Founded in 1873 as Birmingham’s first Black church, 16th Street Baptist Church became a leading institution in the city’s Black community and a central site in the civil rights movement. The present 1911 building, designed by Wallace Rayfield and built by T.C. Windham, hosted major Black leaders and served in the early 1960s as an organizing and mass-meeting center for anti-segregation protests. On September 15, 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four girls and injured twenty-two others, shocking the nation. The attack helped intensify federal action and became closely linked to the momentum behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.