Birmingham committee plans memorial honoring "Four Spirits" as 50th anniversary of deadly church bombing nears (video)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama ? In her travels around the world, Carolyn McKinstry said she has met many people in many different nations who knew of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that injured her and killed four young girls in 1963.

And while a marker commemorating that watershed moment in the civil rights movement was erected outside the Birmingham church in 2011, no other memorial exists in the city forever changed by that bombing, McKinstry said.

?That?s always been a mystery to me,? McKinstry said. ?I?ve never been anywhere in the world where people aren?t aware of the event, but there needs to be a visible memorial in Birmingham.?

For the last several months, McKinstry has served on a committee that plans to build a monument in their honor, likely in nearby Kelly Ingram Park. Sept. 15, 2013 will mark the 50th anniversary of the bombing.

Other members of the ?Four Spirits? committee are former WBRC-TV reporter Rick Journey, attorneys Martha Bozeman and Chervis Isom, Melodie Echols, who is executive director of the nonprofit Norwood Resource Center, and Mark Kelly, the publisher of the weekly newspaper Weld for Birmingham.

Birmingham city officials are currently in discussions with the committee, said city spokeswoman April Odom.

Other committee members said the project is still in the very early planning stages and many details of the project have not been finalized.

McKinstry said an artist has not yet been commissioned to erect the memorial, but she hopes a local artist will be selected. She said she envisioned a memorial cast in the likenesses of the four young girls killed that Sunday morning ? 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.

A marker telling the story of the bombing would also be included with the memorial, McKinstry said.

?People talk a lot about what happened. We feel it is time for something tangible,? McKinstry said of the committee. ?We think it will be a wonderful memorial for the families (of the victims) and Birmingham as well.?

The plan coincides with a year-long commemoration in Birmingham and across Alabama of the events of 1963, a year that also saw the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. write his famous letter from the Birmingham City Jail, George Wallace stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama, and Birmingham police dogs and fire hoses turned on young protestors.

The Alabama Department of Tourism will spend $100,000 promoting civil rights tourism in 2013. A committee, co-chaired by Birmingham native and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, will oversee events in Birmingham.

Source: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/10/birmingham_committee_plans_mem.html

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