September 15

On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young African American girls and injuring scores of worshipers. The church was a central meeting place for the local civil-rights movement; the attack reverberated nationally, helping to build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, after decades of cold leads, producing criminal convictions of Ku Klux Klan members years later.

On September 15, 1958, a Central Railroad of New Jersey commuter train ran onto a vertical-lift span at Newark Bay that had been raised for maritime traffic. Several cars plunged into the water; official tallies list 48 dead and many injured. Investigators concluded the disaster resulted from a breakdown of protective systems — human errors combined with inadequate interlocking and signaling — and the crash helped push railroads and regulators toward stronger fail‑safe protections for movable bridges.

On September 15, 1942, while steaming east of the Solomon Islands to support the Guadalcanal campaign, the fleet carrier USS Wasp (CV‑7) was struck by a spread of torpedoes fired from Japanese submarine I‑19. Multiple hits ignited catastrophic fires fed by aviation fuel and ordnance, forcing the abandonment of the ship and leaving a lasting imprint on American carrier operations during the Pacific War.

On September 15, 1935, at the annual Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, the German government announced two statutes — the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour — that turned racial ideology into everyday law. Published in the Reichsgesetzblatt the following day, these measures redefined who counted as a citizen, criminalized intimate relationships across enforced racial lines, and set in motion administrative systems that made exclusion, dispossession, and later mass persecution legally routinized.