The past on trial: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, civil rights memory and the remaking of Birmingham

In 2001 and 2002, the last of the suspects in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing went on trial for a crime that had remained unsolved for almost forty years. The trials invoked memories of the events that had made Birmingham, Alabama, a notorious site of violent resistance to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Since that moment, city leaders and citizens had been working to reshape "Bombingham" according to an "image of reform"; yet the events of 1963 remained a contested site of memory and the unsolved status of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing challenged that progressive stance. This dissertation asks how memories of the civil rights demonstrations and violent resistance in the 1960s have played out in political and legal battles in the city, as well as in public moments of commemoration. Focusing on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing trials and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, I examine moments in which residents have pushed the city's civil rights history to the foreground in order to showcase real reform or to challenge the current political progress narrative and thereby force a reckoning with the past.