If they had lived beyond the morning of September 15, 1963, four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — who had just attended Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. would now be in their sixties.
Instead, on that fateful Sunday 50 years ago, white sheets shrouded four small, Black corpses being wheeled through the Colored Only entrance of the emergency room at the University of Alabama, Birmingham’s (UAB) University Hospital. Before the carefree girls had a chance to bound up the basement stairs to the sanctuary for worship, a bomb planted in their church by the KKK killed them where they stood at 10:22 a.m. The blast injured other parishioners and ripped through sacred walls. When the ambulance carrying their mangled bodies pulled up to the hospital on the way to the morgue, an injured church member standing at the door recognized one of the girls by her shoe, she recounted decades later in an oral history.
The nation and the city of Birmingham is paying tribute this month to the slain young girls and remembering the civil rights organizers who initiated marches for freedom and equality from the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., who co-authored the initial legislation to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to the four girls on September 12, credited the children’s sacrifice.
“I not only question where I would be without the influence of these four little girls, but more importantly, I question where America would be,” she said.
Five decades ago, University Hospital was inching toward integration, even as the walls of segregation elsewhere in Birmingham seemed immovable, said Timothy L. Pennycuff, assistant professor and university archivist at UAB. But the bombing deaths served as a catalyst for the change that some White hospital administrators and university deans wanted to see inside the facility.
For Pennycuff, “September 15, 1963 will forever be remembered for the bombing … an event that took the lives of four children and shocked the world.” But when he lectures about that sorrowful Sunday, Pennycuff’s recounting begins in UAB’s then-segregated hospital emergency room and focuses on the quiet fire that had begun brewing inside.
UAB’s archives include oral histories, news clippings, letters — some fragile and handwritten — and stark black and white photographs of the hospital’s wards separated by race. Stitched together, Pennycuff said, they tell the story of the hospital’s gradual, “largely peaceful and quiet,” transition from segregated to integrated medical treatment and employment. Those pieces of history also provide a backdrop to a Sunday morning filled with terror, carnage and chaos.
