Photo Courtesy of CBS News

Pastor John H. Cross Jr., who’s Birmingham Church was bombed in 1963, resulting in the deaths of four teenage girls, died this past Thursday night after suffering from a series of strokes. Back in 1972, Cross was appointed associate pastor at Oakhurst Baptist Church.

Daughter Barbara Cross remembered her father in an interview with the AP…

“After the dynamite went off, it dug a large crater,” she recalled. “He had to go through that rubble to make sure all of the children were OK.”

As he dug, other people there told him to stop, worried that there could be another blast.

“But he said, ‘Don’t let another charge go off. I’ve got to go in,”‘ she said of her father.

Cross later presided over a mass funeral for three of the four girls where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy.