On this date in 1963, four little girls were killed when white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

The church had been a rallying point in that year's demonstrations, a symbol of civil rights for activists and segregationists alike.

When the bomb went off, it destroyed a lot of the church. It an eerie touch, the explosion blew out Jesus's face in a stained glass window.

More tragically, the explosion killed four little girls who had been preparing for Bible Study lessons in the church basement.

As a crowd gathered to pull the bodies from the rubble, white teenagers taunted them with a Confederate flag & a "Go Back to Africa" sign.

When some black kids threw stones at the white teens, the police moved in to apprehend the black kids. One ran away & was shot in the back.

At the same time, across town, another pair of white teens pulled up alongside two young black boys who were riding their bikes.

One of the white boys pulled out a pistol, put two bullets into a thirteen-year-old black boy's head and chest, and then drove away.

Just three weeks earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington.

But the violence that day in Birmingham -- by Klansmen, by ordinary white teens, even by the police -- showed how far away that dream was.

In a sign of how far off it was, the pursuit of justice for the church bombing took decades, even though the FBI IDed the bombers in 1965.

It took fourteen years before the first bomber was convicted, and nearly four decades before two others were brought to justice too.

The prosecutor of those last two bombers, I should note, is currently the Democratic nominee for Senate in Alabama: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/14/nation/la-na-nn-birmingham-bombing-prosecutor-20130913

It took decades before the men responsible for the bombing were brought to justice, but in the short term there was a different reckoning.

Charles Morgan, a white lawyer in Birmingham, spoke at a white club the day after the bombing, noting that they were *all* responsible.

It's a remarkable speech. As we confront white supremacy once again today, it's worth listening to again in full: