On September 15, 1963, a Sunday morning, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the predominantly African American Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Famed singer Nina Simone, born in Saint Louis but a French citizen since the 1930s, was overcome with shock and rage. “I had it in mind to go out and kill someone,” she explained when describing how she came to write “Mississippi Goddamn,”
