On this Sunday, we visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where Addie Mae Collins, 14. Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley were struck down by hatred and racism. On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan bombers killed four young girls and wounded more than two dozen other people in a church on Sunday morning. Their deaths came just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington and gave his famous "I have a dream" speech.

Today in the 16th Street Baptist Church, the choir sang "Birmingham Sunday."

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

I know we were standing on sacred ground. This is the very church where Denise and Addie and Carole and Cynthia prayed and sang and went to Sunday school. This is the very church where, on Monday night after Monday night, brave people gathered from 1958 onward to plan and work and organize to win freedom and justice and equal rights. Their heritage and their energy was with us as members of the congregation and guests and two choirs all linked arms and sang "We Shall Overcome" in the same church where Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth sang the same anthem.
Read more here.