The bombing took place less than four weeks after the historic March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., and four months after a Children’s Crusade march that was savagely attacked in Birmingham. On May 3, 1963, 1,000 Black elementary, junior high and high school students left their classes to take part in the crusade action against segregation.

The notorious police commissioner, Bull Connor, gave orders to the racist police to unleash vicious dogs and firefighters to aim water in high-pressure fire hoses on these young people before many of them filled jail cells when they refused to end their march. This incident, which created national and international outrage, prompted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to write his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”