1963 Birmingham Church Bombing.
On September 15th, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
The ground floor of the church collapsed.
A Sunday school session was in progress and four children were in the church
basement preparing for the service.
All four girls died – Denise McNair, aged 11, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia
Wesley and Carol Robertson, all aged 14.
Many others were injured.
Despite the many racial crimes committed in the South, this one
was greeted with abject horror.
Despite the deaths of four young girls, and the many that were injured, no-one
was initially arrested for this crime even though the authorities suspected
four men within days of the outrage.
Birmingham was a major centre of civil rights activities and the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was an organisational centre for the movement.
In particular, youths used the church as a centre to help plan out strategies
to get more black high school children involved in the civil rights cause.
In the Spring of 1963, stores in downtown Birmingham had been desegregated
and just days before the bombing, schools in Birmingham had been ordered
by a federal court to integrate – nearly ten years after Brown v Topeka.
Many Klansmen would not accept this decision nor the successes the civil
rights cause seemed to be making.
The chief of police in the city, Bull Connor, was very anti-civil
rights and had ordered that police dogs and fire hoses be used on civil
rights demonstrators in May 1963.
Birmingham was also a stronghold of the KKK.
The influence of the KKK was such that children’s books that showed black
and white rabbits together were banned from sale in book shops in the city.
Segregation was the norm in the city.
Violence against the black community in Birmingham was not unusual but
the deliberate bombing of a church took that violence to a new level.
In 1965, J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, stated that any chance of prosecution
was “remote” and in 1968, the FBI pulled out of the investigation.
Initially, no-one arrested for the outrage.
Eventually, a known member of the KKK arrested in 1977 – Robert Chambliss.
He was sent to prison and died there in 1985.
However, many believed that was not the only one involved.
In 1980, a US Department of Justice report stated that Hoover had
blocked evidence that could have been used in the pursuit of suspects.
This led to the Alabama attorney reopening the case.
However, while the case was no new charges were filed.
In 1985, Chambliss died – but never that he had any part in the bombing.
In October 1988, Gary A Tucker that he had helped set up the bomb.
Dying of cancer, no charge was laid against him – but federal and state
prosecutors reopened their investigations.
In May 2000, Thomas Blanton and Booby Frank Cherry surrendered to the authorities
after they were indicted on four counts of first-degree murder and “universal malice”.
One year later, Blanton, aged 62, was sentenced to life in prison after being
found guilty on four counts of murder.
I guess the good Lord will settle it on Judgment Day,” Blandon said
after the verdict was announced.
I’ll sleep well tonight, better than slept in many years,” said the Rev.
Abraham Lincoln Woods, a leader of Birmingham’s black community who
pushed authorities to reopen the case.
Woods, the president of Birmingham’s Southern Leadership Conference and pastor at St.
Joseph Baptist Church, said the verdict a statement of how far we’ve come.
Bobby Frank Cherry was initially deemed be mentally unfit to stand trial.
However, this was overturned and he was found guilty after members of
his family gave evidence against him.
This whole bunch lied all the way through this thing,” he said when
Circuit Judge James Garrett asked him whether he had anything to say.
Now, I don’t know why going to jail for nothing.
I didn’t do anything.
Cherry was also sentenced to life in and died in November 2004 of cancer.
The role of the FBI has been criticised by some with regards to this case, particularly
the role played by J Edgar Hoover.
It was only after 14 years that the FBI released 9,000 files relevant to the
case – including the so-called ‘Kitchen Tapes’ in which Thomas Blandon was
heard telling his wife about building the bomb and planning to use it.
Bill Baxley, who had been Alabama’s attorney general when Robert Chambliss
had been put on trial in 1977, stated that he felt he would have been able to
prosecute Blandon and Cherry many years earlier than they were, if the FBI
had released these files to him then.
Why Hoover sat on these is open to speculation.
In 1965, Hoover had stated that any chance a successful prosecution was remote.
Yet he almost certainly knew that the FBI had files that could have led to
the successful prosecution of those who had carried out the bombing.
After all, that same evidence was used in later years to successfully prosecute
those who had carried out the bombing.