On the 60th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke on the importance of remembering the difficult moments of racial inequality in U.S. history.
“The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom, and to do that, we’re going to need the truth – the whole truth – about our past,” Jackson told attendees at the church during a speech on Friday, ABC News reports.
“We must teach it to our children and preserve it for theirs,” she said. “Knowledge of the past is what enables us to mark our forward progress. If we’re going to continue to move forward as a nation, we can’t allow concern about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth, or history.”
According to the Associated Press, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite outside the church under a set of stairs on Sept. 15, 1963. The resulting explosion killed four girls: 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph, survived but was severely injured in the explosion, causing her to lose an eye.
The bombing took place two weeks after the Rev. Martin King Luther delivered
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