Please convey to Matt Herron that his 1963 photograph, “Ladies in Church, Birmingham, 1963,” was not made in the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s church, Bethel Baptist Church, now a National Historic Landmark.
Bethel, headquarters for the Birmingham movement under the leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth, was bombed in 1956, 1958, and 1962. Its figurative glass windows were long gone when Herron arrived in 1963 in Birmingham to photograph the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of Sept. 15, 1963.
Editor’s note: Matt Herron replied that a New York Times article on Sept. 16, 1963, reported a bomb threat at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King and other movement leaders were conducting a meeting. “That’s probably as close as we can get to a positive church identification,” Herron said.