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The 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Killed Four Young Black Girls. But They Weren’t the Only Victims of Racial Violence in the City That Day
Hours after the attack, a police officer shot 16-year-old Johnny Robinson in the back. Then, a white teenager mortally injured 13-year-old Virgil Ware as he rode on the handlebars of his brother’s bike
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In the months before six Black children were murdered on a single day in Birmingham, Alabama, the city emerged as a flashpoint for increasingly tense confrontations between civil rights activists and entrenched segregationists. Attempts to integrate Birmingham’s schools, businesses and neighborhoods sparked an extreme response: Bombs damaged homes and churches, and peaceful protesters faced down truncheons and snarling dogs.
Shortly before the 11 a.m. service on September 15, 1963, a massive explosion ripped through the rear stairwell of the downtown 16th Street Baptist Church. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all age 14, and Denise McNair, 11, were killed just moments after they’d listened to a Sunday school lesson titled “The Love That Forgives.”
Before the sun set on that day of shock and grief, two more young Black Birmingham residents fell victim to violence: 13-year-old Virgil Ware, shot by a white teenager as he rode a bicycle on a rural road, and 16-year-old Johnny Robinson, also spelled Johnnie, killed by a local police officer. Though the teenagers are lesser known than the four girls murdered that morning, their deaths attest to the same deeply rooted racism and hatred that led to the church bombing—and how slow the nation was to reckon with these issues.
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Before the attack, the 16th Street church—a popular gathering place for activists—had received numerous bomb threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Between 1947 and 1963, bombers targeted more than 50 Black-owned homes and businesses in Birmingham, earning the city the ignoble nickname “Bombingham.” Most of these crimes went unsolved. For years, police commissioner Eugene Connor, an avowed white supremacist, enabled Klan violence and encouraged a brutal police response to nonviolent protests, further inflaming the sense of injustice among the Black community.
In the spring of 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined forces with the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who had led the local civil rights campaign since the 1950s, earning the ire of the Klan on multiple occasions. Protests and sit-ins led to hundreds of arrests, including the detainment of King himself on April 12. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” the activist condemned the site of his arrest as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”
“The world’s attention was on Birmingham,” says Samantha Elliott Briggs, former vice president of institutional programs at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. “People had not really seen a level of hate and vitriol to the extent that it was unfolding there.”
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The constant threat of violence and arrest imperiled the movement’s momentum. Organizers decided on a new tactic, planning a Children’s Crusade to draw attention to the campaign for desegregation. On May 2, more than 1,000 students trained in the art of peaceful protest gathered at the 16th Street church to march downtown. Despite hundreds of arrests, they reassembled the next day. Connor dispatched police officers wielding dogs, batons and high-pressure hoses. Newspaper images of these brutal tactics sparked shock and outrage.
“When you bring in the innocence of a child into it, I think the humanness takes over, and there is no way to ignore the violence and trauma,” Briggs says. “And not only what was being done, but the level of discipline that it took those children and participants to endure.”
After President John F. Kennedy’s administration sent a negotiator to the city, civil rights leaders and local officials came to an agreement on May 10 to begin integrating Birmingham businesses. Retaliation was swift. On May 11, the A.G. Gaston Motel, where King and other organizers regularly convened, was bombed, as was the home of King’s younger brother, the Reverend Alfred Daniel King (also known as A.D.).
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This pattern of violent retribution was familiar to those who had been fighting for civil rights in the city for years. NAACP attorney Arthur Shores reported gunshots fired into his home on multiple occasions; his house on Center Street was bombed twice, in August and September 1963. The neighborhood itself was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill” because white supremacists so frequently bombed the homes of Black families in the area.
On the morning of June 11, Vivian Malone and James Hood attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama, only to encounter Governor George Wallace blocking the doorway, leading to a confrontation with federal marshals. (Despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, some states had refused to comply with the desegregation of public schools.) In his inaugural speech a few months earlier, Wallace had defiantly declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The city and the state found themselves on a collision course with the Kennedy administration.
Did you know? A failed attempt to assassinate George Wallace
- In 1972, a fame-seeker shot the Alabama governor while he was delivering a campaign speech, paralyzing him below the waist. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president of the United States, visited Wallace in the hospital, prompting him to rethink his racist views.
- In 1979, Wallace started publicly seeking Black Alabamans’ forgiveness. Representative John Lewis wrote that Wallace “acknowledged his bigotry and assumed responsibility for the harm he had caused.” But others weren’t so quick to forgive the man described by Martin Luther King Jr. as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America.”
A few hours after the standoff, Kennedy delivered a speech to the nation, calling for “American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.” In the persistence of segregation and discriminatory practices, he argued, the U.S. faced “a moral crisis as a country and as a people.” The president called for nationwide civil rights legislation but made little headway.
As schools in Birmingham started integrating in September 1963, Black students encountered hundreds of pro-segregation demonstrators. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard on September 10 in response to the growing confrontation. But worse was yet to come.
