Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement. On Sept. 15, 1963, a dynamite blast killed four young girls in the church: Denise McNair, age 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old. Three days later, at a funeral for three of the girls, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. honored them as “martyred heroines.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “These children—unoffending, innocent and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”