The martyrs of Birmingham
Four girls bombed in a church
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is a center of the civil rights movement — the gathering place where marchers assembled before going into the streets. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 — three weeks after King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial — a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members explodes in the basement.
Addie Mae Collins is fourteen. Cynthia Wesley is fourteen. Carole Robertson is fourteen. Carol Denise McNair is eleven.
They are in the bathroom putting on their choir robes when the bomb goes off.
Four children, killed in a church, on a Sunday morning, while putting on choir robes.
The bombing produces outrage across the country and accelerates the legislative momentum toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is the most infamous act of racial terrorism in the civil rights era and one of the most consequential — not because it achieved its perpetrators' goal of intimidation but because it produced the opposite: a hardening of the national resolve to end what the bombing represented.
King speaks at the funeral of three of the four girls — the fourth's family chose a different minister. He says: They did not die in vain. God still has a way of bringing good out of evil.
The four girls are buried in their choir robes.
They are martyrs of the American church — killed for the community they were part of, in the building they gathered in, on the day set aside for worship.
“They did not die in vain. God still has a way of bringing good out of evil.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., funeral eulogy, September 18, 1963 AD
“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been killed for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, Master, the holy and true, do you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
Four girls in choir robes. Killed in church on Sunday morning.
The souls under the altar cry out: how long? It is the oldest question in the tradition of suffering — not where are you, God, but how long until you act?
The answer given in Revelation is not a timeline. It is a white robe and the instruction to rest a little longer. To wait for what is coming.
The four girls were buried in their choir robes. They are still in the count of those who died for the witness they bore.
The how long is still being asked. The answer is still coming. The church that cries it out is still the right place to cry.