Music in the Wake of the Sixteenth Street Church Bombing, 1963/64

By Chloe Smith

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church — Birmingham, Alabama

During the Civil Rights Movement, music was a powerful means of protest. Activists sang as they marched, and Black religious music was commonplace at mass meetings, where congregations organized their next movements and emboldened their spirits. In a description of a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery in…