BIRMINGHAM, Ala — On this day 57-years-ago, four young black girls were murdered when a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members exploded at their 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Their names were Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14.
Some 400 people were inside the church at the time of the bombing, and 17 other church-goers were injured in the blast. Riots broke out in Birmingham as racial tensions simmered to a new high and two other young black boys, Virgil Ware, 13, and Johnny Robinson, 16, were shot to death by white men.
Ware was gunned down by a white teenager and Robinson was shot to death by a police officer who fired at a crowd of young black boys.
The 16th Street Baptist Church was a predominantly black congregation which also served as a meeting place for prominent civil rights leaders. The Ku Klux Klan attacked the church just two and a half weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights March on Washington.
Outrage over the girls' death and the protests which followed helped draw national attention to the civil rights movement. It also paved the way for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and abolished Jim Crow laws that upheld segregation across the South.
Decades after the attack, four Klansmen were eventually convicted for their roles in what's now considered one of the single most horrifying acts committed by racists during the civil rights era.
Taking to social media, many still remember and ackowledge the girls' deaths as a defining moment in the historical Civil Rights Movement as the country grapples with the same issues.