Birmingham Sunday

Brimner, Larry Dan. Birmingham Sunday.
37 years ago, a racially motivated bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama took the lives of four young women, and the resultant violence took the lives of two young men. Birmingham Sunday is an excellent recounting of the events of that day, and of the events that led up to this event.

This well-illustrated volume, which uses period photographs, covers a wide range of civil rights history, and would be an excellent resource for teachers to use along with Curtis' novel The Watsons Go To Birmingham, or with any unit on civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. It is a large format book, but the information is very well covered, and the short descriptions of various events and players (the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, the Klu Klux Klan) would be well suited to sharing with classes. For students researching this time, this would also be excellent, because the main events are covered, and a bibliography points to other books that could be consulted. I learned a lot of different facts-- for example, the NAACP helped Autherine Lucy when she enrolled in the University of Alabama but was suspended and eventually expelled because she was black. Ms. Lucy was studying to be a librarian.