Birmingham church bombing wasn’t an isolated act of terrorism – there were dozens of attacks on Black houses of worship during the Civil Rights Movement

The Sept. 15 anniversary of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four girls and injured 22 others, marks one entry in a much longer ledger. A sociologist's research team has mapped about 145 attacks on Black churches across the South from roughly 1954 to 1970, many timed to coincide with local civil rights organizing.

Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed three times, including an attack on Christmas 1956 that targeted the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth's parsonage. Four churches tied to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizing in Albany, Georgia, were burned to the ground during a 1961-62 campaign that jailed over 1,000 protesters.

The pattern didn't stop with the civil rights era: roughly 200 Black churches burned in a 1990s wave, Clayborn Temple in Memphis was targeted by arson in 2025, and nine churchgoers were killed at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston in 2015. The researcher's project is now trying to recover attacks that history had simply let drop.

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