KKK bombs Alabama Church

On September 15, 1963, members of the Klu Klux Klan bombed a predominantly African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. The blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four young girls and injured twenty other people. Despite an investigation by the FBI, no one was charged with responsibility for the crime until Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977. His accomplices, Thomas Blaton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, were not tried and convicted until about twenty-five years later.

Learn more about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the trials of Blanton and Cherry from NPR.

THIS DAY @ LAW

First US life insurance company incorporated

On January 11, 1759, America's first life insurance company was incorporated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers was established by Presbyterians to support the families of their ministers. In 1988, the company's name was changed to the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund. The company later became Covenant Life Insurance Company before being acquired by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company in 2002. Read a history of the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund from the Pennsylvania Historical Society.

Treaty ended Anglo-American claims, courts in China

On January 11, 1943, the United States and Great Britain relinquished by treaty their extraterritorial claims in China. This abandonment effectively ended the jurisdiction of the extraterritorial United States Court for China (established 1906) and the British Supreme Court in China. Read more about the United States Court for China, which one scholar has called "probably the strangest federal tribunal ever constituted by Congress," in a short online history of the US Ninth Circuit.