From her office in Birmingham, Alabama, DeJuana Thompson looks across the street and sees a daily reminder of terror. Her window overlooks the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bomb in 1963 killed four young Black girls.
“Living in the era of bomb threats is not new to people of color,” said Thompson, president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
Nearly six decades after that bombing by the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI is now investigating last week’s bomb threats against at least 17 historically Black colleges and universities across the U.S. — including three in Georgia. Thompson said the threats underscore the need to teach new generations the history of violence targeting people of color so the lessons of the past can be applied to the present.
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