Bending Toward Justice: September 1963
A bomb wreaks havoc at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four little girls and injuring dozens of others. Sept. 15, 1963. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Anthony Falletta, Birmingham News)
Events that shaped Birmingham in a year that altered the city forever.
Sixty years ago, Birmingham became ground zero in the struggle for human rights. Many events in Birmingham and Alabama made 1963 a transformative year that would change the city, and the world, forever. Throughout 2023 in “Bending Toward Justice,” Alabama News Center is featuring stories about the events of 1963 and their impact, including a month-by-month timeline listing many of the year’s milestones.
SEPTEMBER 1963
Monday, September 2
Gov. George Wallace and former Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor speak at a Labor Day picnic rally. That night, Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Shelton lures many of the picnickers to a rally at Graymont Armory near Dynamite Hill.
Tuesday, September 3
The Birmingham City Council approves the sale of Birmingham Transit Co. to American Transit Co. based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Wednesday, September 4
On the day three white public schools in Birmingham had been ordered to register a total of five new Black students, police and white demonstrators opposed to integration battled outside Graymont Elementary School and Ramsay High School. Many protesters waved Confederate flags and carried signs with slogans such as “Close Mixed Schools” and “Keep Alabama White.”
White students protesting the integration of West End High School in Birmingham, September 1963. (Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Robert Adams, Birmingham News)
Wednesday, September 4
The evening after the demonstration, a bomb damages the home of attorney Arthur Shores, the second blast in 15 days. His wife suffers a minor shoulder injury.
Thursday, September 5
The Birmingham Board of Education formally closes Graymont Elementary School and Ramsay and West End high schools.
Saturday, September 7
Wallace is the featured speaker for the United Americans for Conservative Government, a Klan-affiliated group, at a Birmingham banquet.
Sunday, September 8
Bombers toss two firebombs at the suburban home of millionaire Black businessman A.G Gaston. No one was injured in the attack. While often at odds with the leaders of the civil rights movement, Gaston owned the motel where they met.
Monday, September 9
Gov. George Wallace bars Blacks from five state public schools that had been ordered by courts to accept them. Alabama state troopers prevent Blacks in Birmingham, Mobile and Tuskegee from attending those schools.
Tuesday, September 10
President John F. Kennedy federalizes the Alabama National Guard and instructs Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to use any of the nation’s armed forces needed to enforce school desegregation in Alabama.
Sunday, September 15
Domestic terrorists bomb the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Four girls are killed – 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Nearly two dozen others are injured. Later that day, 16-year-old Johnny Robinson is shot in the back and killed by a police officer, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware dies when a white teenager shoots him while Ware rides a bicycle on a road in Jefferson County.
Monday, September 16
Lawyer Charles “Chuck” Morgan speaks at a lunch meeting of the Young Men’s Business Club and excoriates the white community for its complicity in the girls’ deaths. “Who threw that bomb? … The answer should be ‘We all did it.’”
Tuesday, September 17
Carole Robertson’s funeral service is held at St. John’s A.M.E. Church with the Rev. John Cross officiating.
Wednesday, September 18
The funeral service for Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair is held at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, bringing out a crowd that numbered in the thousands. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers the eulogy and predicted the deaths “may well serve as the redemptive force that brings light to this dark city.”
Sources: “1963, How the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement Changed America and the World,” by Barnett Wright; Pennsylvania State University, “The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement” Birmingham Timeline; BHAMWIKI 1963; “Parting the Waters, America in the King Years 1954-63,” by Taylor Branch; Alabama Department of Archives & History.