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On September 15, white supremacists placed a box filled with 10 to 15 sticks of dynamite under a stairwell at the 16th Street church, where hundreds of worshippers had gathered for morning services. Shortly after, an explosion killed Collins, Robertson, Wesley and McNair, and injured more than 20 others.
“Survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church’s stained-glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised by the explosion,” United Press International reported. Large crowds stunned and angered by yet another act of violence gathered outside the church, touching off a day of spiraling unrest as news of the explosion spread across Birmingham. “The blood of our little children is on your hands,” King wrote in a telegram to Wallace.
Jim Baggett, a Birmingham historian and former archivist for the city, says, “This bombing was done in retaliation for the integration of schools. Also, 16th Street had become a symbol of the movement because that’s where a lot of the ’63 demonstrations were launched from.”
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Hours after the bombing, a group of white teens waving Confederate flags drove past Robinson, who was with friends about a mile away from the church. One of Robinson’s companions later recalled the teens chanting the common refrain “Two, four, six eight, we don’t want to integrate.” Some hurled bottles at the Black youths, who threw rocks at the car in retaliation. When a police vehicle approached, Robinson and his friends tried to run away. Then, Officer Jack Parker pointed a 12-gauge shotgun out the car’s window and shot Robinson in the back.
Although Parker’s fellow officers claimed that the shooting was an accident, perhaps the result of their car hitting a bump in the road and prompting Parker to fire inadvertently, outside observers reported otherwise, saying “they heard two shots and no advance warnings,” as NPR noted in 2010.
The 16-year-old’s mother, Martha, ran to the scene but wasn’t allowed to see her son, who was pronounced dead at the hospital a short time later. Robinson’s siblings remembered their mother screaming at the police officers, saying they had killed him.
Late in the afternoon of September 15, Ware rode on the handlebars of his older brother’s bike on a rural road on Birmingham’s industrial outskirts, unaware of what had happened at the church earlier that day. The siblings were discussing their plans for a newspaper delivery route when two white teenagers, Michael Lee Farley and Larry Joe Sims, both 16, pulled up on a red motorbike outfitted with a Confederate flag.
After leaving a rally hosted by the white supremacist National States Rights Party, the pair had encountered some friends who said they’d seen Black kids throwing rocks. Farley reportedly replied, “We’ll take care of them,” opening his jacket to reveal a .22-caliber pistol. As the white teens approached the brothers, Farley handed his gun to Sims, who fired twice, striking Ware in the chest and cheek. The bullets knocked the young boy off the bike’s handlebars and into a ditch. “I’m shot,” Ware said, prompting his older brother, James, to urge him to get up, assuming he was kidding. But Ware never spoke or moved again.
James later told the police, “Virgil and I didn’t say anything to the boys on the motor scooter, and we didn’t throw any rocks at them. They didn’t say anything to us.” Farley and Sims sped away, leaving James to flag down a passer-by to help his fatally wounded brother.
Kennedy issued a statement on the bombing the next day, expressing “a deep sense of outrage and grief over the killing of the children yesterday.” He conveyed hope that the tragedy would awaken Birmingham—and the nation—“to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence.” King, Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders met with the president at the White House on September 19 to press for further federal intervention in Birmingham.
Back in Alabama, the local community buried the young bombing victims. “We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers,” King told thousands of mourners at a joint service for three of the girls.
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Comparatively, hundreds attended funeral services for Robinson and Ware, who were both laid to rest on September 22. At Robinson’s funeral, the Reverend Abraham L. Woods lamented the fact that in Birmingham, “every Negro mother’s son is a potential Johnny Robinson.”
Ware’s funeral was held on a hilltop in Birmingham’s Sandusky neighborhood. Nicknamed “Peanut,” the 13-year-old was remembered fondly by his teachers as a quiet student who was deeply religious. Ware wanted to become a lawyer and enjoyed watching the television show “Perry Mason,” about an attorney who defended the innocent. “They’re carrying my baby down the hill,” Ware’s mother, Lorene, said as the hearse departed. Her son was buried in an unmarked grave.
For the six Black children killed in Birmingham on September 15, 1963, the gears of the legal system moved languidly. In the days following Robinson’s death, the local coroner told the press that “some testimony shows that Officer Jack Parker’s gun was fired accidentally as the police car slid to a stop. Also, some testimony showed Officer Parker fired while performing his duties as a patrolman for the city.”
As Baggett says, “These were always judged to be justifiable shootings, regardless of the circumstances.”
A.D. King countered the notion that Robinson’s killing was in any way defensible. “I just don’t know why the police would have to shoot a boy in the back who was alleged to have been throwing rocks,” he said. “These policemen were wearing helmets and were armed and carrying billy sticks. They could have stopped him without shooting.”
Parker was never charged with a crime; grand juries failed to indict him in both 1963 and 1964. In the early 2000s, the FBI re-examined the case under an initiative to address unsolved hate crimes, but agents ultimately closed the matter after learning that Parker had died in 1977.
