16th Street Baptist Church, Civil rights church in downtown Birmingham, United States.
The 16th Street Baptist Church is a brick church at 16th Street and 6th Avenue North in Birmingham, Alabama. Its front has two square towers with pyramidal red tile roofs and wide overhanging eaves; the taller right tower holds two round-arched louvered windows and a small stained-glass window below, the shorter left tower paired arched windows. A lower brick section joins them, and a brick stairway with metal rails rises along the left side.
The congregation dates back to the 1870s, and the current building was constructed in the early 20th century to accommodate a growing membership. In September 1963, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members killed four girls and injured more than twenty others during Sunday school.
The congregation was founded in 1873 as the First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham, the first black church organized in the city. The Wales Window, designed by John Petts, was donated by citizens of Wales and installed in the front window facing south after the 1963 bombing. The church still holds services and runs a drug counseling program.
The church stands at 16th Street and 6th Avenue North, in the Birmingham Civil Rights District, with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute across Kelly Ingram Park. The main entrance is reached by a brick stairway with metal rails along the left side of the facade. The building is an active congregation, so visits are arranged around worship; the basement auditorium and ancillary rooms are used for services and meetings.
The building received National Historic Landmark status in 2006 and became part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in 2017. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here on several occasions in the years before the attack, and the site remained a gathering point for civil rights activists.
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