The 16th Street Baptist Church is a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham was founded in 1873, and the present Byzantine-style church was erected in 1911 after the church's previous property, a brick building constructed in 1884, was demolished in 1908. The 16th Street Baptist Church featured notable speakers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, and Ralph Bunche during the early 20th century, and it served as the center of the city's Civil Rights movement during the 1960s as Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Bevel coordinated their operations from the church. On 15 September 1963, the Ku Klux Klan dynamited the church during a youth event, killing four young Black girls in a horrific tragedy which contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The church was quickly rebuilt following an influx of unsolicited gifts, reopening on 7 June 1964. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and became a major tourist attraction due to its historical significance.