September 15, 1963
During Sunday School, 15 sticks of dynamite blew apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four children in the basement changing room and injuring 23 others. A week before the bombing Governor George C. Wallace had told The New York Times that to stop integration, Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.”
September 15, 1982
In what is considered to be the birth of the environmental justice movement, protestors in the predominantly poor & Black Warren County, North Carolina, attempted to block the dumping of toxic PCBs in their community. Over the course of the next few weeks, more than 500 were arrested.
