Piece of 16th Street Baptist Church being donated to Smithsonian - The Washington Post: In many ways, the roughly eight-inch-wide stained-glass and metal shard has always acted as a symbol of what the Jimerson family stood for. It rested on a hutch in the dining room and traveled with the Jimersons as they left the deep South. Melva Brooks Jimerson would take it to women’s groups and Sunday school classes when she was invited to talk about the family’s years in Birmingham, Ala., and people would go tearful or silent; or they gasped.
Her husband, Norman “Jim” Jimerson, was a white Baptist minister who worked on racial issues, and he handled it most that first day, Sept. 15, 1963, when he drove to the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church and picked through the rubble for some symbol of what, incomprehensibly, had just happened — four girls, taking a break after Sunday school, had been killed by a bomb planted near the basement of an African American church.
