Band to visit US for anniversary of Wales Window

SIXTY years ago Wales gifted a specially commissioned stained-glass window to a community in the US city of Birmingham, Alabama, in the aftermath of a bomb that killed four black girls attending Sunday school two years earlier.

- IAN LEWIS

On September 15, 1963 a bomb blast at the city's 16th Street Baptist Church killed the four children and injured 22 others. A splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan had planted the bomb.

Appalled by the atrocity, artist and craftsman, John Petts was determined to help - even though he lived 4,000 miles away in the village of Llansteffan, south of Carmarthen.

The World War II conscientious objector created a stained-glass window that would become an icon of the civil rights movement. After an appeal in the Western Mail, communities here came together to fund the window as a part of the church’s reconstruction.

Known as the Wales Window, it was donated by the people of Wales and sent to the church in the summer of 1965 after being unveiled at Thomson House, Cardiff, in February that year.

Petts' renowned depiction of a black Christ stands at the front of the rebuilt 16th Street Baptist Church.

The attack still echoes down the corridors of history decades later as a particularly heinous racist act and a tragic defining moment in the American civil rights movement.