This panel seeks to engage the joint funeral service of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair with specific attention to the eulogy given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the eulogy, Dr. King makes claims concerning the death of the little girls that not only have implications for the faithful in attendance, but also to the student and teacher of Black Religious Studies. These claims range from the girls being "unoffending, innocent, and beautiful" to asserting them as "martyred heroines for a holy crusade of freedom." Regardless of where one stands in relation to such claims, they continue to have immense significance for black study as we live in the wake of not only this bombing but the countless deaths of other black children especially in the last decade. To this end, these scholars will engage the eulogy delivered by Dr. King form their own scholarly vantage points that brings us into critical reflection with not only King’s words, but also this historical moment and its import for black childhood studies, theology, religious history, ethics, critical theory, and black (sacred) space studies.

Critical approaches to research on the African American child and African American Sacred Spaces with Dr. Clifton Granby, Dr. James Howard Hill Jr, Dr. Michelle Hite, and Dr. Todne Thomas. This conversation seeks to bring together scholarship that illumines and gives different insight on the historical import of 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and black childhoods more generally.

Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls is the only documentary film that orbits the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Additionally, the film provides the only archive of testimonies from the parents and relatives of the bombings victims. Premiering thirty-four years after the bombing, the film chronicles the afterlives of each family and the church to which these families called home. This event draws on the Womanist tenant of truth-telling, that seeks to honor and take seriously the epistemologies of Black people and especially the mothers of the slain.

As we commemorate the lives ruptured by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, we are also prompted to consider what does ministry in the Black Church look like for youth and young adults, especially Black girls and children who are queer? How might we wrestle with the ways the churches have supported and failed black children? How might we develop forms of pastoral care that offers redress to the current state of youth ministry? Through a lunch conversation sponsored by Andover Newton Seminary at Yale, the Black Church Studies Program, and the Yale Youth Ministry Institute, Dr.Dr. Kishundra King (YDS ’15), and Rev. Whitney Bond will offer paths, prompts, and prophetic witnesses that students might implement in their ministerial toolkit. The proposed conversation will be supported and moderated by Dr. Almeda Wright.

The Marquand Chapel service will be a site of commemoration of the funerary rites of Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair. The funeral of these three girls, like all Black funerals, is a generative source for the fields of Religious History, Black Studies, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies in its unique position to illuminate black(en) gendered performances that subsist through death. My approach to curating this service is to situate the liturgy within the original funeral liturgy taken place on September 18th, 1963. This approach claims that funeral liturgies are instructive for understanding how Black christian communities mourn and grieve violent death, especially that of children.

For the matter of Blackness tending to death and the ongoing state of terror, art has been a medium of resuscitation for Black communities. Whether music, visual art, literature, or movement, art is at the core of Black re-imagination and re-membering. This service will include performed music such as Thomas Dorsey’s Precious Lord Take My Hand (1932). Dorsey’s anthem is an opportunity to cite the Black woman’s vocal performance of grief through song as a sighting of communal mending. In addition to the art performed, the chapel will be a curated art exhibition by textile and fiber maker, Cliff Chambliss, that will tarry with fragments of the bombing (glass, bodies, wood, debris, etc.) as a mode of reckoning with the rupture— crafting a space to mourn and remember.

Join us for a service of remembrance of the lives lost in the wake of the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. This worshipful gathering will honor and vision these young lives, even those at the fringes of our social memories, as ancestor while acknowledging the racialized violence that continues in our society on black youth. We mark this anniversary with a sensory-liturgy through candlelight communion, song, prayer, and written word with a holy sweetness.