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Ware’s killers were identified and arrested within days. The teenagers’ friends testified that they had warned Farley and Sims of the Ware brothers’ presence, accusing the siblings of throwing rocks—a claim that James denied. (The county sheriff concurred, saying he was “unable to find any provocation for the shooting,” per the Associated Press.) James recalled intuitively sensing the danger posed by Farley and Sims’ friends, turning his bike in the opposite direction when their car slowed and waiting until it was out of sight before resuming his journey home.
Dan Jordan, one of the arresting officers, wrote in an unpublished memoir that he didn’t believe the shooting was an accident, even if Farley’s behavior “convinced me that he was the leader” of the two. When questioned, Sims broke down in tears, claiming, “I didn’t mean to kill anyone. I closed my eyes when I shot.”
At a preliminary hearing on September 20, a defense attorney portrayed the perpetrators as victims, describing Farley and Sims as “two raw, grieved, untutored boys who have had this unfortunate thing come into their lives at their age.” The prosecution, conversely, argued that if the victim’s and the preparators’ races were reversed, the jury would quickly reach “a verdict of one of the highest degrees of homicide in this case.” A jury convicted Sims of the lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter in January 1964. Farley pleaded guilty to the same crime in March, but a judge ultimately reduced both teens’ seven-month jail sentences to probation.
The reverberations of Robinson’s and Ware’s deaths devastated their families for decades to come.
The Robinson siblings had already experienced a series of tragic losses. In 1958, a neighbor shot their father to death after he confronted the man for harassing his sister. Later, when Robinson’s mother, Martha, remarried, her new husband physically abused her and her children, on one occasion throwing a can of baby food at their infant’s head. The girl later died from her injuries. Martha eventually spent time in a psychiatric facility to try to come to terms with these traumatic events.
Robinson himself endured hardships during his short life. In 1960, police arrested him for supposedly delinquent behavior, sending him to a prison facility for Black children. Robinson spent about 18 months incarcerated there, where forced labor and abuse were prevalent. He wanted his younger brother, Leon, to avoid the same fate. Leon told NPR in 2010 that had he been with Robinson that afternoon in Birmingham, “I probably would have wound up getting killed too.”
In 2003, Sims gave his first interview about Ware’s killing. “Virgil knows in heaven that positive consequences came from this,” Sims told Time magazine. “He knows that his death helped change society—that it changed me.” Years after the incident, Sims enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War, partly to assuage his conscience.
Ware’s brothers chose to extend forgiveness to his killer. Their sister, Joyce, however, told Time, “Lord knows I haven’t. That was my brother.” Ware’s mother carried the grief of burying her son until her death, in 1996. His father died in 2013 at age 90, having mourned the loss of his son for half a century.
The bombers of the 16th Street Baptist Church evaded consequences for years. Authorities portrayed the hunt for the killers as an exhaustive quest. In truth, however, Robert Chambliss and his accomplices were in the same place they’d always been: ensconced in the community as shameless perpetrators of racial violence.
Nicknamed “Dynamite Bob,” Chambliss was well known to police as a member of an even more extreme splinter group of the Klan. Authorities arrested him and two others on September 30 but charged them only with possession of dynamite—a misdemeanor.
Chambliss’ niece offered a statement to the FBI on October 11, relaying a comment that he had made the day before the bombing: “You wait until after Sunday. They will beg us to let them segregate.” Chambliss bragged about having enough “stuff” stashed to flatten half of the city. Despite this testimony, the court simply fined the men and handed down six-month sentences that were later suspended. One of King’s aides described the proceedings as “a farce.”
Not until 1977, six years after the Alabama attorney general reopened the case, was Chambliss convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Two of his accomplices, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry, were convicted in the early 2000s; the third, Herman Cash, died in 1994.
Local authorities “knew the day [the bombing] happened who had done it,” Baggett argues, even if a conviction would likely have proved elusive at the time. The FBI disputes that Director J. Edgar Hoover withheld information that would have enabled earlier prosecution of the case, arguing instead that “he simply didn’t think the evidence was there to convict.”
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Despite the shocking nature of the Birmingham bombing, the legislation Kennedy had called for in his June 1963 speech remained stalled in Congress by the time of his assassination, in November of that year. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law only the following summer.
Though the segregation perpetuated by Connor and Wallace was well established, “the depth of it, the brutality of it,” was not something many Americans had faced until the Birmingham campaign, Baggett says.
“That’s what the dogs and hoses did for a lot of Americans,” he adds. “Seeing children being attacked in that way … was sort of a slap in the face of reality.”
In 2013, a statue honoring the four victims of the Birmingham bombing was unveiled in a park across from the church. Nine years earlier, amid an uptick in awareness of Ware’s tragic death, his remains were moved to a grave marked with a new headstone.
Both Robinson and Ware are included in Birmingham’s Gallery of Distinguished Citizens. Their deaths serve as a reminder of the many sacrifices made in the city during the long fight for desegregation and civil rights.
“I would like to say to our white brethren that it isn’t enough to toll the bell; it isn’t enough to start a fund for the families,” the Reverend Woods said at Robinson’s funeral. “You have got to preach the Gospel to all God’s children and fix it. The cause of this thing is segregation.”