The Reverend John Cross Jr., who was pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, when four girls at his church were killed in a bombing that became a turning point in the civil rights movement, died November 15 at DeKalb Medical at Hillandale, in Lithonia, Ga. He was 82 and had had a series of strokes in recent years.

Cross was named pastor of the venerable Birmingham church in 1962 after serving at a Baptist church in Richmond, Va. Not previously identified as a civil-rights activist, he appeared to be a good match for the conservative black church, which was known for its educated congregation.

But when he stepped off the train in Birmingham and tried to hail a taxicab, Cross encountered a level of racial animosity he hadn’t seen anywhere else.

“[I] don’t drive coloreds,” a white taxi driver told him, according to a 1991 article in the Boston Globe. “I’ll tell you what,” Cross said, leaning in the window. “I’m coming here to pastor a church. Before I leave here, you’ll be hauling anybody who wants to be hauled.”

With the encouragement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cross made his church a rallying point for the civil-rights movement in one of the most volatile cities in the South. Birmingham had a strong Ku Klux Klan presence and had been shaken for years by an insidious, random violence that led to its infamous nickname, Bombingham.

The city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was notorious for unleashing dogs and turning high-powered fire hoses on demonstrators. Many protesters were beaten in clashes with police.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, Cross was at the church, preparing to deliver a sermon called “A Rock That Will Not Roll” for a youth worship service. At 10:22 a.m., an explosion shattered the morning calm, crumbling a brick wall and destroying the face of Jesus in a stained-glass window. At first, Cross thought the church’s water heater had exploded, but he could smell the powder of explosives and hear anguished cries amid clouds of dust and smoke. As he and church members dug through rubble in the collapsed basement, he found the bodies of 11-year-old Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all 14.

“They were all stacked in a pile, like they clung together,” Cross recalled in 2001. “Their bodies were so mutilated I couldn’t recognize any one of them, as well as I knew these girls. It was like looking at strangers.”

As word of the bombing spread, more than 2,000 people gathered at the church, and some began to throw stones and concrete at passing cars with white drivers. Cross stopped one woman from hurling a brick.

“I had to reach up and touch her hand,” he said. “I said, ‘No, you can’t settle it like this.'”

Sobbing, he picked up a bullhorn to address the crowd and began to recite the 23rd Psalm. The bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church was the 21st in Birmingham since 1955, and the fourth in four weeks, but it was the first to claim lives. Twenty-two people were injured. Later that day, two black teenage boys were shot and killed by police, who said they were throwing rocks at cars.

The resulting national uproar galvanized the civil rights movement, as people from all races united in outrage against the unprovoked attack. Cross officiated at a funeral for three of the girls killed at his church. King gave the eulogy at the service, which was attended by 8,000 people.

In October 1963, Robert Chambliss, a member of a Klan splinter group, was fined $100 and sentenced to six months in jail for possessing dynamite, but he was acquitted of murder charges. Fourteen years later, he was tried again for the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1985.

The case was reopened in 1997, when it was shown that thousands of FBI documents had been kept from prosecutors. One of the suspects, Herman Cash, had died in 1994. Two others, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, were convicted in 2001 and 2002, respectively, for their roles in the bombing plot and received life sentences. Cherry died in prison in 2004.

Cross testified at Blanton’s trial in 2001.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why go back through all this?'” he said then. “Well, it has never left. It’s not a matter of going back through it. It’s a matter of justice being done.”

Cross was born January 27, 1925, in Haynes, Ark., and gave his first sermon as a teenager. Immediately after high school, he served as an assistant chaplain in an Army unit. He taught school in Arkansas before enrolling at Virginia Union University in Richmond, from which he graduated in 1950.

In the early 1950s, he was a minister at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Prince William County, Va. He received a master’s of divinity degree from Virginia Union in 1959 and was a pastor at Richmond’s Gravel Hill Baptist Church before going to Birmingham.

He left Birmingham in 1968 to teach at Alabama State University and to direct a Baptist student center. After serving as associate pastor of a church in Decatur, Ga., from 1972 to 1977, he became an official with the Atlanta Baptist Association. He retired in 1989 but continued to work for several years as a part-time minister and youth counselor.

Throughout his life, he would be forever haunted by the epochal events in Birmingham in 1963. “Hardly a day passes I don’t think about it — dream about it two or three times a week,” he said.

His wife, Julia Ball Cross, whom he married in 1949, died in 2003. Survivors include four children, Barbara Cross and Lynn Cross, both of Decatur, Alma Barber of Stone Mountain, Ga., and Michael Cross of the Bronx, N.Y., and a grandson.