Overview

• Bells tolled at 10:22 a.m., a wreath was laid, and the Carlton Reese Memorial Unity Choir performed during Monday’s commemoration at 16th Street Baptist Church.
• Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who reopened the case in 1971 and secured Robert Chambliss’s 1977 conviction, addressed attendees.
• Survivor Sarah Collins Rudolph urged continued remembrance, noting the attack helped propel the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
• The service honored 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, who were killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb in 1963.
• Attendees also remembered Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, two Black teens killed in the bombing’s aftermath in Birmingham, with public memorials including figures in Kelly Ingram Park sustaining the city’s collective memory.