I returned from a seven-day civil rights tour to Georgia and Alabama on Sunday.  I can’t call it a vacation; rather it was an education.  No matter how much we have read about how civil rights were violated in our country during the time of slavery (and often still are), there is nothing like being where it happened. 

At 10:24 a.m. on Sunday September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Five young girls, dressed in their white Sunday best, were in the downstairs ladies’ room. They were chatting away about the new school year. It was Youth Day, and the girls were excited because they were going to take part in the Sunday adult church service.

Four of the five young girls in the ladies' room were killed  that morning. A fifth, a sister of one of the four, watched her friends die.  She survived, but lost an eye.

In an exhibit about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church, there is a glass display case, about 4 feet by 2 feet.  It contains a small pair of Buster Brown ballet-slipper-like shoes, a brown change purse, a necklace with a delicate cross hanging from it and a fist-sized piece of the building that had penetrated the girl’s skull during the explosion.

The girl was eleven.  Her name, Denise McNair.