In the 1960s, as one of the South’s most segregated cities, Birmingham was a focus of the civil rights movement. In early 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil-rights leaders organized large demonstrations at lunch counters and other sites to protest racial discrimination. When city police attacked the peaceful demonstrators with police dogs and fire hoses, media coverage triggered a national outcry. Here King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he argued that individuals have the right to disobey unjust laws. On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, claiming the lives of four young black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Four members of the Ku Klux Klan were accused of the crime. One man was convicted in 1977; another was convicted in 2001. Both the demonstrations and the bombing helped the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation. In 1979 Richard Arrington, Jr., was elected Birmingham’s first black mayor.

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