Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been Birmingham's largest Black congregation for decades before 1963, when its sanctuary and basement became a staging ground for the campaign Martin Luther King Jr. and the local pastor Fred Shuttlesworth were organizing against the city's segregation laws. In May 1963 the church served as the assembly point for the Children's Crusade, in which Birmingham police turned fire hoses and dogs on marching schoolchildren, images broadcast nationally that shifted public opinion on segregation more than a decade of prior organizing had.

That visibility made the church a target. On the morning of September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members planted dynamite beneath a stairwell on the building's east side. It detonated at 10:22 a.m. as Sunday school let out, and rescuers found four girls dead beneath the rubble: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, each fourteen, and Carol Denise McNair, eleven. Twenty more were injured, including McNair's sister, who lost an eye.

Justice moved with a slowness that scarred Birmingham nearly as deeply as the bombing. The FBI identified four Klansmen as suspects within weeks, but Alabama's own investigation stalled for fourteen years. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977 and died in prison; Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were not tried until 2001 and 2002, after federal reinvestigation reopened evidence Birmingham had left untouched. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 uncharged.

The bombing's national shock helped carry the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. The congregation rebuilt and kept worshipping in the same sanctuary, now a National Historic Landmark whose restored basement holds a permanent memorial to the four girls it lost that Sunday morning.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church's congregation predates its famous building by nearly four decades and its most consequential architect by even longer. The church organized on April 20, 1873, as the First Colored Baptist Church, the first congregation African Americans in Birmingham established for themselves, and grew for a generation before the city ordered its existing building demolished, forcing the congregation to rebuild entirely.

For that new building, church leaders commissioned Wallace A. Rayfield, at the time Alabama's only practicing Black architect. Rayfield had trained formally, earning a certificate in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1898 and a Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia University the following year, credentials virtually no Black architect working in the American South held at that period. Working with T.C. Windham, a Black contractor who supervised construction, Rayfield designed a building completed in 1911 for twenty six thousand dollars, an eclectic structure blending Byzantine and Romanesque elements, twin corner towers, a central dome and drum, rusticated stone, arched loggias and ornamental brickwork, among the most architecturally ambitious buildings any Black congregation in the region had commissioned to that date.

That building is the same sanctuary the 1963 bombing later damaged and the congregation rebuilt rather than replaced, so the structure standing today is substantially Rayfield's own design, not a later reconstruction. Rayfield went on to design churches and institutional buildings across the South before his death in 1941, but Sixteenth Street remains his most recognized commission, its architectural ambition easy to lose behind the history that happened inside it decades later.