The release of film maker Spike Lee's highly acclaimed "4 Little Girls" renewed interest in the Civil Rights Movement and the significant role Birmingham played in that struggle. The film portrays the lives and deaths of the four children killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Civil Rights District

Birmingham's Civil Rights District encompasses the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, historic Kelly Ingram Park and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Also in the district is the home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, which includes the restored historic Carver Theater.

The story of Birmingham's role in the long march to civil rights has been told and retold around the world. With the opening of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 1993, the city found a place to tell its own story.

The Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham and Alabama evolved from a complex history of race relations in the American South. Richly detailed exhibits in the Civil Rights Institute reveal slices of black and white life from the late 1800s to the present. A series of galleries tells the stories of daily life for African Americans in Alabama and the nation, and how it differed dramatically from the lives white people of that era took for granted.

The powerful Movement Gallery presents the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 to 1963. Birmingham's most enduring image, the bad old days of "Bombingham," serves as a reference to the relentless violence that rocked the city in the late 1950s and early '60s.

The institute documents the rise of the movement and the succession of events it bore around the nation: the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus for her refusal to give her seat up to a white man; the U.S. Supreme Court's bus desegregation ruling in 1956; and James Meredith's 1962 admission to the University of Mississippi.

In the final exhibits, the Processional Gallery uses life-size figures representing all ages and races to portray the "walk to freedom." It is also at this point that visitors encounter two huge windows, one overlooking the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the other with a view of Kelly Ingram Park.

The church is Birmingham's most famous civil rights landmark. In the basement of the church on a September Sunday morning in 1963, four African-American schoolgirls were changing into their choir robes. A bomb set by Ku Klux Klansmen ripped through the church killing 11-year-old Denise McNair and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14-years old. The bombing shocked and sickened the city and the nation and was a turning point in the status of race relations.