09/15/2024
ADDIE MAE COLLINS was an outgoing, artistic girl who – as a Black teenager in 1963 – happily went door to door in the white neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama, to sell aprons and potholders that her mother had stitched together to make ends meet.
DENISE McNAIR performed in plays, dance routines and poetry readings to raise money for muscular dystrophy research. She befriended Condoleezza Rice, a fellow elementary school student who later became U.S. secretary of state.
CAROLE ROBERTSON was a good student who loved reading and dancing. She sang in her elementary school chorus, played the clarinet, and was a member of Jack and Jill of America, a civic-minded youth and family organization.
CYNTHIA WESLEY was raised by a single mother but stayed with her adoptive parents so she could attend a better school, where she excelled in math, reading and band.
The lives of all four girls intertwined and tragically ended at 10:21 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, when a bomb planted by Klansmen outside the ladies’ lounge at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham exploded, instantly killing them and injuring 20 others.
Song · Eric Essix · 2013
