16TH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH

This Romanesque and Byzantine church, begun in 1884 and completed in 1911, was the first Black church in Birmingham. In the 1960 s, it became the gathering place for many activists in the struggle for civil rights. These meetings gave rise, from May 1963, to numerous events very strongly repressed by the police. On September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan exploded a bomb that killed four girls and wounded more than 20 people. This event will supplant the movement of civil rights activists, but also repression by the city's authorities. Very touched by the attack, the singer Nina Simone was composed in the days following the song Mississippi Goddam (1963), full of frustration in the face of a South in segregation.