The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham Alabama on September 15, 1963 was an unprecedented act of “domestic terrorism” long before the term would ever be applied. It would be decades before America’s violent racial society admitted that treatment of African Americans since the early days of the enslavement had always been predicated on a particular brand of “nationalized” terrorism. Few people remember their names; but Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair’s senseless death became the turning point of the entire Civil Rights Movement. Filled with the passion of dance sequences, gospel, down-home blues and freedom songs, Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down, takes a poignant look at a memorable day on the linear graph of history’s kaleidoscope that touched/changed a nation while capturing the music, the look, the feel and the movements of a Sunday morning in the south.

Sponsored by the Temple University Center for the Arts

April 27

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