16th Street Baptist Church bombing



The four girls killed in the bombing (clockwise
from top left): Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley,
Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair

Location: Birmingham, Alabama
Coordinates: 33°31'0"N 86°48'54"W
Date: September 15, 1963; 59 years ago; 10:22 a.m. (UTC-5)

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a white supremacist terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963. Four members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter planted 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps located on the east side of the church.

Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity", the explosion at the church killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.

Although the FBI had concluded in 1965 that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had been committed by four known Klansmen and segregationists: Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry, no prosecutions were conducted until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of one of the victims, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair.

As part of a revival of effort by states and the federal government to prosecute cold cases from the civil rights era, the state conducted trials in the early 21st century of Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Cherry, who were each convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Future United States Senator Doug Jones successfully prosecuted Blanton and Cherry. Herman Cash had died in 1994, and was never charged with his alleged involvement in the bombing.

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NBCBLK

The two forgotten Black boys who died the day of the Birmingham church bombing

Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware were killed in the aftermath of the Birmingham church bombing in 1963.


Donnell Jackson, 13, and Shirley Floyd hold up a portrait of Virgil Ware as members of Ware's family stand behind it at a memorial ceremony for Ware in Birmingham, Ala., in 2004.Tamika Moore / The Birmingham News via AP file

Sept. 15, 2023, 6:00 AM EDT
By Char Adams

Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware.

Outside of Birmingham, Alabama, those names have gone largely forgotten in the decades since Robinson and Ware died on Sept. 15, 1963, the day four Black girls were killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

They died in the erupting chaos after the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church that morning in an attack that killed 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carol Robertson and 11-year-old Denise McNair. In the uprising that followed, a white police officer killed Robinson and a white teenager killed Ware.

“For so long, the four little girls got all the recognition, and they forgot about the two little boys,” James Ware, Virgil’s older brother, told The Birmingham News in 2013.

Aside from the four girls, Robinson, 16, and Ware, 13, were the only two people to die in the aftermath of the attack that day. Robinson was with his friends when a group of white people drove by waving Confederate flags, throwing garbage and hurling racist slurs at the Black group, according to NPR. Witnesses said then that a police car arrived after Robinson and his friends were seen throwing rocks at a car draped in a Confederate flag.

“The crowd was running away and Mr. Robinson had his back [turned] as he was running away,” FBI agent Dana Gillis told NPR in 2010. “And the shot hit him in the back.”

Gillis, now retired from the FBI, told NBC News via email that he was tasked with delivering a letter to the Robinson family in 2010 with more information about Robinson’s case and what actually happened that day. Consumed by grief, the Robinsons didn’t talk much about the teen’s death, especially after local and federal grand juries decided not to prosecute Jack Parker, the officer who killed him, NPR reported. Parker died in 1977.

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