The Lesson That Outlived the Bomb

On the morning of September 15, 1963, in the basement of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a Sunday School class opened its Youth Day lesson. The title printed in the quarterly read, "The Love That Forgives." Four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all fourteen, and eleven-year-old Carol Denise McNair — were in the basement ladies' lounge, smoothing their white dresses before the worship service.…