Birmingham, July 15

Everyone arrived last night, and by 8 a.m. the adults on the tour were already organized and heading for the first concert at the Unitarian Universalist Church. That's where today -- and the tour -- really begin.

This afternoon we head for Birmingham's historic 16th Street Baptist Church. According to A Blues for the Birmingham Four:

On September 15, 1963, a savage explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite stashed under a stairwell ripped through the northeast corner of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The four girls killed in the blast: Addie Mae Collins, 14;. Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley, 14, also died, and another 22 adults and children were injured. Meant to slow the growing civil rights movement in the South, the racist killings, like the notorious murder of activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi three months earlier, instead fueled protests that helped speed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

From 1947 to 1963, the Birmingham area suffered 41 racially motivated bombings. "The 16th Street bombing left an indelible image all over the world of what Birmingham was like," said Wayne Flynt, a historian at Auburn University. "It established once and for all an international reputation for Birmingham as a city that was never too busy to hate." Yet the tragedy of the church bombing pushed blacks and whites to work harder at integration --- especially white moderates who had been silently tolerant of measures to quash attempts by blacks to achieve equality.

To see the faces of Addie Mae, Denise, Carole and Cynthia, and for more of the story, click here.

The identities of the Ku Klux Klan bombers were known very early on, but the FBI hid evidence and refused to pursue them. The first bomber, Robert Chambliss, was not convicted until 1977. Two others, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were finally tried and convicted in 2001 and 2002.