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)