Visitors come to Sixteenth Street Baptist Church from all over the world to not only stand on hallowed ground but to remember both the tragedy and triumphs that happened within its walls.  

Starting this month, people will be able to pay their respects more viscerally.   

Sept. 15, 56 years to the day that a bomb killed four little girls— Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson— a new interactive museum will open honoring the girls and the chain of events their murders set off in the Civil Rights Movement.   

Earlier this year, the church completed its five-year restoration plan funded in part by a $150,000 grant won through the National Trust Main Street Fund Partners in Preservation competition. That work made it possible for it to move forward with the museum. 

The centerpiece of the museum will be an experience room that will transport visitors back to the day of the bombing, according to Ted Debro, chair of church trustees said.  

“You’ll get a chance to get a sense and feel for what really happened during that period in 1963 as well as feel and experience the bombing,” he said. “You’ll hear various sounds and noises of that Sunday, with flashing lights. You’ll also experience the clock that stopped in the church at 10:22 a.m.”  

Debro said the eulogy that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave for three of the girls serves as a background for the room.   

Visitors will also be reminded of the Sunday School lesson of Sept. 15, 1963, “A Love That Forgives.”   

Afterward, they will be led through a video-heavy timeline of the church, which was founded in 1873, that leads up to present-day and the issues that the house of worship and its surrounding neighborhood faces, such as urban renewal, economic and business depletion, and struggle for space and identity in an expanding city center.