Two black-and-white photographs that show side-by-side portraits of, on the left, an older Black woman sitting in a pew and, on the right, a Black girl sitting in a pew.

Mary Parker and Caela Cowan

Dawoud Bey (b. 1953)

Date

2012
Object Type

Photographs
Medium

Inkjet prints
Edition

1/6
Credit Line

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Accession Number

P2015.119
Copyright

© 2013 Dawoud Bey

On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members dynamited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Dozens were injured, and four young girls were killed: Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). The horrific violence didn’t come as a surprise; it was the third bombing in the city in less than two weeks, a response by White supremacists to a federal order mandating integration of Alabama’s school system.

In The Birmingham Project, Bey memorializes the lives and deaths of these children in diptychs of Birmingham residents, one the age of a child killed and one the age each would have been had they lived. The poignant portraits emphasize the innocence of the murdered children and the decades of life taken from them, a reminder of the vast number of Black lives that have been cut short by racism in the U.S. over the centuries.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)

Location: Off view

See more by Dawoud Bey

Educator Resources

What is the role of artists in helping to process local and national events?

Is there a difference between memorializing a traumatic event and processing it?

How do time and context change the way we think about historical events?

What roles can photography play in documenting lives and events?
Grades 4–12

Students will connect with an older person, either a family member or someone from their local or school community, who experienced an event that is of interest to the student. Encourage students to have a conversation with that person, informed by questions that they have prepared in advance. Students can create a recording or a transcript to document the conversation. Have students write a reflection about how their ideas about the event changed as a result of the conversation.

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