A couple of decades before Julie Buckner Armstrong was born in Birmingham, Alabama, Black families began to buy homes in neighborhoods there legally designated as whites-only under one of the strictest systems of segregation in the country. The local reaction earned the city the nickname Bombingham,
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On the morning of September 15, 1963, Rev. John H. Cross Jr. and members of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, were preparing to start the Youth Day worship service when a bomb went off. “I will never forget that horrific noise,” said Barbara Cross, the reverend’s eldest daughter. An FBI investigation later discovered that four Ku Klux Klan members (KKK) had planted dynamite under a cement staircase outside of the church.