immanuel Nobel, was an industrialist, engineer, and inventor. He built bridges and buildings in Stockholm and founded Sweden's first rubber factory. His construction work inspired him to research new methods of blasting rock that were more effective than black powder. After some bad business deals in Sweden, in 1838 Immanuel moved Nobel family, his family to Saint Petersburg, where Alfred and his brothers were educated privately under Swedish and Russi ...
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Robert Edward Chambliss
Robert Edward Chambliss (January 14, 1904 – October 29, 1985), also known as ''Dynamite Bob'', was a white supremacist terrorist convicted in 1977 of murder for his role as conspirator in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. A member of the United Klans of America, Chambliss also firebombed the houses of several black families in Alabama. Investigation and conviction A May 13, 1965 memo to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover identified Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. as suspects in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. The investigation was originally closed in 1968; no charges were filed. Years later it was found that the FBI had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover. Edgar Hoover stopped and shut down the investigation in 1968. The files were used by Alabama at ...
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Bobby Frank Cherry
Bobby Frank Cherry (June 20, 1930 – November 18, 2004) was an American white supremacist, terrorist, and Klansman who was convicted of murder in 2002 for his role in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. The bombing killed four young African-American girls (Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair) and injured more than 20 other people. Life Bobby Frank Cherry was born on June 20, 1930, in Mineral Springs, a neighborhood of Clanton, Alabama, Clanton, Alabama. He was born on the same day as Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., but 8 years earlier. He joined the United States Marine Corps as a youth, where he gained expertise in demolitions and working with explosives. After his time with the Marines, Cherry worked a series of low-paying jobs, including a long stint as a truck driver. Cherry had a wife, Virginia, at the time of the bombing. He and Virginia Cherry had seven children together. Their marriage was tumultuous and, at times, violent. Bobby ...
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Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr
Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. (June 20, 1938 – June 26, 2020) was an American terrorist and convicted felon, formerly serving four life sentences for his role as conspirator in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, which killed four African-American girls (Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair). Blanton, along with Bobby Frank Cherry, was convicted in 2001 in a highly publicized trial of the cold case. Early life Blanton was born in Washington, D.C. on June 20, 1938, and was the son of Thomas Edwin "Pops" Blanton Sr., who was described in 2001 as a notorious racist in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Education and career Blanton had a tenth-grade education and served as an aircraft mechanic in the Navy from 1956 to 1959. Blanton was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1960s, along with the other suspects in the bombing. Trial and imprisonment At the time of his arrest, Blanton was working at a ...
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Nonviolence
Nonviolence is the personal practice of not causing harm to others under any condition. It may come from the belief that hurting people, animals and/or the environment is unnecessary to achieve an outcome and it may refer to a general philosophy of abstention from violence. It may be based on moral, Religion, religious or spiritual principles, or the reasons for it may be strategic or pragmatic. Failure to distinguish between the two types of nonviolent approaches can lead to distortion in the concept's meaning and effectiveness, which can subsequently result in confusion among the audience. Although both principled and pragmatic nonviolent approaches preach for nonviolence, they may have distinct motives, goals, philosophies, and techniques. However, rather than debating the best practice between the two approaches, both can indicate alternative paths for those who do not want to use violence. These forms of nonviolence approaches (pragmatic and principled) will be discussed in ...
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James Bevel
James Luther Bevel (October 19, 1936 – December 19, 2008) was a minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then as its Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, Bevel initiated, strategized, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, and the 1966 Chicago open housing movement.Kryn in Garrow, 1989. He suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963.Kryn in Garrow, 1989, p. 533. Bevel strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which contributed to Congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Prior to his time with SCLC, Bevel worked in the Nashville Student Movement, which conducted the 1960 Nashville Lunch-Counter Sit-Ins, the 1961 Open Theater Movement, and recruited students to continue the 1961 Freedom Rides after they were attacked ...
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Martin Luther King Jr
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. An African American church leader and the son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination. King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, ...
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