Bilal Ali Productions Remember’s 4 LITTLE GIRLS
Feb 2nd, 2012 by Bilal Ali
Early Sunday, September 15, 1963, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Herman Frank Cash, and Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, members of United Klans of America, a Ku Klux Klan group (an organization created to protect the rights and interests of white Americans by means of violence and intimidation), planted 122 sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
At about 10:22 a.m., the bomb exploded. Four little girls (pictured above L-R), Cynthia Wesley (aged 14), Carole Robertson (aged 14), Addie Mae Collins (aged 14) and Denise McNair (aged 11), were killed in the blast. Twenty-two others were injured. It was a crime that shocked the nation — and a defining moment in the history of America’s Civil Rights Movement.
Outrage at the bombing and the grief that followed resulted in violence across Birmingham, and two black boys were killed later that day. Sixteen-year-old Johnny Robinson was shot by police after throwing rocks at cars with white people inside, and two white teenage boys shot 13-year-old Virgil Wade, who was on a bike with his brother.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy for three of the girls (a separate service was held for Carole Robertson):