September 15 · This Day in America
It is a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama. Children are in the church basement, changing into choir robes, the lesson that day titled "The Love That Forgives." At 10:22 a.m., nineteen sticks of dynamite, planted under the steps by Ku Klux Klansmen, detonate. Four girls are killed: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11. They were in church. The cruelty of that fact is the whole of it, and it must be said without softening. The nation that had looked away from Birmingham could not look away from this. The grief moved something that speeches had not. Within a year the Civil Rights Act became law. Justice for the men who did it took, in some cases, nearly forty years — but it came. We remember the four names because a country owes them that, and because forgetting would be a second wrong.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1858
Before the railroad and before the telegraph reached the coast, a letter to California could take months by ship. On this day the Butterfield Overland Mail begins: stagecoaches setting out across 2,795 miles of plains, desert, and mountain, from Missouri to San Francisco, on a schedule that demanded the trip be made in twenty-five days. They almost always made it. For the first time, the far coast was reliably, regularly within reach of the rest of the country — by horse and grit and a brutal timetable.
Source: www.tshaonline.org