Addie Mae’s younger sister, Sarah, lived but lost an eye. A bomb planted in the church exploded, killing four Black girls: Carol Denise McNair, who was eleven years old, and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all age fourteen. The lesson was from Matthew: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” That morning, prayers and lessons would be silenced as the church became the target of a horrific act of violence by white supremacists. Just three weeks after the massive March on Washington, African American children were studying the Bible during Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. September 15, 1963, was an ordinary morning in Birmingham, Alabama. If you are Black, there is no safe space.” “These church burnings are a way to reinforce white supremacy. Pinn, a professor of religion at Rice University. “Church burnings in the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries provide the same message that church burnings in the 1800s provided,” says Anthony B. The many church bombings that occurred during these years existed as part of a long history. “And when the Black Church at its best is the public face of the witness of love and justice, it will be targeted.” “Again, it’s about terrorism coming at Black people as a whole,” states the social critic and Harvard University professor Cornel West. If there was a complete engagement, a total commitment of every Black denomination, could we have gone much further?” But I often wonder what could have been if there was full unity. “I don’t do a lot of judging of that, because you would get your church blown up.

Barber II, an NAACP activist and pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, sympathizes with their concerns but still imagines the power of a unified Black Church. And so they refused to allow the leaders of the civil rights movement to even have services there.” They worried that their churches would be the next to be bombed. As a result, the Reverend Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity explains, “There were plenty of Black churches that did not participate in the civil rights movement. Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent terror tactics blocked African Americans’ access to full citizenship, despite the guarantees of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which barred discrimination by race or sex in the right to vote.īlack church leaders, as well as members of their congregations who joined the struggle for civil rights, often suffered a violent and unrepentant backlash. The right to vote was still a far‑off dream for many African Americans in postwar America, especially in the former Confederate states of the Deep South.

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