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Four Little Girls, 58 Years Later (Playlist)
Today, September 15, 2021, marks 58 years since white supremacists bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four KKK members, opposing school integration in the city of Birmingham, bombed the church because they saw it as a stronghold of Civil Rights Movement organization and activism. Four little girls died that day: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair. Two other children died that day as well: Virgil Ware was killed by two white teenagers, and Johnnie Robinson was shot in the back by police after they accused him of throwing rocks at their car.
The girls ranged in age from 11 to 14. Today, they would have only been 69 to 72 years old.
The bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church has become a focal point of my music history research, and I want to take a moment to share the first artistic representation of the event I ever encountered, the poem Birmingham Sunday by Black American poet and writer Langston Hughes.
I’ve outlined a small part of my work on music written about the bombing in two previous blog posts: this one on music written in…
