Instead, on that fateful Sunday 50 years ago, white sheets shrouded four small, Black corpses being wheeled through the Colored Only entrance of the emergency room at the University of Alabama, Birmingham’s (UAB) University Hospital. Before the carefree girls had a chance to bound up the basement stairs to the sanctuary for worship, a bomb planted in their church by the KKK killed them where they stood at 10:22 a.m. The blast injured other parishioners and ripped through sacred walls. When the ambulance carrying their mangled bodies pulled up to the hospital on the way to the morgue, an injured church member standing at the door recognized one of the girls by her shoe, she recounted decades later in an oral history.
